| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 336 words from this article are provided below; about 667 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981. By Carlos Kevin Blanton. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. x, 204 pp. $29.95, ISBN 1-58544310-7.)
Contested Policy: The Rise and Fall of Federal Bilingual Education in the United States, 1960– 2001. By Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2004. viii, 168 pp. $21.95, ISBN 1-57441-171-3.)
Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. opens his analysis of the rise and fall of federal bilingual education policy by emphasizing the broader is sues that his case illuminates, including questions of "national identity, federalism, power, ethnicity, and pedagogy" (San Miguel, p. 1). This is a promising beginning: too often, historians of education get mired in particulars, failing to draw out the wider lessons, and this is certainly the dominant pattern in the case of the historiography of bilingual education. Of the two books reviewed here, however, it is Carlos Kevin Blanton's outstanding new account of The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas that does the better job of drawing out the broad themes. Blanton traces the history of bilingual schooling in Texas from colonial times through to the 1980s, and his central theme is that "bilingual education is thoroughly American education" (Blanton, p. 151). Fascinatingly, he shows that the decentralized polity of mid-nineteenth-century Texas gave private and public schools the autonomy to teach children in Spanish, German, Czech, and Polish (sometimes they did so out of parochialism, sometimes because of a modern-sounding commitment to cultural pluralism). Summing up his central point neatly, he remarks: "for decades, Texas sacrificed any possible desire for all English instruction at the altar of Jeffersonian and Democratic localism" (ibid., p. 43). That all changed during the long Progressive Era, with the expansion of state authority, the development of a pedagogical commitment to English only, and the changing character of the Americanization movement during the years around World War I. Bilingual schooling became illegal in 1918, and that law remained in place for fifty years.	. . .

There are about 667 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.