David Kinley, President of the University of Illinois from 1918 to 1930, was by nature, philosophy and inclination a conservative. He viewed the new and untried with marked suspicion, and he was equally distrustful of the gaudy, the common and the exuberant. Thus, his use of the new jazz age medium of radio to publicize his University seems somewhat ironic. In any case, Kinley rose to the height of his academic career in America's gaudiest, most exuberant decade—the Roaring Twenties. It was an age of frenzy and boredom; a period when a restless nation demanded to be entertained.

Saint Louis University, the first university west of the Mississippi and the first American Catholic institution of higher learning to develop in a predominantly Catholic city, displayed a remarkable broad-mindedness in its policies at a time when interdenominational strife gripped the land. Unfortunately, newcomers to the Midwest and nativists elsewhere in the nation failed to match the wide tolerance of the city and of the University. Open hostility on the part of nativists brought about the disaffiliation of one of Saint Louis University's finest colleges shortly before the Civil War and retarded the growth of the entire school for half a century. This sad but significant aspect of the social history of the United States throws new light on the ghetto attitudes that sometimes characterized denominational education in the latter part of the last century.

From the time the first American edition issued forth from the pioneer Cambridge press of Stephen Daye in 1639, the almanac was destined to play a significant role in the education of the American people. Indeed, an almanac had played a not inconsiderable supporting role in the discovery of America itself, as it was one of the chief navigational aids of one Christopher Columbus.

Identification of American college professors prior to 1800 is a difficult task. Those below were listed as professors at the nineteen American colleges that granted degrees before 1800. Faculty registers, school catalogs and school histories were used in compiling a tentative list. When biographical study indicated that a man was probably a tutor rather than a professor, his name was removed. Some names, for which no data exist, remain, which probably should have been removed.

My interest in collecting old textbooks began about thirty years ago when I was teaching a late afternoon graduate course in the history of American education. One afternoon while discussing the Colonial Period, I mentioned the hornbook, the New England Primer, Dilworths' New Guide to the English Tongue and Websters' so-called Blueback. After class a county superintendent of schools, who was a member of the class, waited for me and asked if I would like to have some old school books. (My knowledge then of the above-mentioned books was merely from reading about them in a history of education textbook.) My reply was “yes.” Several weeks later he brought me an old copy of a Union Spelling Book. That aroused my interest in collecting other old textbooks. But where would I secure them?

The influence of higher education on the history and development of eighteenth-century Colonial America greatly exceeded the small existing institutions and the relatively few scholars which they enrolled. When the American Revolution erupted in 1775, there were but nine scattered collegiate schools within the colonies, and only two of them had been in existence for over thirty-five years. Most of these colonial colleges operated under the restrictive limitations of poor plant facilities, inadequate libraries, little or no endowments, sectarian domination, an authoritarian discipline system and a curriculum which was largely a carry-over from sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Europe. By 1775 the combined enrollment of all these institutions was less than thirteen hundred students and their alumni totaled less than one percent of the entire population. Yet the importance of the end product of the higher educational system in the colonies far outweighed its limited quality or its few participating members. College-trained theologians generally dominated religious thought; their pervasive importance was apparent in the social, economic and intellectual circles of their respective colonies, and their influence in political affairs was illustrated by the fact that one third of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were graduates of a colonial college.

The boston school board added to its problems by its choice of a successor to Philbrick. The man elected, Samuel Eliot (a relative of Harvard's president), had little practical experience in the administration of public education. Born in Boston in 1821, Eliot had graduated first in his class from Harvard at the age of eighteen. Following graduation he toured Europe and wrote a series of history books, including The History of Rome, The Early Christians and a Manual of U.S. History. In 1856 Eliot became Professor of History and Political Science in Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, and from 1860 to 1866 he served as its president. In 1874 (the intervening eight years are vague) he became principal of the Girls' High and Normal School in Boston but resigned the position after only two years because of ill health and family bereavement. Eliot, a scholar and a nearly rank amateur in public school affairs, appealed to the reformist element of the school board, and his reports quickly made it evident that he sympathized with the faction that had deposed Philbrick. Eliot's difficulties were compounded by his snobbish social darwinism and isolation from the schools. As a practical administrator, he was generally inept. By contrast to Philbrick his reports were filled not with pragmatic discussions of practical subjects but with long and florid discourses more suitable to a late nineteenth-century literary magazine than to the report of an urban superintendent.