Historical Studies in Education / Revue d'histoire de l'éducation

D'Arrisso, David

140
Historical Studies in Education / Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 26, 2, Fall / automne 2014
Historical Studies in Education / Revue d’histoire de l’éducation
BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
Robert Gagnon
Urgel-Eugène Archambault.  
Une vie au service de l’instruction publique
Montréal : Boréal, 2013, 301 pp.
David D’Arrisso
Université de Montréal
En proposant cette biographie, l’historien Robert Gagnon, qui a déjà « fréquenté » 
Urgel-Eugène Archambault dans ses travaux antérieurs,1 vise à mieux faire com-
prendre « les effets de certaines structures qui apparaissent au XIXe siècle, non seu-
lement sur un individu [c.-à-d. Archambault], mais également sur la société québé-
coise en général » (11). Le biographe y témoigne donc avec acuité et sensibilité de la 
manière dont un modeste instituteur originaire de Lanaudière s’est transformé en un 
des plus importants entrepreneurs institutionnels qu’ait connu le système éducatif 
québécois.
Gagnon décrit d’abord sommairement le contexte familial et les premières étapes 
de la vie d’Archambault, né en 1834 à Saint-Jacques-de-l’Achigan. Il présente ensuite 
le système public d’éducation qui s’institutionnalise au Québec dans la deuxième 
moitié du XIXe siècle, ainsi que les acteurs et les idéologies qui s’affrontent pour 
le contrôle de celui-ci. Les premiers jalons du parcours d’Archambault témoignent 
d’ailleurs des institutions éducatives qui émergent alors : de la petite école de rang 
jusqu’à la toute nouvelle école normale Jacques-Cartier, où le jeune instituteur ob-
tient en 1858 son diplôme d’école modèle. Il acquiert du coup une légitimité profes-
sionnelle accrue et un accès à un réseau politique conservateur influent qu’il cultivera 
tout au long de sa vie.
La carrière d’Archambault prend son envol en 1859 lorsque le Bureau des com-
missaires catholiques romains de la cité de Montréal, ancêtre de la Commission des 
écoles catholiques de Montréal (CECM), lui offre la responsabilité de sa plus im-
portante école. Sous son égide, celle-ci devient rapidement l’Académie commerciale 
catholique de Montréal et offre aux jeunes hommes un enseignement primaire supé-
rieur mieux adapté à l’industrialisation que connaît Montréal à ce moment. Gagnon 
démontre de façon convaincante que la carrière d’Archambault est intimement liée 
à l’évolution de la CECM, une institution jusqu’alors mineure dans le paysage mon-
tréalais, où de nombreuses écoles privées, laïques et religieuses, répondent déjà en 
partie aux besoins éducatifs de la population.
L’instituteur devient rapidement le premier « directeur d’école », puis le premier 
« directeur général » (surintendant local) de la commission scolaire, de nouvelles 
fonctions qu’appellent la croissance et le repositionnement de la commission scolaire, 
dont il est en partie responsable. L’imposition, en 1869, d’une nouvelle taxe scolaire 
y joue également pour beaucoup. Le dynamisme d’Archambault lui vaut la pleine 
confiance des commissaires qui l’envoient pour un voyage d’études aux États-Unis. 
L’homme y est attiré par certaines idées « modernes » sur l’éducation dont il sait trop 
bien, dans une société toujours marquée par l’ultramontanisme, qu’elles lui vaudront 
une méfiance assurée.
Pour l’historien, c’est toutefois en mettant sur pied ce qui deviendra l’École 
Polytechnique qu’Archambault réussit le plus grand coup de sa carrière. Profitant à la 
fois du désir de l’élite politique canadienne-française de voir rapidement se dévelop-
per une formation qui permettrait à sa jeunesse de prendre sa place dans l’économie 
industrielle montante et du désintérêt de l’Université Laval, il réussit à fonder en 
1874, dans les murs de son Académie (une école primaire rappelons-le!), une école 
de formation d’ingénieurs, dont la crédibilité au départ est plus que chancelante. 
Travaillant d’arrache-pied pour faire reconnaître le statut d’ingénieur et assurer un 
recrutement, naviguant habilement à travers la querelle entre l’Université Laval et sa 
constituante montréalaise, Archambault assure la survie et l’autonomie de l’École. Il 
réussit également, juste avant sa mort en 1904, à la doter d’un bâtiment à la hauteur 
de ses ambitions.
Évidemment, une telle carrière comporte son lot d’adversaires et de combats aux-
quels Gagnon s’attarde longuement. D’abord, les Frères des écoles chrétiennes, qui 
voient leur financement graduellement coupé par les Sulpiciens, supportent très mal 
l’idée d’être placés en concurrence avec des établissements tenus par des laïcs et, pis 
encore, sous le contrôle croissant de ces derniers. L’historien décrit avec force détails 
la cabale menée par le frère Réticius, visiteur provincial des Frères, qui trouve appui 
à sa cause au sein du clergé ultramontain et auprès de certaines élites municipales 
qui jugent exorbitants les coûts de l’expansion de la CECM. Archambault résiste 
stoïquement aux acrimonieuses diatribes du frère Réticius et trouve des appuis straté-
giques pour se défendre. Le conflit culmine avec la mise en place de la Commission 
royale d’enquête sur l’administration des écoles de Montréal, où les commissaires et 
leur homme de confiance se trouvent sur la sellette. Archambault en sort blanchi, 
certes, mais marqué et meurtri. Gagnon témoigne également d’autres combats im-
portants que mène l’administrateur : la création d’une caisse de retraite pour les ins-
tituteurs laïques, ainsi que l’établissement et le maintien d’une formule de partage de 
la taxe scolaire, qui assurerait un financement équitable pour les écoles catholiques 
de Montréal.
Finalement, le biographe fait une incursion dans la vie plus intime d’Archam-
bault. Gagnon brosse un instructif portrait de sa vie familiale éprouvante, marquée 
Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 141
par la mort précoce de plusieurs de ses enfants et par la santé mentale déclinante de 
son épouse, internée à Saint-Jean-de-Dieu en 1893. Sa présentation de la nature du 
conservatisme et du nationalisme d’Archambault permet de mieux saisir sa vision 
du rôle de l’éducation et ses positions, tant à l’égard de l’instruction des filles, qu’il 
néglige dans le repositionnement qu’il opère à la CECM, que sur le rôle des insti-
tutrices, qu’il voit comme un pis-aller, quand il ne les dénigre pas tout simplement.
Une critique peut être adressée à la forme de l’ouvrage. Pour appuyer son propos, 
l’historien présente quantité de données portant, notamment, sur la fréquentation 
scolaire, les établissements, le financement, les salaires. Quelques tableaux ou gra-
phiques auraient pu ici être utiles. Une chronologie ou une ligne du temps des prin-
cipaux événements ayant marqué la vie d’Archambault aurait également pu faciliter 
la lecture de l’ouvrage, dont les derniers chapitres ne suivent pas toujours une stricte 
trame chronologique, ce qui entraîne d’ailleurs quelques redites avec les chapitres 
précédents.
Gagnon met admirablement en lumière la manière dont la carrière d’Eugène-
Urgel Archambault est à la fois produit et instrument de l’institutionnalisation du 
système éducatif public qui émerge au Québec dans la deuxième moitié du XIXe 
siècle. Sa biographie témoigne d’une vie marquée par un travail minutieux et acharné 
de construction et de maintien de légitimité pour de nouvelles institutions souvent 
attaquées de front par de puissants opposants. Certaines de ces institutions faisant 
aujourd’hui l’objet de profondes remises en question (commissions scolaires, taxe 
scolaire), il est particulièrement éclairant de revivre leur émergence à travers le par-
cours exceptionnel d’Archambault.
Notes
1 Voir, notamment, Robert Gagnon avec la collaboration Armand Ross. Histoire de l’École 
polytechnique, 1873–1990 : la montée des ingénieurs francophones. (Montréal : Boréal, 
1991); Robert Gagnon. Histoire de la Commission des écoles catholiques de Montréal : le 
développement d’un réseau d’écoles publiques en milieu urbain. (Montréal : Boréal, 1996); 
et Robert Gagnon, « ARCHAMBEAULT, URGEL-EUGÈNE », dans Dictionnaire 
biographique du Canada, vol. 13, Université Laval/University of Toronto, 2003– , 
consulté le 30 août 2014, http://www.biographi.ca/fr/bio/archambeault_urgel_
eugene_13F.html.
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Robert Gagnon, Urgel-Eugène Archambault: Une vie au service de l’instruction publique

