Gateways to the West, Part I: Education in the Shaping of the West

Abstract

In 1950, theDenver Catholic Registerpublished an article describing and challenging the varieties of “prejudice” that a military pilot moving from base to base in the United States might encounter. To “successfully transact business” in the vicinity of various “metropolitan landing fields,” the writer admonished, the veteran must:Remember to be not too sanguine about people of Oriental ethnic origin when talking with a merchant in Seattle, that he must speak about the Jew with a slight sneer in Eastern cities, that the Colored person must be “kept in his place” in Houston, that in reservation country the Indian must be treated as a man would treat a child and that in the San Antonio-Los Angeles-Denver triangle it is wiser to remember that the Mexican-American is a second-class citizen.

Entangled Pasts: Land-Grant Colleges and American Indian Dispossession

“…As historian Nancy Beadie et al phrase it, the "very same benefit and entitlement that ensured white settlers access to publicly supported education … also dispossessed Indians of land and divested them of benefits and power." 46 This line of analysis needs to be applied to the land-grant system of funding higher education as well.…”

The Federal Role in Education and the Rise of Social Science Research

“…It took a set of issues about the extent and limits of federal authority in education and suffrage and settled them, and it settled them in favor of state prerogative. In a few Western states, such as Wyoming, this new permissiveness led to state provisions that expanded access to political rights for some—especially women—at the same time as it also emboldened some Western states to restrict access for others—for example, Chinese in Oregon and California, Indians in Washington, and citizens not fully literate in English in Oklahoma and Arizona (Beadie, 2016; Beadie et al, 2016; Bottoms, 2013). In the South, by comparison, the defeat of the Blair Bill spelled out a more fully restrictive logic.…”

“… 9 For a fuller discussion of issues of education in the states and territories of the West during this period, see Beadie et al (2016), a historiographical essay that focuses on the history of education from the perspective of the North American West, as well as other articles on the same topic published in the same special issue of History of Education Quarterly (August 2016). For incisive analysis of the interaction between the West and South in Reconstruction era policymaking in Congress, see Anderson (2007); see also Bottoms (2013), West (2003), Wickett (2000). …”