Maria Baldwin's Worlds

Upon Maria Baldwin's death on January 9, 1922, her family, friends, and students remembered her as maternal, gentle, gracious, poised, dignified, and selfless. She had dedicated forty years of her life to teaching at the Agassiz School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Today, that school bears her name. Outside of Cambridge, however, Baldwin is relatively unknown. Only a few personal records survive, making an exploration of her inner life inevitably restricted. Kathleen Weiler proves herself to be up to the task of writing a history of a life in fragments in Maria Baldwin's Worlds. She models the very best in educational history methods by analyzing an array of sources, from speeches and newspaper articles to census records, to reconstruct Baldwin's public persona. Weiler argues that Baldwin navigated two worlds: one black and one white. A native of Massachusetts, Baldwin grew up in Cambridge and graduated from the high school there in 1874. A year later, she completed a teacher training program, becoming part of “New England's educated black elite” (p. 5). After black residents pressured the Cambridge school committee to hire black teachers, she was offered a full-time teaching position at the Agassiz School in 1881. She accepted it. In 1889 she became the school's principal, making her the first black woman to hold such a position in the region. W. E. B. Du Bois praised her as a well-respected woman who educated thousands of white children

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