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This chapter explores California State Normal School, California's first publicly supported higher-education institution. Dedicated to teacher education, normal schools were initially established in the United States during the antebellum period and flourished in the decades following the Civil War. Providing women, especially, access to higher education at a time when most colleges and universities refused to admit them, normal schools manifested a commitment to the public good by welcoming poor students and offering them training to become public-school teachers. Over time, these institutions became a crucial segment of American higher education. They also underwent dramatic transformation. Unbeknownst to many of their current students, hundreds of well-known colleges and universities began as normal schools, with scores having been the first centers of higher learning in their states to receive public support.

This chapter explores the expansion and refinement of the educational partnership between black Mobilians and the American Missionary Association through Emerson Normal. This redefined partnership led to the establishment of a corps of public schoolteachers necessary for new state school system. Outside the classroom, Emerson Normal graduates became an essential asset for black Mobilians and their slow and arduous struggle for African American public education and racial equality. They used these resources to secure Broad Street Academy, African American public schoolteachers, and school administrative positions. Without Emerson Normal and its graduates, the chapter argues that the public schools and turn of the century racial uplift activism would have been greatly impaired.

This chapter examines what happened when object lessons were implemented in the United States, particularly through the development of the Oswego Normal School in New York. E. A. Sheldon developed a rigorous curriculum based on the work of M. E. M. Jones and Elizabeth Mayo that trained pupil-teachers to give object lesson. The intent was to train students how to think and observe rather than to rely on students’ rote memorization of knowledge. His work transformed Oswego into the center of object teaching in the 1860s. Critiques of the practice at Oswego as well as the details of its classroom implementations help to explain what this practice actually looked like and what it meant for the ways students and teachers understood the material world. It also considers the ways object lessons could be used for instruction in composition and historical writing as well as moral training.

This chapter considers the racial implications of object-based pedagogy at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia. At Hampton, African American and Native American students were taught via a variation of object lessons and were referred to as living object lessons. At Hampton, this metaphor was employed to argue for the economic and political citizenship of its graduates and other educated African Americans and Native Americans, based on their appearances rather than their inherent civil rights. Object lessons were closely related to the school’s manual labor philosophy. This allowed the approach to be adapted for young children attending Hampton’s practice schools as well as for its own students. For example, the Kitchen Garden, a variation of object lessons organized around manual training and modeled on kindergarten, trained young children to become domestics. This chapter employs the photographs of Frances Benjamin Johnston, among other historical sources, to explore these topics.

Capitalizing on his reputation as a war hero, Blair established a lucrative business securing pensions for veterans and their dependents. He served three terms in the state legislature where he actively supported improvements in public education and greater rights for women. As a lobbyist, he headed the effort to locate the new normal school in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

This chapter focuses on Harriet Georgiana James and her correspondence. Harriet, born on May 10, 1879, died of consumption before the age of twenty-three. Consumption had begun to ravage her lungs even before she arrived at Hampton Institute and Normal School, but she remained “cheerful, hopeful, and ambitious, she did not seem to see the dark side of her illness at all.”

This chapter narrates the life of Paek Namun. He was born on February 11, 1894, in Kochʻang County, North Chŏlla Province. He began his formal education at the Suwŏn School of Agriculture and Forestry (Suwŏn Nongnim Hakkyo). After graduating in 1915, he taught for a time at the Kanghwa Public Normal School (Kanghwa Kongnip Potʻong Hakkyo) before resigning in 1918 to resume his studies. He had co-established the Society for the Study of the Korean Economy (Chosŏn Kyŏngje Hakhoe) in and became active as a public intellectual by publishing in newspapers and journals. Immediately after Korea's liberation, Paek established the Korean Academy of Sciences (Chosŏn Haksurwŏn), which would become a politically neutral research organization that aimed to shape national policy and construct an autonomous national culture.