Music,Education,and Community in Nineteenth-Century Kansas Euterpe,Tönnies,and the Academy on the Plains

Abstract

This study applied the conceptual structures of gemeinschaft (community) and gesell-schaft (association) developed by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (1855–1936) to the history of music education in Kansas during the nineteenth century. It documents the interactions among musical activities, educational institutions, and community structures in the missions of the early nineteenth century, the relatively independent small town and rural schools from around 1850 to 1875, and the state-wide educational system that grew up in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Primary and secondary sources were taken primarily from the Kansas Collection at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka, and the Country Schools Legacy project of the Mountain Plains Library Association.