Class 6 (9/6)
The educational impulse
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Reform and the educational temper
The popular scientific press
Democratic intentions and Whig improvement
Science in the new American college
Denominational schools and liberal arts education
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Engineering and scientific schools
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| Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827)
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P.T. Barnum
Andrew Jackson (President 1829-1837, Democrat) Whig Party (1830s and 40s) Alfred Beach Corps of Topographical Engineers (Army) |
Why was this book written? What was its purpose?
What educational theories stood behind it?
What fields of experience counted as natural philosophy? Why
do you think natural history was left out?
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, "Parlors, Primers, and Public Schooling: Education for Science in Nineteenth-Century America," in The Scientific Enterprise in America: Readings from Isis, ed. Ronald L. Numbers and Charles E. Rosenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 61-82. [Originally Isis 81 (1990): 425-445.]
What social strata had access to science in this period, and in
what forms?
What material and infrastructural changes made this activity
possible?
How is this similar to (different from) the current state of
affairs?
What is Kohlstedt's historiographic position? That is, how does
she situate her work in relation to what previous historians have written?
What is she arguing that she thinks is new, interesting, or important?