The kindergarten, which offered an innovative approach to early childhood education, was invented in the German-speaking world and arrived in the United States along with German political exiles in the 1850s. In both the United States and Germany, activist women worked to develop and promote this new form of education. Over the course of three generations they created one of the most successful transnational women's movements of the nineteenth century. In this book, Ann Taylor Allen presents the first transnational history of the kindergarten as it developed in both Germany and America between 1840 and 1919.

The kindergarten--as institution, as educational philosophy, and as social reform movement--is one of Germany's most important contributions to the world. Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and his German student Friedrich Fröbel, who founded the kindergarten movement around 1840, envisioned kindergartens as places of education and creative engagement for children across all classes, not merely as daycare centers for poor families. At first, however, Germany proved an inhospitable environment for this new institution. After the failure of the 1848 revolutions, several German governments banned the kindergarten as a hotbed of subversion because of its links to women's rights movements. German revolutionaries who were forced into exile introduced the kindergarten to the United States, where it soon found roots among native-born as well as immigrant educators. In an era when convention limited middle-class women to the domestic sphere, the kindergarten provided them with a rare opportunity not only for professional work, but also for involvement in social reform in the fields of education and child welfare. Through three generations, American and German women established many kinds of contacts In this elegant book, Ann Taylor Allen presents the first transnational history of the kindergarten as it developed in Germany and the United States between 1840 and World War I. Based on a large body of previously untapped sources in bothcountries, The Transatlantic Kindergarten shows how a common body of ideas and practices adapted over time to two very different political and social environments. Since the end of the First World War, early childhood education in the United States and Germany has followed the patterns laid down in the nineteenth century. However, as Allen's nuanced analysis suggests, the provision of public preschool education is still an unfinished and much discussed project on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Sabbath candlesticks given to them by their grandmother when they leave Russia help two sisters make it safely to join their father in New York.

Young Amelia dreams of learning to fly her own airplane and exploring the skies as one of the world's first female pilots. But girls in the early 20th century do not do such things. But Amelia is not easily discouraged, and eventually earns a place in American history. Full color.

Describes the life of Sarah Goode, who was born a slave and grew up to invent a space-saving foldable bed and became the first African American woman to obtain a patent in the United States.

This text provides a comprehensive analysis of historical archives, letters, and primary sources to offer unique insight into how Fröbel’s pedagogy of kindergarten and play has been understood, interpreted, and modified throughout history and in particular, as a consequence of it’s adoption in the US. Tracing the development, modification, and global spread of the kindergarten movement, this volume demonstrates the far-reaching impacts of Fröbel’s work, and asks how far contemporary understandings of the kindergarten pedagogy reflect the educationalist’s original intentions. Recognizing that Fröbel’s pedagogy has at times been simplified or misunderstood, the book tackles issues caused by translation, or transfer to non-German speaking countries such as the US, and so demonstrates how and why contemporary research and Froebelian practice is in the danger of diverging from the original ideas expressed in Fröbel’s work. By returning to original documents produced by Fröbel, Wasmuth traces various interpretations, and explains how and why some of these understandings established themselves in the context of US Early Childhood Education, whilst others did not. This insightful text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, professionals and policy makers in the fields of early childhood education, history of education, Philosophy of Education and Teacher Education.

Of the many innovative approaches to emerge during the twenty-first century, one of the most productive has been the interdisciplinary nexus of theories and methodologies broadly defined as “the study of emotions.” While this conceptual toolkit has generated significant insights, it has overwhelmingly focused on emotions as linguistic and semantic phenomena. This edited volume looks instead to the material aspects of emotion in German culture, encompassing the body, literature, photography, aesthetics, and a variety of other themes.