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Sto caricando le informazioni... Collegiate Republic: Cultivating an Ideal Society in Early Americadi Margaret Sumner
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Appartiene alle SerieJeffersonian America (2014)
Collegiate Republic offers a compellingly different view of the first generation of college communities founded after the American Revolution. Such histories have usually taken the form of the institutional tale, charting the growth of a single institution and the male minds within it. Focusing on the published and private writings of the families who founded and ran new colleges in antebellum America--including Bowdoin College, Washington College (later Washington and Lee), and Franklin College in Georgia--Margaret Sumner argues that these institutions not only trained white male elites for professions and leadership positions but also were part of a wider interregional network of social laboratories for the new nation. Colleges, and the educational enterprise flourishing around them, provided crucial cultural construction sites where early Americans explored organizing elements of gender, race, and class as they attempted to shape a model society and citizenry fit for a new republic. Within this experimental world, a diverse group of inhabitants--men and women, white and "colored," free and unfree--debated, defined, and promoted social and intellectual standards that were adopted by many living in an expanding nation in need of organizing principles. Priding themselves on the enlightened and purified state of their small communities, the leaders of this world regularly promoted their own minds, behaviors, and communities as authoritative templates for national emulation. Tracking these key figures as they circulate through college structures, professorial parlors, female academies, Liberian settlements, legislative halls, and main streets, achieving some of their cultural goals and failing at many others, Sumner's book shows formative American educational principles in action, tracing the interplay between the construction and dissemination of early national knowledge and the creation of cultural standards and social conventions. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)378.73Social sciences Education Higher education North America United StatesClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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In "Cultivating the College World," her first chapter, Sumner profiles Washington College president George Baxter, highlighting one of his multiple fundraising trips to the east for the purpose of soliciting money for the young institution. Baxter provides a useful springboard for a discussion of how college trustees, presidents, and faculty members working together sought to create collegiate communities, and explores to some degree the contributions (whether in the form of land, cash, books, scientific instruments, &c.) required by the early national colleges. I was hopeful that she would treat here the trend of subscription-based college establishments (a important factor in the foundation of Union College, among others), since that doesn't seem to have been much examined in any depth anywhere, but nonetheless the chapter provides a very good cross-regional study.
The second chapter, "Organizing the College World," is centered on the families of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, arguing for the importance of "coeducational sociability" as a key component of college life. The role of faculty members and their families as surrogate parents and siblings to the college boys (often to the extent that living quarters were very close, if not actually shared) is explored thoroughly, with a wide range of useful examples. The idea of shared spaces extends into Sumner's third chapter, "Building the College World," with Franklin College providing the focal point. Here Sumner reaches a bit further, bringing in an argument about the role of colleges in several social reform movements (temperance and colonization).
"Working in the College World," Sumner's fourth chapter, she explores the changing notion of academic pursuit as a new kind of labor, and the idea of the need to balance mental and physical exertions. I was very glad to see that she included the most notable example of this that I knew of: Union's president Eliphalet Nott encouraging professor Isaac Jackson to spend time gardening (Jackson's efforts remain a vital and beautiful component of Union's campus to this day). Sumner's case here as elsewhere also encompasses the key role played by women in this context, with excellent examples in the form of Louisa Payson, Margaret Junkin Preston, and others.
Finally, in "Leaving the College World," Sumner highlights the experiences of John Russwurm, the first black graduate of Bowdoin College, and Jenny, a slave owned by the daughter of a Washington College trustee. While both stories make for interesting examples, and several other cases of poor white servants are included as well, I felt here that Sumner drew a few two many sweeping generalizations based on isolated data points, and this seemed to me the least successful chapter. Given Russwurm's circumstances, it would have been worthwhile, perhaps, to spend some time exploring (as is done just briefly earlier in the book) the long-lasting ties between college leaders and their students, as well as between students themselves, as they leave the college community to make their way in the wider world.
I'm quibbling, mildly, and there are a few very minor typographical errors ("principals" for "principles" at several points being the most noticeable), but overall the book is nicely done. This period remains a vastly understudied time in nearly every respect: there is very little good, broad-based literature about the courses of study at these colleges, their libraries, their cultures, &c. Sumner's contribution to this field is to be applauded, and I do hope that it will spur additional study and exploration. The importance of the post-Revolutionary colleges in the history of the early republic cannot be understated, and I hope we'll see more good studies like this. ( )