John L Rury
Biographic Data
| ID | 273593 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John L Rury |
| GIVEN NAMES | John L |
| FAMILY NAME | Rury |
| SIGNATURE | RURY J L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kansas |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4794-719X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 72 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 97 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 69 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Spying on Students: The Fbi , Red Squads, and Student Activists in the 1960s South
Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To)
University City: History, Race, and Community in the Era of the Innovation District
Journal Article University City: History, Race, and Community in the Era of the Innovation District Get access University City: History, Race, and Community in the Era of the Innovation District. By Laura Wolf-Powers. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 196 pp. $39.95.) John L Rury John L Rury University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American Hist…
Education History in the History of Teachers College Record: A Long and Distinguished Record
This article considers how the history of education has been represented in Teachers College Record over the course of its own history. Almost from the begining it has featured articles dealing with historical questions and the future of the field, as well as serving as a forum for the work of many historians of education. This has included notable scholars from the Teachers College faculty, and a wide variety of other historians, continung to th…
The Origins of American Test-Based Educational Accountability and Controversies About Its Impact, 1970–1983
Background and Context: Statewide test-based accountability in the United States began with minimum competency assessments in public schools during the 1970s, starting in Florida and other Southern states. Controversies over IQ (intelligence quotient) testing contributed to the development of “criterion-referenced” exams that became the principal form of assessment for such purposes. These developments provoked considerable discussion, much of it…
Inequality in the American West: Schooling at a Colorado coal camp in the early twentieth century
This article examines schooling in the western American state of Colorado during the early twentieth century. Conditions of youth and education are examined at the Walsen coal-mining camp near the town of Walsenburg in the southern region of the state. The experiences of children in the camp are compared to with those living in the town, with a focus on educational opportunities. While provision of elementary schooling in both settings was genera…
The Racialisation of literacy: Educational Tests for Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1894–1924
The Immigration Restriction League (IRL) made literacy, and by extension education, a major aspect of immigration reform in United States in the early twentieth century. Appealing to an educated, conservative constituency, it promoted a literacy test aimed at systematically excluding “undesirable” immigrants. Literacy was initially treated as a learned skill, but eventually became linked to fixed, presumably heritable traits. The justification fo…
The [Oxford] Handbook of the History of Education
This handbook offers a global perspective on the historical development of educational institutions, systems of schooling, ideas about education, and educational experiences. Sections deal with questions of theory and methods, ancient and medieval education, the rise of national school systems, the development of universities in different contexts, problems of inequality and discrimination in education, and reform and institutional change. Specif…
Oxford Handbook of the History of Education
Race, schools and opportunity hoarding: Evidence from a post-war American metropolis
Opportunity hoarding is a sociological concept first introduced by Charles Tilly. This article explores its utility for historians by examining efforts to exclude different groups of people in a major American metropolis during the 1960s and seventies. This was a period of significant social change, as the racial composition of big city schools shifted dramatically and suburban school districts grew substantially. An examination two such suburban…
Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America
This well-written, accessible book is a broadly conventional survey of schooling in the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on common schools and the campaigns waged to improve them. Drawing upon a range of sources, it covers much of the ground plowed by Kaestle and other scholars during the past half-century.1 Although hardly interdisciplinary and cautious conceptually, it contributes a few additional wrinkles to the familiar origin story…
Crystal R. Sanders. A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle
Crystal R. Sanders’s book describes the rise and fall of the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), a grassroots organization that grew out of the local civil rights movement to become one of the largest Head Start providers in the country between 1965 and 1968. Radical from its inception, and inspired by activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and other groups, CDGM w…
Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools
Book Review| April 01 2016 Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools, by Amanda E. Lewis and John B. Diamond, Oxford University Press, $27.95, ISBN: 978-0-19-534272-7. Reviewed by John L. Rury, University of Kansas. John L. Rury John L. Rury Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Women, Gender, and Families of Color (201…
War and education in the United States: Racial ideology and inequality in three historical episodes
This paper examines the impact of war on African-American education. This question is considered in three different periods: the eras of the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Second World War. Large-scale conflict, such as these instances of total war, can afford historical moments when oppressed groups are able take steps to improve their social status, challenging the forms of domination that have subjugated them in the past and demand…
Opportunity Hoarding
“Opportunity hoarding” is a sociological concept utilized by Charles Tilly in 1998 that has been used to explain a growing range of phenomena related to social inequality. It concerns the control of resources, defined in any number of ways, that allow certain groups to exclude others from access to said resources or benefits accruing to them. While Tilly used the term in distinction to other forms of social control and manipulation, such as explo…
Trouble in Suburbia: Localism, Schools and Conflict in Postwar Johnson County, Kansas
Suburban public schools have become the predominant form of American education in the past fifty years. As a number of commentators have noted, however, historians have devoted relatively little attention to the development of these educational systems. This is surprising, given the importance of schools in the development of many suburban communities, especially during the postwar era. Education became a critical element in suburban struggles to…
The Power and Limitations of Historical Case Study: A Consideration of Postwar African American Educational Experience
This essay considers the use of case studies in the history of education. In doing this, it focuses on the recent history of African American education and several prominent studies in particular. The power and limitations of case study research are considered, drawing upon literature in sociology and qualitative research. Focusing on highly acclaimed studies, historical research on African American education is utilized to assess the interpretiv…
Suburban Opposition to District Reorganization: The 1968 Spainhower Commission and Metropolitan Kansas City and St. Louis
The Geo-Spatial Distribution of Educational Attainment: Cultural Capital and Uneven Development in Metropolitan Kansas City, 1960-1980
This article explores historical evidence of spatial inequality in a particular metropolitan setting, focusing on adult education. Variation in collegiate education is interpreted in light of Bourdieu's conception of cultural capital. Using census tract data, OLS regression suggests that education levels were moderately independent of other social characteristics in both 1960 and 1980. Historically, distinct "education zones" or districts took sh…
An end of innocence: African-American high school protest in the 1960s and 1970s
This paper considers African-American student protests in secondary schools during the 1960s and early 1970s. Taking a national perspective, it charts a growing sense of independence and militancy among black students as they made the schools a focal point of activism. Activist students challenged established civil rights organisations on a variety of questions. They also engaged in an escalating series of protest activities to make schools chang…
Historical Research in Education
Two Cheers for NCLB, and Questions for Professor Garrison
Education and the Changing Metropolitan Organization of Inequality: A Multilevel Analysis of Secondary Attainment in the United States, 1940–1980
This study examines metropolitan segmentation in educational attainment during the postwar era. Employing a multilevel analytical approach with U.S. Census data drawn from IPUMS, it finds urban-suburban distinctions shifted and grew in magnitude. While students in central cities enjoyed an educational advantage in 1940, by 1980 it was suburban youth who clearly exhibited higher levels of attainment. Various explanations for these developments are…
Suburban Advantage: Opportunity Hoarding and Secondary Attainment in the Postwar Metropolitan North
This study examines urban/suburban differences in educational outcomes in light of Tilly’s conception of “opportunity hoarding.” Data from the U.S. Census reveal the changing circumstances of 17-year-olds in central city and suburban settings across the post–World War II period. Focusing on the metropolitan Northeast and Eastern Midwest, we consider a range of factors associated with differences in educational attainment. Using a multilevel analy…
History, Theory, and Education
The distinguished Africanist Robert Harms once observed that “we historians are a practical people who pride ourselves on our attention to facts and our painstaking attention to detail.” If this is the case in other parts of the world, it is certainly true of American historians, who have been periodically admonished for their disinterest in questions of theory and purpose related to their craft. In this issue we have an opportunity to discuss th…
