Faculty Research Projects

Exchange of Ideas uses insights from the new history of capitalism to show how the market revolution of the mid-eighteenth century penetrated American colleges and pulled scholarship—or the products of intellectual labor—into the sphere of transatlantic commercial relations. It explains how “useful ideas” became “salable goods” that could be factored into an international balance of trade, and how American scholars viewed the resulting commodification of higher education with a mixture of fascination and fear. Along the way, it uncovers the roots of the modern economy of knowledge.

Capital of Mind chronicles the parallel emergence of a new institution—the modern university—and a new ideology—market liberalism. Specifically, it explains how “the idea of a university” arose during the early nineteenth alongside the unprecedented social changes wrought by the first industrial revolution. Shaped by a desire to foster the mass production and mass consumption of “useful” knowledge for members of a new middle class, the university sought to make the United States more “competitive” on the world stage and maximize its capacity for material as well as mental production.

Dr. Bill Reese is currently researching and writing this book. Born in 1804 in Vermont, Colburn was a math prodigy who was exhibited throughout the United States after his talent in arithmetical calculations appeared in 1810. He traveled with his father throughout Europe between 1812 and 1824 and attended prestigious schools in Paris and London. He also performed on the stage in various theatrical productions in England and Ireland. Returning to the United States in 1824, he underwent a religious conversion during the Second Great Awakening; he became a Methodist minister and a professor of ancient and modern languages. Based on research in numerous archival collections in the U.S. and Europe, the book will explore the life of America’s first child celebrity.

Dr. Bill Reese is currently researching and writing this book. Funded by a major grant by the Spencer Foundation, it analyzes how federal policies have shaped governance, academic standards, and race relations in the nation’s capital since the nineteenth century. Why has a school system in the shadow of the most powerful government in the world not become world-class? Based on an array of primary sources, it will be the first single-volume history of the Washington, D.C., public schools, from their origins in the early nineteenth century to the recent past.

African Americans southerners premised their campaigns against segregated schooling on the notion that the state must safeguard their children’s rights and safety. Yet Black children’s vulnerability increased as southern districts implemented desegregation during the 1960s and 1970s. Notably, Black students experienced racially disparate discipline that resulted in high rates of suspensions and school-based arrests. This book project explores how and why this occurred and its consequences for Black youth. It does so through the experiences of Gary Tyler, a Black teenager who was imprisoned for nearly 42 years after being wrongfully convicted of fatally shooting a white student at their desegregating Louisiana high school in 1974. The shooting occurred as the school closed early in response to brawls between Black and white students and as white youths and adults attacked the school bus carrying Tyler and other Black students. Dr. Stern has received support for this project from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, the Historic New Orleans Collection, and the UW–Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education.

Dr. Stern has published several articles tied to this book project. An article on Tyler’s case, “School Violence and the Carceral State in the 1970s: Desegregation and the New Educational Inequality in Louisiana,” appears in Journal of Southern History LXXXIX, no. 3 (August 2023): 483–534. His related research on racialized school violence during the 1960s and 1970s in and beyond Louisiana resulted in two additional publications. The first, “The Hidden Politics of High School Violence,” appears in New Perspectives on the History of the Twentieth-Century American High School, ed. Kyle P. Steele (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). The second, “‘We Got to Fight for What We Want’: Black School Rebellions in Louisiana, 1965–1974,” appears in Teachers College Record  125, no. 3 (March 2023): 319–349.

This September 2023 special section of the Journal of Urban History examines the intertwined evolution of the state’s protective, preventative, and punitive power in urban America from the antebellum era through the 1980s. Dr. Stern guest edited the eight articles in this special section and wrote its introductory essay. The section explores topics such as the confinement of truant youth in nineteenth-century Brooklyn, the criminalization of student protest and students of color in New York City, Charleston, and Boston during the 1960s and 1970s, the political manipulation of images of strict Black principals during the Reagan era, and the development of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program in 1980s Los Angeles. Dr. Stern’s introductory essay, “Where Protection Meets Punishment: Public Education and the Carceral State in Urban America ” discusses how the articles in the special section provide a new model for understanding the historical connections between schools, police, and prisons. He notes that they illuminate the reciprocal relationship between state protective and punitive authority and the deep roots of the policies and practices that have historically linked public education to the criminal justice system. Additionally, the special section shows that the carceral state, which refers to the array of governmental policies and practices that enable mass incarceration—both moved into and emerged from within schools themselves.