Histories of 19th-century U.S. education center White experiences, while formal education policy and practice pertaining to Black and Native Americans are treated as marginal phenomena that had little impact on schooling at a national level. Furthermore, current historical framings overwhelmingly analyze Native, White, and Black American education as separate entities, which conceals the political economic character of race as a relational phenomenon. To explore connections between race, school, and nation building, this review presents a relational analysis of scholarship on Native, White, and Black American education through the 19th century. In doing so, it outlines how formal U.S. education expressed, created, and adjusted racial hierarchies through the 19th century; and more importantly, it highlights how America’s education system developed in a context where Native, White, and Black American experiences were deeply interrelated. The review ends by identifying paths for new research on the racial dimensions of U.S. education during its foundational years and beyond.
AdamsD. W. (1995). Education for extinction: American Indians and the boarding school experience, 1875-1928. University Press of Kansas.
3.
AdamsD. W. (2006). Beyond bleakness: The brighter side of Indian boarding schools, 1870-1940. In TrafzerC.KellerJ. A.SisquocL. (Eds.), Boarding school blues: Revisiting American Indian educational experiences (pp. 35–64). University of Nebraska Press.
4.
AkinsD. B.BauerW. J.Jr. (2021). We are the land: A history of Native California. University of California Press.
5.
AllenD. S. (2004). Invisible citizens: On exclusion and domination in Ralph Ellison and Hannah Arendt. In WilliamsM.MacedoS. (Eds.), Nomos XLVI: Political Exclusion and Domination (pp. 29–76). NYU Press.
6.
AndersonJ. D. (1988). The education of Blacks in the south, 1860-1935. UNC Press.
7.
BallengerT. L. (1952). Colored High School of the Cherokee Nation. The Chronicles of Oklahoma, 30(4), 454–462.
8.
BaumgartnerK. (2019). In pursuit of knowledge: Black women and educational activism in antebellum America. NYU Press.
9.
BeadieN.TolleyK. (Eds.). (2014). Chartered schools: Two hundred years of independent academies in the United States, 1727–1925. Routledge.
10.
BeyerK. (2014). Comparing Native Hawaiian education with Native American education and African American education during the nineteenth century. American Educational History Journal, 41(1), 59–75.
11.
Bill 79. (1950). A bill for the more general diffusion of knowledge, 18 June 1779 (1950). In BoydJ. P. (Ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 2, 1777–18 June 1779 (pp. 526–535). Princeton University Press.
12.
BondH. M. (1994). Negro education in Alabama: A study in cotton and steel. University of Alabama.
BuffaloheadW. R.MolinP. F. (1996). “A nucleus of civilization”: American Indian families at Hampton Institute in the late nineteenth century. Journal of American Indian Education, 35(3), 59–94.
ChildB. J. (2014). The Boarding School Metaphor. In ChildB. J.KlopotekB. (Eds.), Indian subjects: Hemispheric perspectives on the history of indigenous education. School for Advanced Research Press.
17.
ChildB. J.KlopotekB. (Eds.). (2014). Indian subjects: Hemispheric perspectives on the history of indigenous education. School for Advanced Research Press.
18.
ColemanM. C. (1993). American Indian children at school, 1850-1930. University Press of Mississippi.
19.
CorneliusJ. (1983). “We slipped and learned to read:” Slave accounts of the literacy process, 1830-1865. Phylon, 44(3), 171–186. https://doi.org/10.2307/274930
20.
CorneliusJ. D. (1992). When I can read my title clear: Literacy, slavery and religion in the antebellum south. University of South Carolina Press.
21.
CrainP. (2016). Reading children: Literacy, property, and the dilemmas of childhood in nineteenth-century America. University of Pennsylvania Press.
22.
DouglasD. (2005). Jim Crow moves north: The battle over northern school segregation, 1865-1954. Cambridge University Press.
23.
DuaneA. M. (2020). Educated for freedom: The incredible story of two fugitive schoolboys who grew up to change a nation. NYU Press.
24.
Dunbar-OrtizR. (2015). An indigenous peoples’ history of the United States. Beacon Press.
25.
EelmanB. W. (2004). “An Educated and Intelligent People Cannot be Enslaved”: The struggle for common schools in antebellum Spartanburg, South Carolina. History of Education Quarterly, 44(2), 250–270. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-5959.2004.tb00163.x
26.
EllisC. (1996). To change them forever: Indian education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893-1920. University of Oklahoma Press.
27.
EstesN. (2019). Our history is the future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the long tradition of indigenous resistance (illustrated ed.). Verso.
28.
FallaceT. D. (2015). Race and the origins of progressive education, 1880–1929. Teachers College Press.
29.
Fear-SegalJ. (2007). White man’s club: Schools, race, and the struggle of Indian acculturation. University of Nebraska Press.
30.
