Schools as Imagined Communities: The Creation of Identity, Meaning, and Conflict in U.S. History

Schools as Imagined Communities: The Creation of Identity, Meaning, and Conflict in U.S. History. Ed. by Deirdre Cobb-Roberts, Sherman Dorn, and Barbara J. Shircliffe. (New York: Palgrave, 2006. xii, 217 pp. Cloth, $75.00, isbn 1-4039-6471-8. Paper, $24.95, isbn 1-4039-6472-6.)

The anthropologist Benedict Anderson's claim that new twentieth-century nations were imagined communities prompted the title of this short anthology. It consists of an introductory essay by the three editors, who are professors of the social foundations of education at the University of South Florida, and seven chapters written by the editors and four others. Contributors include an anthropologist, four educationists, and two historians. Their essays address varied topics and periods: two are about schools in nineteenth-century New England; one is on African American collegians at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in the mid-twentieth century; another is about activism in the 1970s by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender school workers; two deal with the twentieth-century African American educational...