Wednesday, February 22, 7 PM on Zoom

Following the American Revolution, it was a cliché that the new republic's future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. Yet, it took decades before even Northern states created the common schools--accessible, elementary education--that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry. This talk explores the political debates particularly in New York State that led to the creation of public schools and, in turn, the racialized democracy that characterized the nineteenth-century United States.

Mark Boonshoft is Associate Professor and Conrad M. Hall ’65 Chair in American Constitutional History at Virginia Military Institute. He received his B.A. from SUNY Buffalo and his Ph.D. in early U.S. history from Ohio State University. Before arriving at VMI, Boonshoft was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the New York Public Library, taught at Norwich University in Vermont, and was the Executive Director of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Boonshoft’s publications include: Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), a finalist for the 2021 George Washington Book Prize; and “From Property to Education: Public Schooling, Race, and the Transformation of Suffrage in the in the Early National North” (Journal of the Early Republic), which received the 2022 History of Education Society Prize for the “most distinguished scholarly essay in educational history … published in any journal over the previous two years.”