"This nineteenth-century study is highly instructive about a cluster of today's issues: the role of religion and religious beliefs in public education; interactions between religion and national self-understanding; connections between implicit racism and political success; the fairness of school vouchers; and tensions between multiculturalism and the common American culture. McAfee goes to the heart of these and other complex historical debates and lifts out their subtle but significant meanings." — William D. Dean, Iliff School of Theology, author of American Religious Empiricism

"This is a masterfully written book with virtually flawless research, synthesis, and argumentation. It presents a fresh, iconoclastic interpretation of Reconstruction, Republicanism, and the place of educational reform in the 1870s that leaves most of us flat-footed. McAfee sees connections among issues, movements, and people that all of us laboring in this field have overlooked. Best of all, this is an interpretation that works. The author is thorough, modest, but always persuasive. I began reading the book skeptical of the claims the author promotes; by the end, I was fully convinced of nearly all of them." — Ronald E. Butchart, coeditor of Classroom Discipline in American Schools: Problems and Possibilities for Democratic Education

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Prologue to the Seventies

2. Church, State, and School

3. Dividing the School Funds

4. Educating the Freedmen

5. Federal Aid to Education

6. Reconstruction's Racial Dissolution

7. Backlash: 1874

8. The Anti-Catholic Antidote

9. The End of Reconstruction

Notes

Bibliography

Index