| This dissertation examines the origins of education for non-elite whites in Georgia and South Carolina during the eighteenth century, partly by juxtaposing it to educational institutions for the elite and non-whites. I consider the free laboring classes, the enslaved, and Native Americans in the lower south ca.1700-1820s in order to make original contributions to the New Cultural History of Education and a growing historiography that places colonialism closer to the center of our understanding of cultural institutions in Early North America.;Using published and manuscript sources, I have found approximately 370 educational initiatives for boys, girls, men, and women of all backgrounds in Georgia and South Carolina. To this archive I added close analysis of fiction, visual texts, and autobiographical narratives in order to interpret the extent to which the class, gender, and race dimensions of colonialism and colonial society were a force in the creation of charity schools, orphanages, missions, free schools, and common schools.;Ultimately I argue that the origins of non-elite white education in the lower south lay in the colonialism of the eighteenth century, before and after the American Revolution. Citing Joyce Chaplin on colonial anxiety and "projecting," I show how the lower south produced strong traditions of charity and practical, basic-skill instruction in the interest of bolstering and promoting a representation of ordered, competent, and moral colonial expansion. After the Revolution, continued colonialism in the lower south, including the ongoing interest in cultivating white unity, helped legitimize new initiatives that were modeled mainly on the charity institutions of the British colonial era. Eventually whites in the lower south hybridized this colonialism with republicanism and thereby spurred an even greater expansion of educational institutions for the non-elite, exemplified best in South Carolina's 1811 free school act. |