Race, Space, and the Politics of Chicago's Public Schools: Benjamin Willis and the Tragedy of Urban Education
University City: History, Race, and Community in the Era of the Innovation District
Journal Article University City: History, Race, and Community in the Era of the Innovation District Get access University City: History, Race, and Community in the Era of the Innovation District. By Laura Wolf-Powers. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 196 pp. $39.95.) John L Rury John L Rury University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American Hist…
Suburban Advantage: Opportunity Hoarding and Secondary Attainment in the Postwar Metropolitan North
This study examines urban/suburban differences in educational outcomes in light of Tilly’s conception of “opportunity hoarding.” Data from the U.S. Census reveal the changing circumstances of 17-year-olds in central city and suburban settings across the post–World War II period. Focusing on the metropolitan Northeast and Eastern Midwest, we consider a range of factors associated with differences in educational attainment. Using a multilevel analy…
The Changing Profile of College Access: The Truman Commission and Enrollment Patterns in the Postwar Era
The 1947 President's Commission on Higher Education, popularly known as the Truman Commission, offered a remarkable vision, one of an expansive, inclusive and diverse system of postsecondary education in the United States. It appeared just as hundreds of thousands of former GIs poured onto the nation's campuses, taking advantage of a little heralded program to provide tuition and other benefits to veterans of the recently concluded World War II. …
The Curious Status of the History of Education: A Parallel Perspective
Many educational historians no doubt have experienced the inevitable cocktail party question: “so what is your area of specialization?” Whether uttered over the clink of ice or in some other social setting, the answer is rarely simple. Real historians, after all, are supposed to work in history departments, and to focus on periods and places rather than a specific type of institution. For many people, it seems hard to comprehend the idea of histo…
Social Capital and Secondary Schooling: Interurban Differences in American Teenage Enrollment Rates in 1950
This article considers the influence of social capital on secondary enrollments in American cities in 1950. Data from the U.S. census are utilized to analyze enrollment rates across metropolitan areas with populations greater than 500,000. The effects of adult education levels and poverty rates were linked to social capital; employment patterns and the size of various ethnic groups also affected enrollment levels. Overall, trends were similar to …
Vocationalism for Home and Work: Women's Education in the United States, 1880-1930
BETWEEN 1880 AND 1930 millions of women poured into the American labor force. The rate of female labor force participation in this period increased from about fifteen to nearly twenty five percent, such that by 1930 almost one out of every four American workers was a woman. Taking jobs as typists, clerks, teachers and telephone operators, as well as traditionally female jobs in manufacturing and domestic service, women rapidly expanded the range …
Education and Women's Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban America, 1870-1930
Suburban Opposition to District Reorganization: The 1968 Spainhower Commission and Metropolitan Kansas City and St. Louis
Democracy’s High School? Social Change and American Secondary Education in the Post-Conant Era
In this article I discuss James Conant’s ideas about the democratic role of the comprehensive high school and address just how those ideas have been treated by history. I consider the historical context of the post–World War II United States, focusing on several issues: (a) race and the growth of school segregation, (b) the rise of a youth culture and the movement for students’ rights, and (c) the changing national economy, especially with respec…
Seeds of Crisis: Public Schooling in Milwaukee since 1920
Beset by such controversies as whether they have the right to search students lockers for guns and drugs, big city schools are making adjustments unimaginable in earlier eras, when detention was still sufficient for keeping order. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is one city trying to cope with the educational challenges of the twentieth century. Seeds of Crisis examines the ways in which these challenges have affected the politics of education, the curricu…
Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930-1960
Journal Article Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930–1960. By Arthur Zilversmit. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. xviii, 251 pp. Cloth, $38.95, ISBN 0-22698329-3. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-226-98330-7.) Get access John L. Rury John L. Rury DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 81, Issue 3, December 1994,…
The Trouble with Coeducation: Mann and Women at Antioch, 1853-1860
