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The economic and environmental significance of school land policy in the United States has yet to be imagined, let alone systematically studied, by scholars. Although the fact that Congress allocated shares of public lands to the support of schools beginning in the 1780s is well known, historians have not adequately assessed the impacts of that policy. No one has seriously posed the question of how such policies figured in the history of resource extraction, capital accumulation, and economic development. What difference did it make that federal policy tied school funding to the sale of billions of acres of public land or to the direct lease of such lands to timber, mining, and livestock interests--historical arrangements that survive today through much of the U.S. West? Drawing on state-by-state accounts of the terms of school land disposition and the record of Congressional debates over school land policies, this article advances an argument about the relationship between nature, education, and political economies of U.S. state formation, laying the groundwork for assessing more fully the consequences of that relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Civil War (1861–1865), the United States faced a problem of “reconstruction” similar to that confronted by other nations at the time and familiar to the US since at least the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). The problem was one of territorial and political (re)integration: how to take territories that had only recently been operating under “foreign” governance and integrate them into an expanded nation-state on common structural terms. This paper considers the significance of education in that process of state (re)formation after the Civil War, with particular attention to its role in federal territories of the US West. Specifically, this paper analyses the role that education-based restrictions on citizenship, voting rights and office-holding played in constructing formal state power in the cases of five western territories: Hawaii, Indian Territory, Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico. A focus on the significance of education in these cases both advances and challenges literature on the “hidden” and decentralised structure of national policy-making in the US. It adds to that literature by illuminating how education served as an indirect tool of national policy in the West, effectively shaping the structure of power in other policy domains. At the same time, by focusing on the US West, the present analysis challenges the idea that national governance in the US was particularly “decentralised” or “hidden”. It highlights instead: (1) the role of colonial racialism in shaping national responsibility and authority for education in the US; and (2) the significance of education as both an alternative and a corollary to war in establishing US colonial power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The relationship between education and state formation in the United States differed from that in other countries in ways that have yet to be adequately accounted for in comparative and theoretical literatures. Specifically, in the northern United States, very high levels of mass school attendance and funding were achieved prior to and outside state initiative. Although this distinctive history of educational development in the US has been noted by scholars, existing literatures still leave largely unresolved two salient questions following from this fact: (1) What factors facilitated the earlier and greater expansion of mass education in the northern US in the absence of direct state intervention? and (2) What was the significance of this early expansion for the process of state formation itself? This article addresses these questions by juxtaposing an intensive case study of the relationship between education and state formation in New York State in the early republican era, 1790-1840, against reigning comparative historical accounts of such relationships. In the process, two factors are identified that promoted education expansion in the northern US that so far have received little attention in the comparative literature: access to corporate legal power and the distribution of wealth. Finally, it is suggested that the substantial social, financial and political capital commanded by schools prior to state intervention had a significant impact on the process of state formation in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]