Abstract

Students have been some of the least studied and most misunderstood historical actors in colonial America. This article seeks to reanimate the long since stagnated study of early American education. Focusing on student societies at colonial American colleges and digging into scores of overlooked manuscripts (in English, Latin, Greek and shorthand), this account offers a radically new understanding of early students as knowledge producers in a colonial world that respected and empowered their intellectual autonomy. Early American students needed neither a revolution nor the importation of the nineteenth-century German research seminar to appreciate the benefits of mutual instruction conducted in small, self-governing groups.