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Wiggin, Kate Douglas Smith (1856-1923)

In 1881, Kate married (Samuel) Bradley Wiggin, a San Francisco lawyer.‪ According to the customs of the time, she was required to resign her teaching job.‪ Still devoted to her school, she began to raise money for it through writing, first The Story of Patsy (1883), then The Birds’ Christmas Carol (1887). Both privately printed books were issued commercially by Houghton Mifflin in 1889, with enormous success. Ironically, considering her intense love of children, Kate Wiggin had none. She moved to New York City in 1888.‪

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Relation of the Kindergarten to Social Reform: 1888

This entry was a presentation by Kate Douglas Wiggin at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of The National Conference of Charities and Correction, 1888. Wiggin was an American educator and author of children’s stories. She devoted her adult life to the welfare of children in an era when children were commonly thought of as cheap labor. Wiggin discusses kindergarten as a type of social reform.

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Care And Training Of Feeble-Minded Children (1887)

The superintendents of American institutions for feeble-minded persons, in their session of I878, submitted the following: “Idiocy and imbecility are conditions in which there is a want of natural or harmonious development of the mental, active, and moral powers of the individual affected, usually associated with some visible defect or infirmity of the physical organization or with functional anomalies, expressed in various forms and degrees of disordered vital action. There is frequently defect or absence of one or more of the special senses, always irregular or uncertain volition, and dulness or absence of sensibility and perception.”

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Kindergarten: Practical Results Of Ten Years’ Work – 1889

This entry was a presentation written by Mrs. Sarah B. Cooper at the Sixteenth Annual Session of the The National Conference of Charities And Correction, 1889. Mrs. Cooper was internationally known as a pioneer in kindergarten education. Her ideas were endorsed by American educators, and she…led the founding of a teacher training institute, and in 1892 she founded and was elected first president of the International Kindergarten Union.
The Kindergarten takes hold of the child at the most important epoch of life,- the formative period. Impressions precede expressions, and we should be most careful that the child receive none but the best impressions, especially when we consider that these will be lasting and affect his whole after life.

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Kindergarten A Child-Saving Work -1882

This entry was a presentation by Mrs. Cooper at the Ninth Annual National Conference of Charities and Corrections, 1882. Mrs. Cooper was internationally known as a pioneer in kindergarten education. Her ideas were endorsed by American educators, and she… led the founding of a teacher training institute, and in 1892 she founded and was elected first president of the International Kindergarten Union.

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Kindergartens: A History (1886)

This entry is a presentation by Constance Mackenzie at the Thirteenth Annual Session of The National Conference Of Charities And Correction, 1886. “‘The kindergarten itself does not, of course, bear directly upon crime,’ writes one of our correspondents; ‘but, if the entire after education of the child were carried out according to the principles of the kindergarten, there can be no doubt that its effects would be strongly felt in every direction.'”

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The Fight for Equal Rights: Black Soldiers in the Civil War

By the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men (10% of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war—30,000 of infection or disease. Black soldiers served in artillery and infantry and performed all noncombat support functions that sustain an army, as well. Black carpenters, chaplains, cooks, guards, laborers, nurses, scouts, spies, steamboat pilots, surgeons, and teamsters also contributed to the war cause. There were nearly 80 black commissioned officers. Black women, who could not formally join the Army, nonetheless served as nurses, spies, and scouts, the most famous being Harriet Tubman, who scouted for the 2d South Carolina Volunteers.

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Public Aid For The Feeble-Minded (1889)

This entry was a presentation by Mrs. George Brown at the Sixteenth Annual Session of The National Conference Of Charities And Correction, 1889. “In an assemblage like this Conference, it must be an axiomatic proposition that the State should educate all its dependent children. It is not charity: it is simply providing for those of its own household…The question, then, is, in what respects must this provision for the feeble-minded differ from that given to others?”

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State Boards Of Charities: A Report Of The Committee – 1889

Report by H. Hastings Hart presented at the Sixteenth Annual Session of The National Conference of Charities and Correction. “A board of charities is a balance-wheel to steady the motion of the charitable machinery of the State. It is its office to promote the wise founding and the safe running of public charities, to correct and prevent abuses, to check extravagance, to promote economy, and to rebuke niggardliness.”

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Colonial Expansion Heads South

In 1619, a Dutch ship brought some Africans to Jamestown. They had been kidnapped from their homes by African traders and sold to the ship’s captain. He sold them to the Virginia settlers. Those first blacks may have been treated like indentured servants. Later, however, colonists decided to keep them as slaves so they would not have to continue paying for workers. Indians did not make good slaves because they could run away. Blacks could not. They had no place to go. Slowly, laws were approved in Virginia that made it legal to keep black people as slaves. By 1750, there were more Africans in Virginia than any other group.

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