Teaching Marianne and Uncle Sam : Public Education, State Centralization, and Teacher Unionism in France and the United States

Offering the first systematic, comparative examination of the origins of teachersOCO unions in two countriesOCoFrance and the United StatesOCoTeaching Marianne and Uncle Sam shows how teachersOCO unions came into existence not because of the willful efforts of particular actors, but over the course of decades of conflict over the proper role of professional educators in public politics.Nicholas Toloudis traces teacher unionism back to the first efforts of governments to centralize public education. He carefully documents how centralization created new understandings of the role of teachers in their societies and generated new sources of conflict within teachersOCO corps. Using rare archival source materials, Toloudis illustrates how these internal conflicts became salient in teachersOCO battles with governments over their legitimate right to exist as collective claim-makers within the polity.In the series Politics, History, and Social Change, edited by John C. Torpey