Olympia Brown came to Ohio's Antioch College in 1856 in search of a liberal education. At Mount Holyoke Female Seminary she had found too many rules and restrictions: “young ladies are not allowed to stand in the doorway”; “young ladies are not allowed to linger in the halls”; and “we never examine young ladies in Algebra.” Reared in Michigan under the influence of a mother determined to see her daughters fully educated, Brown was attracted to An…
Education and the Changing Metropolitan Organization of Inequality: A Multilevel Analysis of Secondary Attainment in the United States, 1940–1980
This study examines metropolitan segmentation in educational attainment during the postwar era. Employing a multilevel analytical approach with U.S. Census data drawn from IPUMS, it finds urban-suburban distinctions shifted and grew in magnitude. While students in central cities enjoyed an educational advantage in 1940, by 1980 it was suburban youth who clearly exhibited higher levels of attainment. Various explanations for these developments are…
Expanding Secondary Attainment in the United States, 1940–80: A Fixed-Effects Panel Regression Model
In this article, the authors examine the growth of secondary school attainment in the United States between 1940 and 1980, exploring several different conceptual frames of reference. Using state-level data, the authors identify a diffusion model of educational expansion using a fixed-effects panel regression approach. This method is used to analyze change over time, with particular attention to evaluating nonlinear processes of growth. The author…
Children of Privilege: Student Revolt in the Sixties
(1985). Children of Privilege: Student Revolt in the Sixties. The Journal of Higher Education: Vol. 56, No. 5, pp. 582-584
Urban Structure and School Participation: Immigrant Women in 1900
Trouble in Suburbia: Localism, Schools and Conflict in Postwar Johnson County, Kansas
Suburban public schools have become the predominant form of American education in the past fifty years. As a number of commentators have noted, however, historians have devoted relatively little attention to the development of these educational systems. This is surprising, given the importance of schools in the development of many suburban communities, especially during the postwar era. Education became a critical element in suburban struggles to…
The Geo-Spatial Distribution of Educational Attainment: Cultural Capital and Uneven Development in Metropolitan Kansas City, 1960-1980
This article explores historical evidence of spatial inequality in a particular metropolitan setting, focusing on adult education. Variation in collegiate education is interpreted in light of Bourdieu's conception of cultural capital. Using census tract data, OLS regression suggests that education levels were moderately independent of other social characteristics in both 1960 and 1980. Historically, distinct "education zones" or districts took sh…
History, Theory, and Education
The distinguished Africanist Robert Harms once observed that “we historians are a practical people who pride ourselves on our attention to facts and our painstaking attention to detail.” If this is the case in other parts of the world, it is certainly true of American historians, who have been periodically admonished for their disinterest in questions of theory and purpose related to their craft. In this issue we have an opportunity to discuss th…
Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America
How could so many of America's educational, political and intellectual leaders have advocated such things as institutionalization, segregation and even sterilization of those with inferior blood? How could the racist notion of selective breeding and racial betterment have become an integral part of high school and college biology textbooks? In this work Stephen Selden tells the story of the eugenics movement in America during the early decades of…
Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education
Race, Region, and Education: An Analysis of Black and White Scores on the 1917 Army Alpha Intelligence Test
In 1917 the United States Army sponsored the most sweeping application of standardized testing then yet attempted. Using an instrument modeled after Lewis Terman's modified version of the Binet test (the well known Stanford-Binet test), the Army administered tests to some 1,750,000 men, most of them draftees, under the direction of a team of psychologists headed by Harvard University professor Robert M. Yerkes. From the standpoint of these psycho…
Myths of Coeducation: Selected Essays, 1964-1983
Education in the New Women's History
The Political Economy of Women's Work: 1900-1920
The Political Economy of Women's Work: 1900-1920
Recent work in women's history suggests that the dramatic rise in female labor force participation in the first decades of the twentieth century cannot be understood solely in terms of labor market forces. Although the demand for female labor increased substantially between 1900 and 1920 (Oppenheimer, 1970), such variables as religion, education, ethnicity, and social class interacted to determine the supply of women available for hire at any one…
The New York African Free School, 1827-1836: Conflict over Community Control of Black Education
