Thursday, March 25, 2010

“Educating an Exceptional Empire, 1865-1905: The Federal Government, Schooling, and the Legacies of American Colonial Rule”
Presented by Sarah Manekin, Ph.D.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
6:30 - 8 p.m. (doors open at 6 p.m.)
4th Floor Program Room in the Andrew White Student Center
Light refreshments will be served

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Lecture abstract:
From the conclusion of the Civil War through the present day, the federal government has provided schooling to children in lands it has occupied or in lands that it assumes are of vital political interest. Surveying the 40 years after the conclusion of the Civil War, Manekin's work explores the changing reasons why the United States government assumed this responsibility, the mechanisms it used to meet it, and the effects of its work. In a period in which the federal government was weak and its role in public education even weaker, the provision of schooling for children in the new possessions ascribed racial and political meaning onto these “new Americans,” challenged the government’s administrative capacity, and exposed the tensions inherent in transposing systems of “free” schools onto colonized peoples.

The legacies of this process are deep and lasting. Studying the federal government’s efforts to craft schools and school systems for its colonies reveals the longevity of public-private educational partnerships, the consistency of schooling as an aspect of U.S. foreign policy, and the significance of federalism as a structuring component of American educational exceptionalism.

About the speaker:
A historian of American education and U.S. imperialism, Sarah Manekin earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation titled, “Spreading the Empire of Free Education, 1865-1905.” Dr. Manekin received fellowships from the Spencer Foundation, the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the University of Pennsylvania. In October 2009, she was awarded the Henry Barnard Prize for the best article by a graduate student in the History of Education. A former high school history teacher, Dr. Manekin received both of Penn’s major graduate student teaching awards and was twice named a Fellow at Penn’s Center for Teaching and Learning. She is currently a lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University.