ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the major works concerned with nineteenth century rural education. The social and intellectual developments of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe were not kind to American Puritanism. The intellectual and religious milieu in the days of the founding of the interior plains states had much to do with the shape of public education in the South and the Middle West. The student about to undertake the study of rural educational history in the Midwest would do well by beginning with a few books only tangentially related to schooling. The nineteenth century educational history of blacks and Indians in the Midwest is a serious void in the field-serious because its absence has hindered our understanding of the schooling experience of the majority by allowing the traditional "onward and upward" story of "democratic" schooling to be told and retold without critical examination.