FosterS. J. (1999). The struggle for American identity: Treatment of ethnic groups in United States history textbooks. History of Education, 28(3): 251–278. https://doi.org/10.1080/004676099284618
31.
FranklinJ. H.HigginbothamE. B. (2010). From slavery to freedom. McGraw-Hill.
32.
FultzM. (2001). Charleston, 1919-1920: The final battle in the emergence of the south’s urban African American teaching corps. Journal of Urban History, 27(5), 633–649. https://doi.org/10.1177/009614420102700504
33.
FultzM. (2020). An African American educator in the context of his time: George Washington Trenholm, 1871–1925. The Alabama Review, 73(3), 246–267. https://doi.org/10.1353/ala.2020.0023
34.
GatesH. L. (2010). The trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s first black poet and her encounters with the founding fathers (reprint ed.). Civitas Books.
GivensJ. R. (2021). Fugitive pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the art of Black teaching. Harvard University Press.
37.
GomersallM. (1994). Education for domesticity? A nineteenth-century perspective on girls’ schooling and education. Gender and Education, 6(3), 235–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/0954025940060301
38.
GrandeS. (2004) Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought (10th anniversary ed.). Rowman & Littlefield.
39.
GreenH. (2016). Educational reconstruction: African American schools in the urban south, 1865-1890. Fordham Univ Press.
40.
GürselB. (2018). Teaching national identity and alterity. Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society, 10(1), 106–126. https://doi.org/10.3167/jemms.2018.100107
41.
HagerC. (2013). Word by word: Emancipation and the act of writing. Harvard University Press.
HartmanS. (1997). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. Oxford University Press.
44.
HoSangD. M.MolinaN. (2019). Introduction: Toward a relational consciousness of race. In MolinaN.HoSangD. M.GutierrezR. A. (Eds.), Relational formations of race: Theory, method, and practice (1st ed., pp. 1–18). University of California Press.
45.
HoxieF. E. (2012). This Indian country: American Indian activists and the place they made. Penguin Press.
46.
IgnatievN. (1995). How the Irish became White. Routledge.
47.
JacobsonM. F. (1998). Whiteness of a different color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race. Harvard University Press.
48.
KaestleC. F. (1983). Pillars of the republic: Common schools and American society, 1780-1860. Macmillan.
49.
KatzM. B. (1987). Reconstructing American education. Harvard University Press.
50.
KellyM. (2016). Schoolmaster’s empire: Race, conquest, and the centralization of common schooling in California, 1848–1879. History of Education Quarterly, 56(3), 445–472. https://doi.org/10.1111/hoeq.12198
51.
KingT. L. (2019). The black shoals: Offshore formations of Black and native studies. Duke University Press.
52.
LitwackL. F. (1965). North of slavery: The Negro in the free states, 1790-1860. University of Chicago Press.
53.
LomawaimaK. T. (1995). They called it Prairie Light: The story of Chilocco Indian School. University of Nebraska Press.
54.
LomawaimaK. T.OstlerJ. (2018). Reconsidering Richard Henry Pratt: Cultural genocide and native liberation in an era of racial oppression. Journal of American Indian Education, 57(1), 79–100. https://doi.org/10.5749/jamerindieduc.57.1.0079
55.
McHenryE. (2002). Forgotten readers: Recovering the lost history of African American literary societies. Duke University Press.
56.
McKellipsK. K. (1992). Educational practices in two nineteenth century American Indian mission schools. Journal of American Indian Education, 32(1), 12–20.
57.
MilesC. C. (2013). “Americanizing” American Indian girls through the off-reservation boarding school system. Ex Post Facto, XXII, 67–82.
58.
MillsS. (2021). An African school for African Americans: Black demands for education in antebellum Boston. History of Education Quarterly, 61(4), 478–502. https://doi.org/10.1017/heq.2021.38
59.
MossH. J. (2009). Schooling citizens: The struggle for African American education in antebellum America. University of Chicago Press.
60.
NashG. B. (1974). Red, White, and Black: The peoples of early America. Prentice-Hall.
61.
NashM. A. (2009). Contested identities: Nationalism, regionalism, and patriotism in early American textbooks. History of Education Quarterly, 49(4), 417–441. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-5959.2009.00224.x
62.
NeemJ. N. (2017). Democracy’s schools: The rise of public education in America. JHU Press.
63.
OmiM.WinantH. (2014) Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (3rd ed.). Psychology Press.
64.
OpalJ. M. (2004). Exciting emulation: Academies and the transformation of the rural North, 1780s–1820s. The Journal of American History, 91(2), 445–470. https://doi.org/10.2307/3660707
65.
PattonM. Q. (2015). Qualitative research & evaluation methods: Integrating theory and practice (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.
66.
PruchaF. P. (1986). The great father: The United States government and the American Indians (abridged ed.). University of Nebraska Press.
67.
RabinowitzH. N. (1974). Half a loaf: The shift from White to Black teachers in the Negro schools of the urban south, 1865–1890. The Journal of Southern History, 40(4), 565–594. https://doi.org/10.2307/2206355
68.
