Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic

Mark Boonshoft is executive director of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
For more information about Mark Boonshoft, visit the Author Page.

“[Boonshoft’s] incisive narrative provides a useable past for dealing with issues of privatization, privilege, and inequity which continue to plague America’s public schools.” --American Nineteenth Century Review

“Exceptional in most every regard . . . thoroughly compelling. Historians of education, and of American history more generally, would do well to emulate [Boonshoft’s] approach.” --Journal of Southern History

“A deeply researched, well-written and unfailingly interesting contribution to the historiography of education and education reform in Colonial and Revolutionary America and the antebellum United States.” --History of Education

“Incisive and insightful. . . . More than just a history of education, it is an account of the political conflicts and compromises that shaped the early republic.” --Journal of American Studies

"Mark Boonshoft is outstanding in working with a huge range of sources and his argument is original, important, and convincing. Without exaggeration, this is a 'breakthrough book' of the first order."--Jason Opal, author of Avenging the People: Andrew Jackson, the Rule of Law, and the American Nation

"This work is innovative and exciting because it transforms our understanding of the academies that blossomed after the Revolution. Mark Boonshoft does an exceptional job revealing education’s role in the social and political development of the new United States."--Johann Neem, author of Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America