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Professor Tamura, in her paper "Narrative History and Theory," poses an issue with which the author has lately wrestled. She reviews some of the challenges to the tradition of narrative history presented by "social-scientifically oriented historians" like Fernand Braudel and "analytic philosophers" like Hayden White in the 1960s and 1970s, and then goes on to note that more recently, a turn to narrative among social scientists and a use of theory by historians suggests the possibility of combining narrative and theory in historical work. Overall, Professor Tamura expresses a sanguine view of the prospects for such integration. While narrative "provides a causal account and allows one to relive events," theory "allows one to analyze more effectively the forces that are beneath the surface." In her efforts to write a history of education in the early Republican era that moves back and forth between telling the stories of ordinary people and using social capital theory to analyze the place of schooling in larger patterns of social, economic, and political change, the author intends to share Professor Tamura's interest in the possibilities, and at the same time to identify some of the challenges, of such work. Like Professor Tamura, the author is drawn to the power of narrative to illuminate the significance or meaning of events from inside history. (Contains 9 footnotes.)

Much good work has recently been done on the socioeconomic history of teaching in the United States, particularly in relation to the "feminization" of the profession that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century. This article brings together evidence from disparate local sources in both North Carolina and New York to explore the structure of teacher labor markets during the years from 1800 to 1850. Among the sources examined are hundreds of newspaper advertisements for venture schools and academies in North Carolina and detailed school and teacher employment records for one rural New York town. Considered in conjunction with scattered comparative material from other primary and secondary sources for those states, this evidence leads the authors to challenge several key assumptions and suggest a few new lines of inquiry about regional variations in teacher employment, socioeconomic incentives for teachers, and the gender transformation of teaching in the early nineteenth century. The authors have chosen both New York and North Carolina as subjects of study, not only to compare and contrast women's entry into teaching in both regions but also to analyze some of the factors that motivated women to travel from the North to the South to teach. The authors argue that, in addition to the ideological and cultural factors historians have documented, socioeconomic incentives influenced young women to take up teaching in both the North and the South. The article is organized in three main parts. In the first section, the authors look at women's entry into teaching during the early decades of the nineteenth century in both northern and southern contexts. In the second section, the authors investigate the salaries paid to female teachers in comparison to wages available to women in other forms of paid work. In the third section, the authors hypothesize a model of teacher-labor markets and opportunity structures for women in the early antebellum era by looking at salary trends over time, highlighting comparisons between male and female teachers, and exploring differences between the opportunities available in northern and southern schools and economies. This analysis leads the authors to pose new questions about the interaction of teacher labor markets, the state, and schools. It also illuminates some of the reasons that may have impelled northern women to travel south to teach in the early nineteenth century. (Contains 2 figures, 7 tables and 71 footnotes.)

Offers an account of the origins of the Regents examination system in New York providing an assessment of the preliminary examination results from 1866 to 1885 and a description of the development of advanced examinations. Discusses the implications of the New York case for understanding the emergence of credential markets. (CMK)

Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools. By Jonathan Zimmerman. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. 228 pp. Abbreviations, notes, and index. $29.95. Whose America gets to the nub [...]