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 of public education.
The disciplinary diversity in this account is best represented by intellectual, political, and social history. The intellectual component is the sturdiest, featured in two opening chapters that describe the various moral, spiritual, and political rationales for creating and supporting public schools. Citing figures such as Channing, Mansfield, and Westlake, Neem paints a vivid picture of the arguments in favor of universal education.2 But much of the account dwells on the usual suspects in this story, including Horace Mann, William...