Educating Young Children in WPA Nursery Schools, the first full-length national study of the WPA nursery school program, helps to explain why universal preschool remains an elusive goal. This book argues that program success in operating nursery schools throughout the United States during the Great Depression was an important New Deal achievement. By highlighting the program’s strengths—its ideals, its curriculum, and its community outreach—the author offers a blueprint for creating a universal preschool program that benefits both children and their families. This volume uncovers the forgotten perspective of WPA nursery school leaders and highlights the program’s innovative curriculum for young children by incorporating both extensive archival research and neglected sources.

Educating Young Children in WPA Nursery Schools, the first full-length national study of the WPA nursery school program, helps to explain why universal preschool remains an elusive goal. This book argues that program success in operating nursery schools throughout the United States during the Great Depression was an important New Deal achievement. By highlighting the program’s strengths—its ideals, its curriculum, and its community outreach—the author offers a blueprint for creating a universal preschool program that benefits both children and their families. This volume uncovers the forgotten perspective of WPA nursery school leaders and highlights the program’s innovative curriculum for young children by incorporating both extensive archival research and neglected sources.

Educating Young Children in WPA Nursery Schools, the first full-length national study of the WPA nursery school program, helps to explain why universal preschool remains an elusive goal. This book argues that program success in operating nursery schools throughout the United States during the Great Depression was an important New Deal achievement. By highlighting the program's strengths-its ideals, its curriculum, and its community outreach-the author offers a blueprint for creating a universal preschool program that benefits both children and their families. This volume uncovers the forgotten perspective of WPA nursery school leaders and highlights the program's innovative curriculum for young children by incorporating both extensive archival research and neglected sources.

Few episodes in American history were more transformative than World War II, and in no region did it bring greater change than in the West. Having lifted the United States out of the Great Depression, World War II set in motion a massive westward population movement, ignited a quarter-century boom that redefined the West as the nation's most economically dynamic region, and triggered unprecedented public investment in manufacturing, education, scientific research, and infrastructure—an economic revolution that would lay the groundwork for prodigiously innovative high-tech centers in Silicon Valley, the Puget Sound area, and elsewhere. Amidst robust economic growth and widely shared prosperity in the post-war decades, Westerners made significant strides toward greater racial and gender equality, even as they struggled to manage the environmental consequences of their region's surging vitality. At the same time, wartime policies that facilitated the federal withdrawal of Western public lands and the occupation of Pacific islands for military use continued an ongoing project of U.S. expansionism at home and abroad. This volume explores the lasting consequences of a pivotal chapter in U.S. history, and offers new categories for understanding the post-war West. Contributors to this volume include Mark Brilliant, Geraldo L. Cadava, Matthew Dallek, Mary L. Dudziak, Jared Farmer, David M. Kennedy, Daniel J. Kevles, Rebecca Jo Plant, Gavin Wright, and Richard White.

Education and the Great Depression: Lessons from a Global History examines the history of schools in terms of pedagogies, curricula, policies, and practices at the point of intersection with worldwide patterns of economic crisis, political instability, and social transformation. Examining the Great Depression in the historical contexts of Egypt, Turkey, Germany, Brazil, and New Zealand and in the regional contexts of the United States, including Virginia, New York City, Cleveland, Chicago, and South Carolina, this collection broadens our understanding of the scope of this crisis while also locating more familiar American examples in a global framework.

A history of policies and programmes for the education of three-to-five-year-olds in the USA. This book also traces efforts to make pre-school education a part of the American public school system and shows why these efforts have been rejected, despite evidence of pre-school benefit.