RamseyP. J. (2009). In the region of Babel: Public bilingual schooling in the Midwest, 1840s–1880s. History of Education Quarterly, 49(3), 267–290. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-5959.2009.00209.x
69.
RamseyP. J. (2018). Migration and common schooling in urban America: Educating newcomers in Boston and Cincinnati, 1820s–1860s. Paedagogica Historica, 54(6), 704–719. https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2018.1521849
70.
RasmussenB. B. (2010). “Attended with great inconveniences”: Slave literacy and the 1740 South Carolina Negro Act. PMLA, 125(1), 201–203. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25614450
71.
RauscherE. (2016). Does educational equality increase mobility? Exploiting nineteenth-century U.S. compulsory schooling laws. The American Journal of Sociology, 121(6), 1697–1761. https://doi.org/10.1086/685443
72.
ReyhnerJ.EderJ. (2017). American Indian education. Oklahoma University Press.
73.
RoedigerD. R. (2007). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class (rev. ed.). Verso.
74.
RuryJ. L. (2009). Education and social change: Contours in the history of American schooling. Routledge.
SabzalianL. (2019). Indigenous children’s survivance in Public Schools. Routledge.
77.
ScribnerC. F. (2020). Surveying the destruction of African American schoolhouses in the south, 1864–1876. The Journal of the Civil War Era, 10(4), 469–494. https://doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2020.0070
78.
SnyderC. (2017). Great crossings: Indians, settlers, and slaves in the age of Jackson (illustrated ed.). Oxford University Press.
79.
SpanC. M. (2005). Learning in spite of opposition: African Americans and their history of educational exclusion in antebellum America. Counterpoints, 131, 26–53. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42977282
80.
Steffes.T. L. (2011). School, society, and state: A new education to govern modern America, 1890-1940. University of Chicago Press.
81.
SteinekerR. F. (2016). “Fully equal to that of any children”: Experimental Creek education in the antebellum era. History of Education Quarterly, 56(2), 273–300. https://doi.org/10.1111/hoeq.12183
82.
SteudemanM. J. (2018). From civic imperative to bird’s-eye view: Renegotiating the idioms of education governance during the Reconstruction Era. History of Education Quarterly, 58(2), 199–228. https://doi.org/10.1017/heq.2018.3
83.
Sundue. (2007). Confining the poor to ignorance? Eighteenth-century American experiments with charity education. History of Education Quarterly, 47(2), 123–148. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-5959.2007.00086.x
84.
SzaszM. C. (2007). Indian education in the American colonies, 1607-1783. University of Nebraska Press.
85.
TocquevilleA. d. (2004) Democracy in America (GoldhammerA., Trans.). New York: Library of America. (Original work published ca.1834).
86.
TolleyK. (2016). Slavery and the origin of Georgia’s 1829 Anti-Literacy Act. In AnguloA. J. (Ed.), Miseducation: A history of ignorance-making in America and abroad (pp. 13–33). Johns Hopkins University Press.
87.
TorracoR. J. (2016). Writing integrative reviews of the literature: Methods and purposes. International Journal of Adult Vocational Education and Technology, 7(3), 62–70. DOI: 10.4018/IJAVET.2016070106
88.
TrafzerC. E.KellerJ. A. (Eds.). (2006). Boarding school blues: Revisiting American Indian educational experiences. University of Nebraska Press.
TyackD. B. (1974). The one best system. Harvard University Press.
91.
UptonD. (1996). Lancasterian schools, Republican citizenship, and the spatial imagination in early nineteenth-century America. The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 55(3), 238–253. https://doi.org/10.2307/991147
92.
ViolaH. J. (1974). Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s early Indian policy: 1816-1830. Sage Books.
93.
WarrenK. C. (2010). The quest for citizenship: African American and Native American education in Kansas, 1880-1935. University of North Carolina Press.
94.
WatkinsW. (2001). The White architects of Black education: Ideology and power in America, 1865-1954. Teachers College Press.
WilderC. S. (2013). Ebony and ivy: Race, slavery, and the troubled history of America’s universities. Bloomsbury Press.
97.
WildersonF. B.III (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the structure of U.S. antagonisms. Duke University Press.
98.
WilliamsH. (2007). Self-taught: African American education in slavery and freedom. UNC Press.
99.
WolfeP. (2001). Land, labor, and difference: Elementary structures of race. The American Historical Review, 106(3), 866–905. https://doi.org/10.2307/2692330
100.
WoodsonC. G. (1915). The education of the Negro prior to 1861: A history of the education of the colored people of the United States from the beginning of slavery to the Civil War. Putnam and Son’s. http://archive.org/details/educationofnegro00wooduoft
101.
WoodwardC. V. (2001). The strange career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press.
102.
ZellarG. (2007). African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation. University of Oklahoma Press.
