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Podcast: New Books in Public Policy
Episode: Cody D. Ewert, "Making Schools American: Nationalism and the Origin of Modern Educational Politics" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)
Description: In recent years, public schools have become one of the central battlegrounds of American politics. Making Schools American: Nationalism and the Origin of Modern Educational Politics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) lucidly explores how schools acquired such a critical role in the United States and its nation-building projects. Its author, Cody Dodge Ewert, illustrates how school reformers in the Progressive Era celebrated public education’s unique capacity to unite a diverse and diffuse citizenry while curing a broad swath of social and political ills. Pitching the school as a quintessentially American institution, these reformers’ lofty visions and nation-building projects inspired a hist...