Smaller, Harry

137
Historical Studies in Education / Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 26, 2, Fall / automne 2014
Historical Studies in Education / Revue d’histoire de l’éducation
BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
William J. Reese
Testing Wars in the Public Schools:  
A Forgotten History
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013. 298 pp.
Harry Smaller
York University
As a high school student in the late 1950s, I (and thousands of others) experienced 
the Ontario Grade 13 “Departmental Exams” — standardized exams which were sent 
out in sealed envelopes to high schools across the province, to be written at the same 
time everywhere (e.g. English Literature — Monday, June 9th, 9:00am, etc.). Our 
names were coded on our answer sheets, and they were sent to Toronto to be marked 
anonymously by teachers hired for the summer. Later in the summer we would re-
ceive in the mail a print-out of our results — and soon afterwards, a brochure would 
appear in the mailbox from our local Board of Education (a large suburb of Toronto), 
ranking all the schools in the district according to the percentage of exams passed. 
(For whatever reasons, individual students, classes or teachers were not identified in 
these brochures). University enrolment was based almost entirely on the results of 
these “Departmentals.”
To this day, two specific memories stand out for me, in addition to the “nervous-
ness and fright” (see below) that many of us suffered. First, some months before the 
end of term, on our sciences and maths teachers’ instructions (five courses and five fi-
nal exams), money would be collected from students and class sets of “Coles Reprints” 
purchased. These reprints were collections of all of the Departmental Exams from the 
previous twenty-five years. Then, for much of the rest of the year, each day’s classes 
would consist of going over, in detail, all of the questions from one year’s exam. My 
other memory pertains to the experience which a classmate suffered that year. Our 
French teacher had decided that he would probably not be successful in his exam at 
year’s end and, clearly in collusion with school officials, he was told part way through 
the year that he should wait until the following year to take the course and that he 
was going to be removed from the class in the meantime (in effect, extending his 
schooling by another year). If my memory serves, it was only after his parents ob-
jected to the school principal, a school superintendent, and a school trustee, that he 
was allowed to continue in the class, and successfully complete the exam.
I am reminded of all this while reading Bill Reese’s new volume, Testing Wars in 
the Public Schools. His detailed chronicling of the rise of the standardized testing 
movement in the United States begins in the mid-nineteenth century, with the now-
classic struggles by Massachusetts’ school promoters to “reform” what they saw as 
ineffective, and often brutal, schools run by the all-powerful Boston grammar school 
masters. One of the ways in which the latter were able to maintain their positions 
over the years was by holding annual student recitation events, which members of 
the governing school committee would attend. Subsequently these officials would 
submit laudatory anecdotal reports, on the strength of which the masters’ contracts 
would be renewed for yet another year. In 1845, in order to break this cycle, a newly 
elected school committee devised a unique solution — standardized student exams, 
the predicted results of which would hold the masters in disrepute. Accordingly, that 
spring the school examiners showed up at the various schools, not to be submitted to 
another oral presentation by selected students, but rather to surprise everyone with 
written examination questions they had secretly prepared, and which all students 
were required to complete in writing. As predicted, the students did very poorly. 
Understandably, the grammar school masters soon retaliated, and the “testing wars” 
(40) began. These wars continued for some time, involving most of the political, 
economic, religious and schooling elite.
Within two decades this new examination mode of written tests had clearly taken 
hold, not only in Boston, but across virtually the entire United States. By 1866 for 
example, as Reese points out, a school superintendent in Cleveland was preparing 
“thirty-four different sets of printed questions” (174). In addition an entire new pub-
lishing industry was spawned — guides, “keys,” and books filled with exam questions, 
advertised in teachers’ magazines nationwide, which encouraged them (in the words 
of a San Francisco superintendent in 1883) to “spend nearly all their time in drilling 
and preparing the pupils for the annual examination” (205). One very popular book, 
The Question Book: A General Review of Common School Studies, for the Use of Teachers, 
and Those Intending to Teach, went through several editions. Its first issue in 1872 
contained 1,047 questions and answers; its 1887 iteration, under new title, “bulked 
up to 3,700 questions, without counting the questions within the questions” (206).
By the 1870s strong opposition to these new testing regimes had set in, includ-
ing mounting resistance from the same strata of schooling officials who had initially 
promoted them. Clearly, the escalating workload attached to preparing, distributing, 
and administering these tests, as well as assessing them and reporting on the results, 
was weighing heavily. In addition, officials soon tired of the increasing number of 
parents complaining that their children were better than indicated by test scores. 
Humanitarian concerns were also evident, however, and even a school superintendent 
in Omaha had to admit in 1873 that many children in his district would “manifest 
nervousness and fright” (175) during the testing ordeal. Not least, teachers weighed 
in heavily — both because of the increased workload involved and because of the 
Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation138
dramatic effects which the new regime imposed on the curriculum and their peda-
gogy. In addition, they were feeling the increased surveillance and control occasioned 
by these new “objective” measures of their “efficiency.” The prestigious Journal of 
Education had to confess in 1884 that “written examinations were the ‘greatest evil’ in 
the schools and created perpetual ‘warfare between the teacher and examiner’” (199). 
Even as early as 1866 another noted educator, Francis W. Parker, claimed that they 
“were the ‘greatest obstacle’ to ‘real teaching,’ destroying creativity and individual 
expression” (199). Perhaps concerned about what was seen as a massive shift back to 
rote teaching and learning which this testing regime had occasioned, one contributor 
to the California Teacher lamented in 1883 that “teaching can never rise higher than 
the examination” (204).
In spite of this opposition, little was actually accomplished, in relation to beating 
back the juggernaut. Ironically, the one major change which did occur — moderating 
to some extent the emotional one-time “high stakes” testing of students — in fact 
only served to further extend the overall testing regimen in the nation, as schooling 
officials “balanced” the results on the year-end exam with others administered dur-
ing the term. For example, as Reese notes, as early as 1871, pupils across Little Rock, 
Arkansas “faced all-day tests once a month in every class above the fifth grade” (177). 
By the end of the century, Washington, DC superintendent William Powell, “an 
outspoken champion of child-centred education and vehement critic of competitive 
exams, was hauled before a Congressional committee, berated for allegedly lowering 
standards, and sacked” (223). The stage was certainly set for the continuation of these 
exams into the twentieth century, and beyond.
Reese offers a well-written book based on meticulous and detailed historical re-
search into the formation of standardized exams in our schooling systems, and their 
subsequent effects. He cautions that “the nineteenth century . . . has to be understood 
on its own terms” but at the same time notes that it provides “more than a glimpse 
of the future” (226). Now, like then, international comparisons based on test results 
showing American schooling in a poor light are used to promote reform measures; 
now, like then, teachers are held out as the perpetrators of these purportedly low 
standards, and in need either of correction, or replacement. The testing industry 
flourishes and high stakes exams persist. Reese concludes that history “cannot offer 
prescriptions to cure current educational ills” (230). However, he adds that anyone 
“who imagines that recurrent attacks on high-stakes exams will lead to a diminution 
in the number and authority of tests is surely mistaken” (233).
Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 139


