School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890-1940

"Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife," wrote John Dewey in his classic work The School and Society. In School, Society, and State, Tracy Steffes places that idea at the center of her exploration of the connections between public school reform in the early twentieth century and American political development from 1890 to 1940.

American public schooling, Steffes shows, was not merely another reform project of the Progressive Era, but a central one. She...