2. Cultivating Demand for Vocational Secondary Education: A Case Study of Michigan
3. Books, Basketball, and Order of the Fish: Youth Culture in Small-Town High Schools
4. A Window into the World of Students: An Analysis of 1920s High School Student Newspapers
5. Resisting Boundaries, Demanding Change: Gender in the Postwar High School
6. “Fight for Your Land”: Southern High School Student Activists and the Struggle for Youth Autonomy, 1946-1964
7. Renovating The Last Little Citadel (1986) after Thirty Five Years
8. “Southeast High’s New Reputation: A Historical Study of a Large Midwestern High School”
9. An Education for “Intellectual Power”: Theodore Sizer and the Origins of the Coalition of Essential Schools at Phillips Academy, Andover, 1972-1981
10. The Forgotten History of High School Violence: Desegregation and the Making of Mass Incarceration in the United States
11. High School Inequities and School Funding in North Carolina, 1977-1997
12. Epilogue
Kyle P. Steele is Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, USA. His first book is Making a Mass Institution: Indianapolis and the American High School (2020).
The growth of the American high school that occurred in the twentieth century is among the most remarkable educational, social, and cultural phenomena of the twentieth century. The history of education, however, has often reduced the institution to its educational function alone, thus missing its significantly broader importance. As a corrective, this collection of essays serves four ends: as an introduction to the history of the high school; as a reevaluation of the power of narratives that privilege the perspective of school leaders and the curriculum; as a glimpse into the worlds created by students and their communities; and, most critically, as a means of sparking conversations about where we might look next for stories worth telling.