William J. Reese, Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History

Dyck, Erika

149
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Historical Studies in Education / Revue d’histoire de l’éducation
BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
Edward Shorter
Partnership For Excellence: Medicine at the 
University of Toronto and Academic Hospitals
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. 903 pp.
Erika Dyck
University of Saskatchewan
Shorter this book is not. Edward Shorter has written over twenty books on topics 
within the history of medicine, and this one may well be the longest yet. It explores 
the history of medical education at the University of Toronto over the course of the 
twentieth century as the university moved from a provincial school catering to rural 
Ontario farm boys to an “international powerhouse” (inside cover) attracting stu-
dents and faculty from all over the world. By the end of its 750 pages of text, divided 
into 30 chapters, readers are left with a dizzying array of details supporting Shorter’s 
overall contention that the University of Toronto, with its medical school and its 
affiliated hospitals, is an internationally recognized leader in teaching and research, 
and among the top North American schools of medicine. Moreover, its success is 
both because and in spite of the collected assortment of hospitals, departments, and 
personalities that have all been harnessed together under strong leadership. Writing 
this history is no easy task, but Shorter has done it with characteristic flare for colour-
ful anecdotes and a writing style that breathes humour and wit into an otherwise 
daunting array of administrative memos, program reviews, and strategic planning 
documents.
The title is an appropriate moniker for what is in essence a study of partnerships. 
The main partnership concerns the university and the hospitals — nine in total, in-
cluding Toronto Sick Children’s Hospital, Toronto General Hospital, Sunnybrook 
Health Sciences Centre, Princess Margaret’s Hospital, St Michael’s Hospital, and the 
Centre(s) for Addiction and Mental Health. Nowhere else in Canada is there such a 
rich geographical concentration, even as one travels north as far as the Sunnybrook 
campus, stretching the collaboration beyond reasonable walking distance. Proximity 
is an important feature of this partnership, but as Shorter demonstrates, it has been 
historically significant for developing a rather fluid relationship for teaching, re-
search, and clinical work.
The partnership between teaching and research is another central theme. Shorter 
describes that transformation of the University of Toronto medical complex as one 
that moved from primarily teaching medical students to one that has become a world 
leader in research. This evolution, he suggests, is not by accident, but is the direct re-
sult of decanal visions for an internationally significant research agenda, from which 
good teaching naturally followed. The historical context helps to show how such 
innovation occurred, and the resultant shift in student demographics, from farm 
boys to war veterans to increasing numbers of women and Jews, and ultimately to 
a cosmopolitan and global mixture of students that better reflects the multicultural 
nature of Toronto itself. Shorter contends that research was the main driver that kept 
the University of Toronto ahead of its competitors.
Another salient partnership involves funding. Shorter points to the many private 
benefactors who came up with funding to secure professorships, maintain a research 
idea, or establish more space — all three items have been identified as critical to de-
signing a successful model.
International partnerships shifted, from Britain to Canada in the first half of the 
century, and then from the United States to Canada, and later still from a wider set of 
international resources. Although Shorter does not identify it as such, there is also a 
more stable relationship between Toronto and the rest of Canada, with the University 
of Toronto drawing motivated students, researchers, and leaders from all parts of 
the country. The flow of traffic seems to favour people moving into the nexus of the 
medical world in Toronto, while ideas, technologies, patents, and treatments moved 
outward from this site of innovation.
One of the final, and perhaps most significant, partnerships, for this reviewer, are 
the myriad relationships that form, grow, break apart, and reform under the umbrella 
of disciplines or departments or research institutes. Although tracking these changes 
is tedious and challenging to follow as Shorter moves back and forth in time with 
each new organizational thread. The sum of these stories provides detailed insight 
into the evolution of clinical medicine and its professionalization. Within this sub-
theme, the influence of technology is impossible to ignore. In fact, Shorter’s interpre-
tation suggests that changes are often led by technological innovation, around which 
a discipline forms, after which it breaks off into its own departmental structure as 
it demands its own space, funding, curriculum, etc.. But, as Shorter points out, this 
sub-specialization has some limits. As medical schools used to essentially fold all 
the bio-medical sciences under physiology before specialization splintered the cur-
riculum into numerous capillaries of bodily systems and their affiliated tools and 
techniques, the pendulum is in some ways swinging back towards medical education 
that favours broad-based learning, with room for continuing education throughout 
one’s clinical career. Physiology, it seems, may re-inherit this foundational role as the 
main artery running through the heart of a medical education.
One is hard pressed to find Shorter criticizing the University of Toronto’s path 
to medical excellence. His heavy reliance on administrative documents and external 
Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation150
program reviews furnishes him with plenty of public-relations-approved language 
to promote an insider’s view of this institutional complex in a manner that praises 
a long history of administrative vision alongside a nimble structure that was flexible 
enough to take advantage of serendipity. The deep concentration of facilities presents 
a formidable administrative and structural challenge, but as Shorter plainly states: 
“the faculty has had a series of unusually gifted leaders to help yoke the locomotives 
together” (4). The book examines those leaders in great detail, exploring their influ-
ences on the success of the complex while often overlooking other contextual factors, 
whether those be patients, families (of patients or students), macro-economics of 
health care in Canada, health policy, even Medicare, or developments in other medi-
cal institutions throughout Canada or elsewhere. While Shorter states that, “this is 
not hagiography” (6), readers with less admiration for university administrators may 
find this account a rather tough pill to swallow.
Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 151


