In the years between the conclusion of the Civil War and the start of the twentieth century, the United States acquired the Alaskan Territory, Hawaii, Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. As the federal territory moved beyond its contiguous frontier and the United States incorporated different populations into its broader domain, educators championed schooling as a solution to the problems of territorial expansion and developed educational policies and practices which would, they believed, graft American political, social, cultural and economic ideals onto the children of the new possessions. Drawing on a range of domestic models and utilizing a shifting array of domestic partners, federal education officials built schools and school systems for these new territories. Focusing on networks of federal education officials and the schooling projects they implemented in Alaska, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, my dissertation finds that as U.S. educators responded to changing political and cultural conditions both within the United States and the new possessions, they created an ad hoc and largely decentralized educational apparatus for the new populations under their control.

Measured against almost every marker of school performance U.S. officials used at the time, however, the United States' efforts to establish systems of schooling for its new possessions were, at best, only marginally successful. One vital reason for this failure was the resistance of the targeted populations, but a more fundamental problem existed within the structure of the state itself. The very partnerships that enabled the federal government's expansion of schooling rendered the government dependent upon networks of allies and weakened the development of a centralized colonial apparatus. Moreover, the inherent localism of American public education was fundamentally at odds with the kind of centralized power required of colonial rule and impeded educators' efforts to transplant U.S. school systems onto newly "American" soil. My dissertation argues that colonialism exposed the cracks in the infrastructure of American schooling and the weakness of the federal government as an agent of its own empire.