| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The War That Wasn't: Religious Conflict and Compromise in the Common Schools of New York State, 1865–1900. By Benjamin Justice. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. xiv, 285 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-7914-6211-0.)
Public education often has been at the center of debates regarding the place of religion in American public life. As the United States has become more confessionally pluralistic and state and national governments have asserted increasing authority over public schools, these debates have become part of what James Davison Hunter has called our culture wars. National leaders and interest groups view battles over human origins, financial aid to faith-based schools or their constituents, and Ten Commandments displays as part of the larger struggle to define America. Frequently influenced by current events, historians of education have often utilized warfare as an organizing theme in their accounts of the role of religion in the development of the American educational enterprise.	1
Has historians' focus on the metaphors of combat caused us to overlook examples in the past when compromises and adjustments wrought at the local level regarding contentious matters such as religious exercises in public schools and public aid to private schools fostered peace as opposed to school wars? Benjamin Justice believes that is indeed the case in one state. In his well-researched study of religious conflict and compromise in New York in the latter years of the nineteenth century, he asserts that the early common school system embodied a principle of local, democratic decision making that often led to peaceful, if not perfect, resolutions rather than war.	. . .

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