Edward Shorter, Partnership For Excellence: Medicine at the University of Toronto and Academic Hospitals

Dehli, Kari

126
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BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
Thomas S. Popkewitz, ed.
Rethinking the History of Education: 
Transnational Perspectives on Its Questions, 
Methods, and Knowledge
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 251 pp.
Kari Dehli
University of Toronto /Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
In the opening sentence to the Preface to this collection the editor, Thomas S. 
Popkewitz, states that the book was written “to contribute to a dialogue between 
leading historians working in education outside of the United States and American 
historians of education” (xiii). As there are no Canadian contributors to the col-
lection, readers of HSE/RHE may ponder how to respond to this invitation, and 
whether they would place themselves in the first or second of these groups, or perhaps 
choose both or neither? Popkewitz wants to question the production, circulation, 
and effects of the terms and categories used and/or assumed by historians to name 
their subjects and objects. He is particularly critical of the positivism and provincial-
ism that, in his view, characterizes education history in the United States, even in 
much of the history that aims to critique the inequalities and injustices of schooling. 
Therefore, the question of how and where “we” might position ourselves in relation 
to the categories that he fashions in his invitation to a dialogue is not a trivial one. I 
will return to it in this review’s conclusion.
Popkewitz asserts a wish “to engage the history of education in a conversation by 
its questions, methods, and knowledge” (2), and at the same time to challenge ortho-
doxies in the history and historiography of education. For readers old enough to have 
attended the joint conference of CHEA/ACHÉ and the History of Education Society 
(US) in Toronto in 1996, these assertions have a familiar ring. The provocative ques-
tions that Popkewitz raises about historical orthodoxies in his preface and introduc-
tion will be of interest to many readers of this journal. In a prolific output of articles, 
papers, books, and edited and co-edited collections over several years, Popkewitz 
has posed similar challenges to curriculum scholars, sociologists and philosophers 
of education. While not foregrounded as explicitly here as in his other publications, 
Popkewitz has for many years worked with questions inspired by Foucault’s archaeol-
ogy of knowledge and his genealogies of power and the subject.1 Traversing sociology 
and history of schooling and curriculum, Popkewitz has previously written that his 
“concern with history is to understand how the current problems of schooling, de-
fined as school reform, become constituted as they are.”2
One key feature of the collection reviewed here is its transnationality, both in 
terms of the location and empirical focus of the authors (Brazil-Turkey, China, 
Luxembourg, Mexico, Portugal, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United 
States) and in the perspectives they bring to bear on their topics. Thus, several chap-
ters aim to complicate our understanding of the places, connections, and discourses 
that shaped educational thinking and practice in the past, and to trace the spaces and 
networks in which educators moved, worked, or wrote. Warde’s chapter on relations 
between educators in Turkey and Brazil questions easy assumptions about the flow 
of ideas and influence, while Horlacher and Sobe reflect on how specificities of time 
and place complicate chronological accounts of change and comparison. Trohler’s 
chapter provides an insightful interrogation of historians’ relationship to the archive, 
and the ways in which its documents and objects are transformed into “data” that 
are made to “speak for themselves.” I enjoyed reading that chapter alongside Zongjie 
Wu’s contribution on the changing aesthetic and poetic dimensions of Chinese his-
torical thinking, as the latter elegantly put into question the rationalist presumptions 
of “Western” historical scholarship.
One striking feature of the collection is the attention given to the aesthetic and 
emotional dimensions of education, and to the complicated role of the arts in par-
ticular. Thus, the chapter by de O, Martins, and Paz outlines a genealogy of the 
changing formation of the artist-as-subject in and of Portuguese education, while 
Lora offers an engaging account of how aesthetic sensibilities of “Mexicanicity” were 
crafted and disseminated through arts education to form a new national identity in 
early 20th century Mexico. Dussel’s contribution draws out implications of “the vi-
sual turn” in the history of education and cautions against taking visual images, and 
photographs in particular, as unproblematic representations of the real. In a thought-
provoking chapter that started out as a biographical essay about Victorian school 
architect E.R. Robson, Burke and Grosvenor reflect on how historians might craft 
biographical accounts when only small details, or “body parts,” can be known. Their 
paper makes visible historians’ work of assemblage, organization, and imagination. 
Fendler’s concluding chapter offers a reading of the previous chapters, reiterating 
and extending some of Popkewitz’s discussion from the introduction. She organizes 
her reading of the chapters by contending that they attempt to dislodge four ghosts 
that haunt education history — the nation-state, the enlightenment, the archive, and 
chronology.
Popkewitz deploys a different conceptual device to organize his discussion of 
education history in the introductory chapter. Attending to “reason” as a “historical 
problem in the study of schooling,” he borrows from Ian Hacking 3 to talk about 
Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 127
history as “styles of reason.” This device allows him to “explore the principles that 
govern the forms of historical questions, its methods and meaning of the archive, 
and the modes of judgments as the narratives of history” (2). Distinctive “styles of 
reason” — Popkewitz identifies historicism and historicizing — is about more than 
different interpretations of the same data; it is about what comes to count as legiti-
mate questions for historical inquiry; it is about decisions and procedures for what 
can be seen as data; and, it is about how the epistemological principles that shape and 
authorize historical accounts. On his reading, American (here meaning US) history 
of education has adopted an historicist style of reason based in positivism, founded 
on humanist principles, ahistorical notions of agency, and narratives of progress. For 
Popkewitz this “style” is problematic because it fails to historicize the conditions of 
possibility that produce particular phenomena as problems of education and as ques-
tions of historical inquiry. Historicism also fails to ask how some, but not all, ways 
of knowing, seeing, acting, and participating are made possible in education. And, 
while ostensibly committed to projects of justice and emancipation, critical histories 
of education that assume this “style of reason” unwittingly enclose their subjects, and 
their capacity to act, in ahistorical notions of agency.
As I suggested at the outset of this review, Popkewitz has posed these kinds of 
questions and critiques for a number of years in numerous publications, and he has 
done so in contexts of networks of graduate students and colleagues at the University 
of Wisconsin, Madison, as well as in Europe, South America, and China (and quite 
possibly elsewhere). Rethinking the History of Education is one of the products to 
come out of these networks and it seems apparent that an intense and lively set 
of conversations is taking place there. Although some of the chapters offer promis-
ing examples, it is less clear to this reader how other historians, and particularly 
those whose work might be critiqued in these pages, could be persuaded to join in 
those conversations. Adopting the style of the book we might ask about the terms 
that would govern education historians’ speaking, acting, and participation. Would 
education historians have to denounce their attraction to the archive, to practices of 
detailed footnotes and citation, or, for the individual historian, to one’s affinities for 
humanist notions of agency? Or, would it be possible to have a dialogue about those 
commitments, and to also bring into question the commitments that Popkewitz and 
colleagues are advancing? Where might Canadian historians of education want to 
situate themselves?
Apparently, there are formidable obstacles in the way of conversation and dia-
logue. The difficulty, from Popkewitz’s perspective, is that although there are some 
American scholars who attend international meetings and who therefore are aware of 
international debates, in general “American historians” are “myopic” and provincial, 
and “…tend not to engage in broader intellectual debates in the field or recognize the 
comparative differences as related to theoretical, epistemological, and historical ques-
tions about the constitution of historical inquiry” (xiv). To make matters worse, he 
suggests that American historians of education (none of whom is named) tend to see 
international historiography as “merely” theory, to regard it as without “data” under-
pinning its narrative or interpretation, and to find it flawed because this international 
Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation128
literature does not adhere to the methodological (positivist) principles of historical 
study. These are not promising grounds for dialogue.
Whether or not Canadian readers of HSE/RHÉ identify with Popkewitz or the 
American historians he critiques, they will find much that is of interest in the collec-
tion. Many of the chapters are certainly worth reading and to my reading some quite 
successfully bridge the divide that Popkewitz constructs. The questions they raise are 
both important and provocative, they are based on meticulous research, and they are 
very well written. As a minor point, several of the papers could have benefitted from 
careful copy-editing.
Notes
1 For example, Thomas S. Popkewitz, Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform: 
Science, Education, and Making Society by Making the Child (New York: Routledge, 
2008); Thomas S. Popkewitz and Marie Brennan eds., Foucault’s Challenge: Discourse, 
Knowledge and Power in Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998); Thomas 
S. Popkewitz, Barry Franklin, and Miguel Pereyra eds., Cultural History and Education: 
Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2001).
2 Thomas S. Popkewitz, “The Production of Reason and Power: Curriculum History and 
Intellectual Traditions,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 29, no.2 (1997): 131-164.
3 Ian Hacking, “‘Style’ for Historians and Philosophers,” Studies in the History and 
Philosophy of Science 23, no. 1 (1992): 1-20.
129 
 


