Research On The Development Process Of American Higher Education History In The Second Half Of The 20th Century

The paradigm of the historiography of American higher education in the second half of the 20th century was constantly changing.Studying the theory and paradigm transformation of the historiography of American higher education in this period has important implications to the study of the history of higher education in China.The dissertation is mainly carried out through two main lines.The dominant line is to sort out and analyze the historical evolution of the historiography of American higher education in the second half of the 20th century.The author is to lay stress on the main historians and their works in the course of the historiography of American higher education during the second half of the 20th century,focusing on the analysis of the social and academic background of the traditional historiography of American higher education,the revisionist historiography of American higher education and the post-revisionist historiography of American higher education.The tacit line is to explore the transformation of the paradigm of the historiography of American higher education in the second half of the 20th century through the analysis of the research paradigm of "foundation-break-conformity" of the historiography of American higher education by the historians of traditional higher education,revisionist higher education and post-revisionist higher education.The dissertation consists of an introduction,body and conclusion.The body of the dissertation includes four chapters.The first chapter studies the historiography of American higher education before the second half of the 20th century.During the colonial period,the relevant records of the history of American higher education only existed sporadically in the works of Puritan historians.The emergence of early college history initiated the process for scholars to systematically study the history of American higher education in the 1930s.In the 1970s,a group of historians began to study the history of American colleges and universities with scientific methods,making the establishment of the history of American higher education.The historiography of American higher education achieved initial development under the influence of the conflict-progressive view of history in the first half of the 20th century.In the following three chapters,the author discusses the three stages of the development of the historiography of American higher education in the second half of the 20th century.The second chapter studies the traditional historiography of American higher education.By researching Hofstadter and Metzger's The Development of Academic,Freedom in the United States,Rudolph's The American College and University:A History and Veysey's The Emergency of the American University,the author finds that the three classic works abandoned the past practice of focusing solely on the history of one college or one state.They not only expanded the scope of the study to the historical evolution of American higher education,but also studied the history of American higher education in the context of social development and cultural change from the perspective of ecology.The third chapter analyzes the issues of the Ante-Bellum American colleges,especially the "standard account" on the decline of the liberal arts college and the emergence of modern universities and the affirmation of the changes,vitality and social importance of Ante-Bellum colleges,which the revisionist historiography of American higher education focuses on.Chapter four discusses the post-revisionist historiography of American higher education,and makes a case study of John Thelin's History of American Higher Education.It reveals that the main feature of the historiography of American higher education in this period lies in integrating the achievements of the traditional historiography of American higher education and the revisionist historiography of American higher education,which are further deepened and expanded.The conclusion reviews not only the relationship between the historiography of American higher education and the development of American higher education,but also the relationship between the historiography of American higher education and the evolution of American historiography,exploring the characteristics of the development of the historiography of American higher education.