rHE NEW YORK AFRICAN FREE SCHOOL was founded in 1789 to serve city's growing free black population. Established by New York Manumission Society to divert black children from the slippery paths of vice, it was among first nondenominational charity schools in American cities. Throughout its history, school's trustees were dedicated to teaching free blacks industry and sobriety, virtues calculated to make them more orderly and tractable as they emer…
Urban Structure and School Participation: Immigrant Women in 1900
Vocationalism for Home and Work: Women's Education in the United States, 1880-1930
BETWEEN 1880 AND 1930 millions of women poured into the American labor force. The rate of female labor force participation in this period increased from about fifteen to nearly twenty five percent, such that by 1930 almost one out of every four American workers was a woman. Taking jobs as typists, clerks, teachers and telephone operators, as well as traditionally female jobs in manufacturing and domestic service, women rapidly expanded the range …
Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture
Philanthropy, Self Help, and Social Control: The New York Manumission Society and Free Blacks, 1785-1810
Children of Privilege: Student Revolt in the Sixties
(1985). Children of Privilege: Student Revolt in the Sixties. The Journal of Higher Education: Vol. 56, No. 5, pp. 582-584
Education and Industry: Women, Schooling, and Labor Force Participation; 1900–1920
Women's history has been the object of a revival in historical scholarship in the last decade or so, and the development of women's work in the early twentieth century has received a significant attention from the 'new' women's history. On the other hand, very little attention has been devoted to the history of women's education—and particularly to the relationship between education and women's work—even in this critical period. My curiosity abou…
Class and Reform: School and Society in Chicago, 1880-1930
The Trouble with Coeducation: Mann and Women at Antioch, 1853-1860
Olympia Brown came to Ohio's Antioch College in 1856 in search of a liberal education. At Mount Holyoke Female Seminary she had found too many rules and restrictions: “young ladies are not allowed to stand in the doorway”; “young ladies are not allowed to linger in the halls”; and “we never examine young ladies in Algebra.” Reared in Michigan under the influence of a mother determined to see her daughters fully educated, Brown was attracted to An…
Myths of Coeducation: Selected Essays, 1964-1983
A History of American Higher Education
Education in the New Women's History
We teach the girl repression, the boy expression”: Sexuality, sex equity and education in historical perspective
(1987). “We teach the girl repression, the boy expression”: Sexuality, sex equity and education in historical perspective. Peabody Journal of Education: Vol. 64, Sex Equity and Sexuality in Education, pp. 44-58
The Politics of Urban School Reform, 1870-1940
Urban School Enrollment at the Turn of the Century: Gender as an Intervening Variable
In 1900, boys 'and girls' patterns of school leaving were influenced by differing factors
Race, Region, and Education: An Analysis of Black and White Scores on the 1917 Army Alpha Intelligence Test
In 1917 the United States Army sponsored the most sweeping application of standardized testing then yet attempted. Using an instrument modeled after Lewis Terman's modified version of the Binet test (the well known Stanford-Binet test), the Army administered tests to some 1,750,000 men, most of them draftees, under the direction of a team of psychologists headed by Harvard University professor Robert M. Yerkes. From the standpoint of these psycho…
Women and Higher Education in American History: Essays from the Mount Holyoke College Sesquicentennial Symposia
Transformation in Perspective: Lawrence Cremin's Transformation of the School
Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education
Educational Renaissance: Our Schools at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, by Marvin Cetron and Margaret Gayle
Journal Article Educational Renaissance: Our Schools at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, by Marvin Cetron and Margaret Gayle Get access Educational Renaissance: Our Schools at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century by Marvin Cetron and Margaret Gayle. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1991. 352 pp. $21.95. John L. Rury John L. Rury DePaul University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterl…
Education and Women's Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban America, 1870-1930
Education and Women's Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban America, 1870-1930
Education and Women's Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban America, 1870-1930
Journal Article Education and Women's Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban America, 1870–1930. By John L. Rury. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. xx + 277 pp. Cloth, $59.50, ISBN 0-7914-0617-2. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-7914-0618-0.) Get access Barbara Brenzel Barbara Brenzel Wellesley College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 79, Issue 4,…
Sociology (61 works) · Political science (47 works) · Law (32 works) · Law (25 works) · Economics (24 works) · Gender Studies (22 works) · Race, History, and American Society (20 works) · Diverse Education Studies and Reforms (19 works) · Politics (17 works) · Psychology (17 works)