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Hall, Kristin

Bibliography of Canadian Educational History / Bibliographie d’histoire de l’éducation canadienne 2014

Fleming, Thomas

152
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BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
Kate Rousmaniere
The Principal’s Office: A Social History of the 
American School Principal
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013. 197 pp.
Thomas Fleming
University of Victoria
Countless articles, books, dissertations, theses, and reports have examined various 
facets of the principal’s working life since administrative study began in education 
more than a century ago. However, despite the legions of professors and students 
who have long comprised a vast industry that prepares principals in graduate schools 
across the United States, educational and social historians have generally ignored this 
large and important occupational group that consists currently of more than 115,000 
members in America’s public and private schools.1
According to Rousmaniere, historians have neglected the study of school princi-
pals because they have preferred “to focus on institutional and policy history at the 
central office level or on the social history of teachers, students, and communities” 
(1). “Principals,” she argues, slipped “through the middle, seemingly neither players 
in policy development nor in the day-to-day life of the classroom” (1).
Other and more idiosyncratic reasons also explain historians’ longstanding disin-
terest. “One reason why the history of all school principals has been largely ignored,” 
Rousmaniere advises, is “that historians shared with others a personal predilection 
against school principals. In our own life history, many of us remember an aspir-
ing teacher but we may remember the principal only for an unfortunate, and as-
suredly unfair, disciplinary encounter” (2). Small wonder that principals have been 
stereotyped as “one-dimensional functionaries, white men in dull coloured baggy 
suits who obediently completed administrative tasks and ordered others to be obedi-
ent to them” (2). So, too, Rousmaniere adds, “for women and people of colour, the 
principal is often a position not of us, and not attainable” (2).
Nevertheless, historical caricatures of principals are mostly undeserved, 
Rousmaniere maintains. The diverse roles principals have historically fulfilled have 
made them “the most complex and contradictory figures in the pantheon of educa-
tional leadership” (2) as they struggle to balance family and community demands 
with the economic and political realities of school bureaucracies. Beset by forces far 
beyond their control — including state legislatures, militant and intrusive teacher 
unions, dissatisfied parents and community leaders — it is not surprising that princi-
pals carry with them a sense of ambiguity and unease about who they are and what 
they do.
Within a world characterized by uncertainty and contradiction, Rousmaniere 
chronicles the evolution of the American public school principal’s office “amid 
the conflicting external and internal pressures on the people who sat in that of-
fice” (3). The focal points of the principalship’s history are assembled into six well-
written and deftly-organized chapters: “Preceptors, Head Teachers, and Principal 
Teachers: School Leadership through the Late Nineteenth Century;” “The Making 
of the Principal’s Office, 1890–1940;” “Outside the Principal’s Office: Principals, 
Democratic Leadership, and Community Change;” “Cracks in the System: School 
Leadership, 1945–1980;” “Bearing the Burden: The School Principal and Civil 
Rights;” and, finally, “Instructional Leaders in High-Stakes Schools.” Each chapter 
illustrates how pedagogical and organizational forces within schools intersect at par-
ticular times with a kaleidoscope of social, economic, and political forces to produce 
a new stage in the development of school leaders. Each chapter also examines how 
principals are shaped by vacillating forces of constancy and change, sometimes pull-
ing them in new directions, sometimes pulling them back to their older traditions 
and responsibilities.
The first two chapters provide an “inside-out” view of the principalship as it 
emerged in the post-Revolutionary era by detailing how it gradually assumed greater 
form in private, parochial, and community schools during the first half of the nine-
teenth century when principal-teachers began to embody “the cultural authority of 
the school in a way that the individual teacher could not” (9). As the great crusade for 
common schools intensified during the century’s second half, civic and social reform-
ers assigned principals a far more intoxicating role in the command and control of 
what were often poorly coordinated and, at times, chaotic schools.
Rousmaniere skillfully portrays the principal’s questionable influence and status 
in the ragtag world of late nineteenth-century schools, pointing out to good effect 
that a principal’s role and reputation were highly dependent on circumstance and 
place. In some communities, principals were influential figures who managed several 
schools with the brawny authority of Scottish lords. Elsewhere, principals toiled as 
mere clerks, instructed by school boards to do little more than maintain children’s 
attendance records.
In the next four chapters, the narrative is more broadly driven by an outside-in 
perspective that surveys the intellectual and political events influencing the course of 
public schooling throughout much of the twentieth century and, in turn, principals’ 
work lives. Beginning with the great progressive campaign to remanufacture the cen-
tral institutions of American life in the early days of the new century, Rousmaniere 
recounts how ideas about democratic administration and consensual management 
Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 153
gripped American society and schools as the Great Depression deepened in the 1930s 
and threats from totalitarian regimes overseas mounted.
Rousmaniere then reviews the troubled state of educational leadership in the post-
World War II era, a period marked by sharp criticisms of the school’s scholastic fail-
ings, waning confidence in public education, and the exile of females from principals’ 
offices in the 1940s and 1950s. Movements for civil rights and school desegregation 
imposed new priorities for principals in the post-1960s era, as did state and national 
reform initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the 1990s, the principal’s world has 
been transformed again in light of emerging parental and community lobbying for 
enhanced school choice, campaigns for “effective” schools, and accelerating political 
demands for high stakes testing.
Within the arc of these developments, Rousmaniere’s treatments of women and 
minorities in the principal’s office clearly stand out as high points in this narrative. 
Her discussions of “culturally responsive principals” (68) who mobilized community 
support for predominantly black schools in black neighbourhoods as early as the 
mid-1930s, along with her account of the politics that reshaped and, sometimes, 
derailed progressive reform efforts, are particularly enlightening. Rousmaniere like-
wise deserves credit for illustrating how a historically strong female presence in prin-
cipals’ offices (albeit in schools that were mostly small, elementary, and rural) was 
dismantled by various factors after 1945, including school consolidation movements, 
demobilization and the GI Bill, as well as initiatives to de-feminize schools.
Summing things up, this readable volume makes a strong historical case that prin-
cipals, by virtue of their strategic position as middle managers in schools, have played 
“a central role in the development of American schooling” and that, because of their 
unique position as “the connecting link,” between school systems, communities, 
and children, they have remained “literally at the front door of educational change” 
(152). Rousmaniere is also correct in asserting that the principal’s office is the place 
where many “of our deepest questions about public education” (152) come in search 
of resolution.
Obviously, a volume as economical as this in length (152 pages of text) cannot 
address all things. But if Professor Rousmaniere should decide to extend this work 
at some point, or if someone else would like to take on the challenge, certain ad-
ditions may be worth considering. For example, greater attention could be given 
to chronicling how principals saw themselves and their work over time. Granted, 
principals and teachers are notoriously poor diarists, letter writers, and record keep-
ers. Nevertheless, in the interest of seeing the world from behind the principal’s desk, 
social historians could make far greater use of interview data and oral histories, along 
with small commemorative histories often written by former teachers, principals, and 
students.
An enlarged historical study of principals could also allow greater investigation of 
work and status differences between elementary principals and the men and women 
who supervised America’s great high schools in the early and mid-twentieth cen-
tury, many of which were institutions of immense civic — and, indeed, architec-
tural — prominence. Exploring in greater depth the intellectual, social, and cultural 
Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation154
differences that have historically separated the worlds of elementary and secondary 
school principals might explain, among other things, some of the organizational dis-
connections that still hamper K-12 systems today.
Notes
1 Amy Bitterman, Rebecca Goldring, and Lucinda Gray, Characteristics of Public and 
Private Elementary and Secondary School Principals in the United States: Results from the 
2011–2012 Schools and Staffing Survey (Washington: National Center for Education 
Statistics, 2013.)
Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 155


