BIBFRAME Work

Title

Absence of national feeling

Type

• Monograph
• Text

Contribution

• Steudeman, Michael J. (author)

Subject

• Public schools--United States--History--19th century (LCSH)
• Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877) (LCSH)
• Education and state--Social aspects--United States (LCSH)
• Education and state--United States--History--19th century (LCSH)
• Education--Political aspects--United States--History--19th century (LCSH)
• Democracy and education--Social aspects--United States (LCSH)
• Public schools--Political aspects--United States (LCSH)

Language

• English

Classification

• LCC: LC89 .S6687 2025 (Assigner: dlc) (Status: used by assigner)
• DDC: 379.7309/034 (Assigner: dlc)

Content

• text

Supplementary content

• bibliography
• index

Summary

"Before the start of the Civil War, the US Congress seldom took up the question of education, deferring regularly to a tradition of local control. In the period after the war, however, education became a major concern of the federal government. Many members of Congress espoused the necessity of schooling to transform southern culture and behavior, secure civil rights, and reconstruct the Union. Absence of National Feeling: Education Debates in the Reconstruction Congress analyzes how policymakers cultivated a rhetoric of public education to negotiate conflicts over federalism and civic belonging in the aftermath of the Civil War. Reconstruction Era advocates embraced education as a way to orchestrate the affective life of Americans. They believed education could marshal feelings of hope, love, shame, and pride to alter Americans' predispositions toward other citizens. The most assertive educational advocates believed that schools would physically bring together children divided by race or religion, fostering shared affinities and dissolving racial hierarchies. Schooling promised to be an emotional adhesive, holding together the North and South and facilitating US expansion into the West. Through protracted debates over national education funding, the fate of the Freedmen's Bureau, and school desegregation, members of Congress negotiated schools' potential as a vehicle for social change. By Reconstruction's end, most members of Congress accepted schooling as an element of national reconciliation. To reach this tenuous consensus, though, legislators sacrificed their call for schools to intervene in the feelings of prejudice, resentment, and superiority that sustained the culture of slavery. Rejecting a transformative educational vision, Congress took another tragic step in its abandonment of Reconstruction. Focusing on the words spoken in the Reconstruction Congress, Absence of National Feeling contends that educational rhetoric appealed to legislators debating whether the federal government could, or even should, alter public feeling. Tracing congressional transcripts between 1865 and 1877, author Michael J. Steudeman illustrates that these debates lastingly helped to both define and delimit the possible trajectories of education policy"-- Provided by publisher.

Table of Contents

Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Education and estrangement: the postbellum crisis of public feeling -- Chapter One: Federalism and feeling: enforcing education in the South, 1865-1871 -- Chapter Two: A system of shame: founding the Bureau of Education, 1865-1872 -- Chapter Three: An atmosphere of altruism: renewing the Freedmen's Bureau, 1866-1870 -- Chapter Four: The method of mingling: the Civil Rights Act and educational reunion, 1872-1876 -- Conclusion: Schooling and sentiment: reconciliation and the limits of good feelings -- Notes -- Index.

Authorized Access Point

Steudeman, Michael J. Absence of national feeling

Geographic Coverage

• United States

Admin Metadata

• Date: 2026-09-11T20:20:34.478491+00:00
• Agent: cbc
• Status: c
• Derived from: 24148300

Admin Metadata

• Date: 2026-09-11
• Cataloger id: Unknown
• Description level: http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/bibframe-2-6-0/
• Description language: eng
• Description authentication: pcc