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It makes historians of education uncomfortable to admit that much of their knowledge of Southern teachers-and American teachers generally-rests on histories written more than half a century ago. "Cubberlian" may be the most pejorative adjective in the educational historian's lexicon, followed closely by "Knightian" if the historian is a Southerner. Yet the portraits of teachers that appear in Ellwood P. Cubberley's Public Education in the United States (1919) and Edgar W. Knight's Public Education in the South (1922) bear a striking resemblance to the portraits in many recent histories.' The portraits have been hanging on the museum wall for so long that most educational historians can describe them without looking. Before the Civil War, American teachers were typically male, impoverished, itinerant, and marginally literate. Southern teachers had the same characteristics, but to an even greater degree. After the Civil War, as feminization affected first the North, then the West, and finally the South, the image of female teachers from humble farming backgrounds with modest amounts of schooling became the national standard. With these highly stylized portraits in place by the 1920s, few historians saw the need to pay further attention to teachers. Some of those who did were black scholars. Keenly aware that the portraits on the wall were of white teachers, Horace Mann Bond built on theworkofW. E. B. DuBois, CarterG. Woodson, and other black researchers in The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (1934), which contained a chapter on black teachers in the South. Bond's analysis seems today much more "modern" than that of Cubberley and Knight, obviously because his racial attitudes were closer to those of today's historians, but more importantly because Bond was more sensitive to the "larger context" of black education. Focusing on the South's dual school systems, Bond painted a vivid picture of conditions behind the wall of segregation. 2