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Reid, Jason

159
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BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
Christopher J. Greig
Ontario Boys: Masculinity and the Idea of 
Boyhood in Postwar Ontario, 1945–1960
Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014. 182 pp.
Jason Reid
Ryerson University
Christopher J. Greig’s new book examines public discourses on boyhood in Ontario 
during the years following the Second World War. Greig argues that a host of jour-
nalists, child-rearing experts, and novelists (among others) used boyhood as a means 
of rejuvenating patriarchal structures that had been challenged by the decline of the 
male breadwinner ideal during the Great Depression and the increased participation 
of women in the workforce during the war. Indeed, if the commentators in Greig’s 
study are to be believed, the creation of a rugged “boy citizen” who could “promote 
and protect democracy” was necessary in order to stave off a serious crisis of mascu-
linity (xix).
Greig’s study begins by looking at the extent to which boyhood was dependent 
on a stable home life. According to most observers, the ideal boy came from a white, 
middle-class, Protestant environment in which traditional gender roles were held 
sacrosanct. Mothers, for instance, were expected to stay at home to look after the 
children, while fathers were expected to be friendly and gentle, yet firm when the 
situation called for it, and willing to protect male children from their mother’s over-
protective ways. This vision of family and boyhood, Greig argues, represented a con-
certed attempt to “reconstruct patriarchal and heterosexist relations” (25).
The second chapter shifts to a discussion of teamwork and its importance in shap-
ing modern boyhood. Greig suggests that the culture’s intense emphasis on coop-
eration and loyalty to group structures — expressed most often through sports, Boy 
Scouts, summer camp, and other types of organized activities — was a response to 
the growing corporatization of the postwar economy, a means of countering fears 
of communism and labour unrest by instilling a corporatist ethos into the minds 
of the boys who would one day guide the Ontario economy. Even informal boy 
gangs — though not, it should be noted, the non-Anglo variations that were often 
associated with urban crime — were portrayed in positive terms, acting as a “model 
for corporate or factory life” (48).
The next chapter looks at how the discourse on boyhood was influenced heavily 
by heroic narratives. Once again, Greig places his arguments within the context of the 
corporate structure that defined life in postwar Ontario. The ideal boy was expected 
to be somewhat of an individualist and have a healthy respect for entrepreneurial 
activities, both of which were recast in a heroic light in order to complement the 
collective goals associated with modern corporations. Led by the businessmen and 
middle-class professionals who presided over the postwar corporate structure, the 
Boy Scouts are given special emphasis here, as Greig argues that they combined the 
conformity of the corporate world with the rugged individualism and love of nature 
that was associated with boy culture during the nineteenth century.
The most interesting chapter in Greig’s book involves the types of boys who fell 
outside the white, middle-class, Protestant milieu that so often defined the discourse. 
Perhaps not surprisingly, poorer, non-Anglo, urban-dwelling boys were cast as the 
“Other,” as a group of “bad boys” that were adventurous, yet lacking in self-control. 
Commentators often responded to this variation of boyhood by encouraging the cre-
ation of organized athletics and boys’ clubs, both of which were given the task of pre-
venting their charges from lapsing into delinquency or perversion. Vocational school-
ing was also offered, a trend that Greig interprets (rightly so) as a reflection of class bias 
within the discourse. Whereas the ideal boy was being prepared to take a leadership 
role in the corporate structure, the best a so-called “bad boy” could hope for was a 
spot at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy as an unskilled or semi-skilled worker.
Greig’s final chapter is, admittedly, a bit troublesome, as it discusses current views 
on masculinity and how boyhood is once again being used as a means of reconsti-
tuting a more conservative social order. To be sure, Greig makes a noble attempt at 
linking his earlier points on boyhood to more contemporary debates on the subject. 
In the end his analysis is undermined somewhat by the fact that he tries to contem-
porize his arguments while ignoring the fifty-plus years of history that took place 
between 1960 (where his analysis ends) and the present. In other words, Greig’s final 
chapter would have been more germane to what preceded it had he examined the 
entire postwar era rather than the fifteen years immediately following the end of the 
Second World War.
Another criticism I have involves the sources Greig uses to craft his arguments. 
His analysis of boyhood is limited to printed material that was published between 
1945 and 1960 — most notably newspapers, magazines, scholarly material, and the 
odd novel. While his handling of this material is above reproach, Greig’s arguments 
could have been strengthened somewhat by discussing how ideas on boyhood played 
out on television, film, radio, and popular music. After all, this was the era of Leave 
It To Beaver, children’s Saturday matinees, and the growing popularity of rock ‘n’ roll. 
It would have been nice, in short, to see how ideas on boyhood made appearances in 
other types of popular culture, many of which targeted youth of all ages in a fairly 
aggressive manner.
Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation160
Ultimately, Ontario Boys represents a valuable contribution to the literature on 
boyhood, its strengths far outnumbering its weaknesses. It not only provides scholars 
with several strong arguments on how masculinity shapes our understanding of boy-
hood, but it does so in an engaging and well-written manner. By the same token, 
however, Greig’s work could stand to be a bit more expansive in terms of its chronol-
ogy and the types of sources it employs. It would have been interesting, for example, 
to see how the discourses on boyhood found expression in other media, and how they 
were challenged and/or reinforced as a result of the social upheavals of the 1960s, 
1970s, and 1980s.
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Christopher J. Greig, Ontario Boys: Masculinity and the Idea of Boyhood in Postwar Ontario, 1945-1960

