Academies were a prevalent form of higher schooling during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States. The authors in this volume look at the academy as the dominant institution of higher schooling in the United States, highlighting the academy's role in the formation of middle class social networks and culture in the mid-nineteenth century. They also reveal the significance of the academy for ethnic, religious, and racial minorities who organized independent academies in the face of exclusion and discrimination by other private and public institutions.

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Contributors Intro duction A School for Every Purpose: An Introduction to the History of Academies in the United States Kim Tolley and Nancy Beadie Institutions: Origins and Purposes Mapping the Landscape of Higher Schooling, 1750 - 1850 Kim Tolley From Anstalt to Academy: Moravian Boarding Education for Native American Children in the Eighteenth Century Amy C. Schutt A Triumph of Reason: Female Education in Academies in the New Republic Margaret A. Nash Students: Meaning and Culture Internal Improvement: The Structure and Culture of Academy Expansion in New York State in the Antebellum Era, 1820-1860 Nancy Beadie Endeavor to Improve Yourself: The Education of White Women in the Antebellum South Kathryn Walbert A Good and Delicious Country: Free Children of Color and How They Learned to Imagine the Atlantic World in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana Mary Niall Mitchell Teachers and Institutions: Challenges and Opportunities Leaving Home to Teach: The Diary of Susan Nye Hutchison, 1815-1841 Kim Tolley and Margaret A. Nash Creating an Educational Interest: Sophia Sawyer, Teacher of the Cherokee Teri Castelow Alternative Pedagogy: The Rise of the Private Black Academy in Early Postbellum Mississippi, 1862-1870 Chris Span The Chinese Western Military Academies in the United States, 1902-1911 Carol Huang Systems: Competition, Struggle, and Transformation Let the People Remember It: Academies and the Rise of High Schools, 1865 to 1890 Sevan Terzian and Nancy Beadie Betrothed to the State?: Nineteenth-Century Academies Confront the Rise of the State Normal Schools Christine Ogren Many Years Before the Mayflower: Catholic Academies and the Development of Parish High Schools in the United States, 1727 - 1925 Kim Tolley Conclusion Legacies of the Academy Nancy Beadie Index