The American Teacher: A History

The American Teacher: A History is, as the title makes clear, a history of teachers in the United States. Supported by hundreds of research studies done over the years as reported in scholarly journals, the book fills a niche in the history of education, sociology, gender studies, and the United States as a whole. K-12 teachers and, to a lesser extent, college/university teachers, are discussed in the work which travels through the past century.

Told chronologically and divided into ten decades, The American Teacher sheds light on the important role that teachers have played in this country over the last one hundred years. The subject is parsed through the voices of educators, intellectuals, and journalists who have weighed in on its many different dimensions from the 1920s right up to today. The American teacher is a key site of race, gender, and class, we learn from a survey of its history, revealing some of the tensions embedded in our constructed social divisions. Controversy has always surrounded teachers in the United States, making them a fascinating subject to explore in depth.

The "schoolteacher" has long served as a principal player in American culture, making The American Teacher a kind of character study that distinguishes fact from fiction. Rather than a research study itself, the work draws on the most important scholarship that has been completed over the years. The work is a big, sweeping picture of the history of American teachers that is designed to complement more academic books that take a more in-depth analysis of unique topics with original research. And in place of focusing on a particular topic, the book examines the threads that have connected issues such as gender and economic status over time.

In short, The American Teacher is a synthetic, narrative-driven study that brings together in one place the essential research in the field. And like any good history, the book shows how mining the stuff of everyday life serves as the richest way to learn more about a group of people at a particular time and in a particular place.

Lawrence R. Samuel is a Miami-based independent scholar who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and an MA in English from the University of Minnesota, an MBA in Marketing from the University of Georgia, and was a Smithsonian Institution Fellow. Larry blogs for Psychologytoday.com, where he has received over a million hits, and is often quoted in the media.