Di Mascio, Anthony

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BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
James E. Block
The Crucible of Consent: American Child Rearing 
and the Forging of Liberal Society
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012. 464 pp.
Anthony Di Mascio
Bishop’s University
In The Crucible of Consent: American Child Rearing and the Forging of Liberal Society, 
James E. Block suggests that the paradox of child rearing throughout American his-
tory has been in shaping the young to believe they are free. From its revolutionary 
origins in the eighteenth century to the present day, liberal democracy has depended 
upon the consent of the governed. The making of such consent, the author contends, 
was located in the nation’s youngest inhabitants, where the self-direction and integra-
tive social conduct necessary to legitimize the Republic could be established without 
inciting suspicion or opposition. Written by a political scientist whose work has fo-
cused on political theory and the shaping of modern American society, this book 
promises to bring a unique perspective to the history of childhood and schooling; 
and, indeed, while much of the evidence and many of the themes covered may be 
familiar to historians of education, the book nevertheless fulfills the promise.
Block’s book is divided into three main parts that chronologically guide the reader 
through three main eras in American history. The first part takes the reader from 
the American Revolution to the early nineteenth century. Block examines closely the 
revolutionary dream of creating a democratic republic that could uphold the values of 
freedom and equality. It was in these years that major thinkers and political figures be-
gan the great American project to shape the modern citizen from birth. The challenge 
was to convince an individual that he or she was entirely self-determining and yet fully 
adaptive in his or her conduct. This could be accomplished, early school advocates ar-
gued, by winning the will of the child to demonstrate responsibility for his or her own 
social integration. In a significant sense, Block thus argues, the history of the United 
States began with a socialization project. Schools, according to the popular and politi-
cal rhetoric of the time, would help create a new way of thinking and new principles in 
which a republican society could endure (88-99). Such rhetoric, however, also perme-
ated Britain and its colonies, where no republican project thrived. Block unfortunately 
never looks beyond America’s borders to understand the educational rhetoric of this 
era, leading him to conclude that the “key to the democratic order was equal access to 
universal schooling and the opportunity for advanced education where appropriate” 
(105), without considering that school advocates were calling for similar educational 
opportunities in non-democracies throughout the world.
Part two is concerned with how liberal child rearing was framed in antebellum 
America. These years would see the rise of capitalism accompanied by a new rhetoric 
of pragmatism that would ultimately reshape the American dream. The author traces 
the emergence of what he calls an “agency consensus” in socialization and education 
through the writing of major nineteenth-century thinkers such as Horace Bushnell 
and Daniel Wise. Their writings, couched as extensions of earlier principles, reveal 
to Block the forces and trade-offs necessary to support the growing commitment to 
a “national project.” The result was the rise in antebellum America of a “national 
civil religion” that was more reflective of popular values than in any previous society. 
Americans did not just agree to a common education system in these years, but to 
a common “socialization and educational system” which brought forth the agency 
society (152). Its shared creation promoted a sense of common ownership in the 
American project that persists to this day. Through popular reading material such as 
self-help books, parents were encouraged to take part in this project by “winning” 
the child’s will, and they were instructed in the methods for activating the skills and 
aspirations necessary to meet the strenuous demands of liberal individualism and 
republican responsibility (174). All of this culminated in a new national curricu-
lum, promoted both inside and outside schoolhouse doors, which included inno-
vative child-rearing strategies affirming self-development, self-governance, and self-
management; hence creating the consummate social agent ready to be released from 
socialization and into society. The author does not, however, provide evidence which 
could help tell us how widespread this curriculum was, or how widely, and willingly, 
it was accepted. The reader is simply expected to trust that it was so.
The third and final part of the book is concerned with how the agency republic was 
consolidated from the late nineteenth century up to about the 1960s. Much of Block’s 
understanding of children’s history in this period is shaped by the work of G. Stanley 
Hall and the new child study movement of late nineteenth-century America. By then, 
the popular school advocates had shaped a formidable school system which saw the 
schoolmaster replace the parent as the central intellectual authority in a child’s life. The 
centrality of the parent, once sacred, was now suspect in America, and by the end of 
the nineteenth century children had gained “unprecedented power and leverage over 
adults.” The parent’s role, now, was to “bring out the best” in their children (288). To 
no small degree, the future of American liberalism rested in the childhood socializa-
tion needed to support the foundations of liberal society, and adults were expected, 
indeed required, to make the greatest efforts to nourish and nurture the minds of the 
young. The book concludes with Block’s critique of what he calls the “American dream 
machine” which developed throughout the twentieth century and targeted youth with 
Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 131
“cheap theatres, followed by early motion pictures, department store displays, mass-
market newspapers and magazines, fairs and amusement parks, radio and music, direct 
mail and billboards, and the promotion of fashion, style, and appearance” (335). Here 
again, however, Block does not connect the dots The reader is left having to accept the 
links that the author tells us existed between the ideas of major nineteenth-century 
school advocates and the ideas of major twentieth-century corporate executives. While 
mass schooling may indeed be connected to the propagation of mass consumer culture, 
more evidence is needed in order to fully substantiate that claim.
There are other problems with this book. The historian will be frustrated, for 
example, that Block does not explain his choice of sources or his methods of analysis. 
A perusal of the footnotes highlights an abundant reading of the major movers and 
shakers in American society throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In a 
book that purports to explain how popular consent was won, however, the ideas and 
writings of ordinary Americans are conspicuously absent. Nevertheless, Block raises 
challenging questions that have plagued supporters of both public schooling and 
liberal democracy. The greatest of all of these questions, perhaps, is: can we return to 
a time where people believed that the dream of free citizens, living in a free society, 
willingly consenting to their role in shaping, supporting, and fulfilling liberal democ-
racy, and to upholding the values of freedom of equality, was achievable?
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Douville, Bruce

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BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
Matthew Levin
Cold War University: Madison and the New Left 
in the Sixties
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. 224 pp.
Bruce Douville
Algoma University
Public universities are political institutions, not only in the sense that they are state-
funded, but also that they function as cradles of social and political dissent against 
the state. In Cold War University, Matthew Levin explores the paradoxical relation-
ship between these two aspects of the public university in postwar America. His 
study centres on the University of Wisconsin-Madison (hereafter, “Wisconsin” or 
“UW-Madison”), one of America’s leading public universities, and, in the 1960s, an 
important centre of New Left student activism. Levin argues that Wisconsin was one 
of many “Cold War universities” in the postwar years. In other words, the federal 
government funded such universities generously for Cold War-related research. This 
unprecedented infusion of government money allowed universities to expand, but 
in the process, it created the conditions for the emergence of a vibrant movement of 
student radicals. As Levin explains, this “was the contradiction in American higher 
education that emerged during these years, with universities becoming increasingly 
central to the Cold War struggle even as they became centers of protest against Cold 
War policies” (7). The author’s framework of analysis is not entirely new; Rebecca 
Lower coined the term “cold war university” in her study of Stanford, and Jeremy 
Suri has written about the “contradictions of the Cold War” in the context of West 
Berlin’s Free University. What makes Levin’s argument unique is that he uses this 
framework to analyze radical student activism at a large American public university.
One of the strengths of Levin’s work is that it demonstrates how the Cold War uni-
versity environment of the 1940s and 1950s laid the foundations for the appearance 
of a New Left scene in the 1960s. Consequently, he devotes the first three chapters to 
the history of UW-Madison in the early postwar period. The first chapter explores the 
growth of federal funding in the decades following the Second World War. The next 
two chapters concern the campus left of the 1940s and 1950s, and the university’s 
progressive intellectual environment. Wisconsin’s left-wing student milieu consisted 
of Jewish youth from out of state (especially New Jersey and New York) as well as 
home-grown radicals, who gravitated to Communist-affiliated campus groups such 
as the Labor Youth League. Such groups were never large and they faced opposition, 
but Levin argues that UW-Madison administrators were relatively tolerant of them, 
because of the university’s long-standing commitment to free speech. Consequently, 
the university made space for a campus left — not only Communist-affiliated groups, 
but also the Socialist Club and the Student Peace Center formed in the late 1950s. 
Left-wing students — including many graduate students — found mentors and role 
models in faculty such as William Appleman Williams, a diplomatic historian and 
critic of America’s Cold War foreign policy. Furthermore, many Wisconsin graduate 
students developed their critique of “corporate, Cold War liberalism” on the pages of 
Studies on the Left, which began publishing out of UW-Madison in 1959.
The chapters that follow focus on the 1960s and the emergence of a New Left 
at UW-Madison. The civil rights movement provided young activists with an op-
portunity to travel south and put their bodies on the line in the Freedom Rides 
and voter registration; it also provided a model for civil disobedience strategies 
that they could employ on university campuses such as UW-Madison. However, 
the Vietnam War was an even greater spur to activism in the mid- to late 1960s. 
It also spurred the growth of radical campus-based groups at Wisconsin such as 
Students for a Democratic Society, the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and 
University Community Action. Levin shows how these groups resorted to confron-
tational, disruptive methods to protest the University of Wisconsin’s complicity with 
the American government’s prosecution of the war in Vietnam. For Levin, the two 
key examples of confrontation between students and university authorities are the 
May 1966 “Draft Sit-In,” and the October 1967 protests against Dow Chemical’s 
recruitment efforts on campus. Levin devotes an entire chapter to the latter episode 
(which involved thousands of students and ended in a violent police crackdown), in 
which he paints a sympathetic picture of the chancellor William Sewell as a tragic 
figure with little room to manoeuvre. For Levin, the Dow Chemical protests, and the 
university’s response, were “the culmination of the paradoxes of Cold War-era higher 
education at the University of Wisconsin” (136).
Levin’s final chapter, “Endings and Beginnings,” is the weakest chapter in an oth-
erwise strong monograph. He briefly touches on a multitude of developments, some 
of which would merit chapters in themselves. For example, in August 1969, radicals 
bombed Sterling Hall, resulting in the death of a physics postdoctoral researcher. 
Their intended target was the Army Mathematics Research Center, a symbol of the 
university’s complicity with the “war machine.” Though this is a prime example of 
the contradictions of a Cold War university, Levin devotes merely four paragraphs to 
the episode; his account lacks the drama and depth of detail with which he treats the 
Dow protests. Furthermore, the gay liberation and environmental movements receive 
two sentences each, while the counterculture and second-wave feminism merit each 
approximately a page and a half. These four movements are seen as extensions of New 
Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 115
Left activism, but “outside the confines of the New Left” (177), an interpretation that 
some scholars would find debatable.
Such qualms aside, Cold War University is an impressive book, rooted in extensive 
archival research and oral interviews. It is a readable and informative work explor-
ing the New Left at an important public university in the American Midwest, in 
the context of the problematic postwar relationship between the university and the 
federal government. Moreover, readers familiar with the trajectory of 1960s radical-
ism at other universities in the United States and Canada will find many parallels 
with the events described in Levin’s study. In short, Cold War University is a welcome 
addition to the growing body of scholarship on the North American student left in 
this turbulent era.
Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation116


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