This study investigates how high-achieving Latino adolescents at an urban high school designate significance to events, people, and documents in American history. Survey and interview data of 70 high school students and their advanced placement history teacher document how students attach their own meanings to the history of the nation and employ concepts of freedom and unity as criteria for attributing significance. Unlike other ethnic minority students, however, these almost exclusively Cuban American students complemented and reinforced the official narrative of national uniqueness and progress.

The American public's longstanding preference for intelligence over intellect informed ambivalent portrayals of American scientists in the postwar era. This essay considers how six popular Hollywood films from a largely neglected genre-comedy-projected ambivalent images of scientists from 1961 to 1965. It argues that scientists were often respected for their intelligence, but were mocked or even feared for their intellect. In the comedic subgenres of the family film and slapstick, scientists who were safely contained at institutions of higher education committed merely social transgressions and became objects of mockery. In the political satire of Dr. Strangelove, however, the direct threat of nuclear annihilation cast the scientist as an object of fear and a real threat to the security of the nation. This discussion of popular comedies thus accounts for an under-studied cultural barometer and powerful medium in the popularization of science.

A host of scholars have illuminated the ways in which schools and other institutions have created and then sustained a vast gender gap in the scientific professions. Many of these studies have focused on overt discrimination: deliberate efforts by men to prevent the entry of women into scientific pursuits. Others have identified subtle and culturally mediated processes that have often led girls away from scientific courses and careers. This article examines rhetorically lofty, but qualified, efforts to encourage women's interest in science, and it demonstrates how even these attempts may have contributed to the gender gap in the scientific professions. Specifically, it focuses on the portrayal of women scientists in a high school science magazine,Science World, and analyzes its ambiguous messages to high school girls about the possibility of careers in science. This essay employs ideas about curricular self-selection and the formulation of career aspirations in interpreting the depiction of female scientists in issues from the time of the magazine's founding in 1957 to 1963, the year Betty Friedan publishedThe Feminine Mystiqueand the symbolic dawn of the liberal feminist movement. During these years, the United States government funded numerous educational initiatives in response to the Soviet Union's launching of Sputnik to attract more students to the scientific professions. In addition, professional scientists revised high school curricula in physics and biology to foster public rationality, critical thinking, and greater appreciation of scientific inquiry. The late postwar era also marked the beginning of greater female participation in the sciences.

At the 1939–1940 New York World's Fair, several thousand boys and girls, all members of a growing national network of high school science and engineering clubs, displayed their science fair projects and conducted live experiments to more than 10 million visitors. Housed in the building sponsored by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, their exhibits depicted a wide range of scientific phenomena. They also represented the conflicting values of science educators and industrialists about the societal worth of science education. In some instances, students' projects and laboratory activities prized hands‐on learning and aimed to abet widespread rational thinking for democratic citizenship, which reflected the civic priorities of Progressive science educators. In other cases, science was presented as a magical spectacle with consumer applications intended to entertain and inspire the public's confidence in American industry and scientific experts. Ultimately, the corporate sponsorship of the high school science extracurriculum at the World's Fair marked a turning point when the Progressive purposes of science education began to give way to “manpower” and “professionalist” ends that aligned with the nation's economic and military imperatives. This historical episode also anticipated recent proposals to reform science education in the United States and ideas about scientific learning in museum settings. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 93:892–914, 2009

The number of international students studying at U.S. institutions of higher education in the 2003-2004 academic year dropped for the first time in more than three decades. New visa restrictions and international tensions in the wake of September 11, 2001, have been cited as central factors. This article identifies historical precedents from the postwar era (1945 to 1960) as additionally significant causes of this decline. Highlighting competing advocates of altruism, cultural diplomacy, or exclusion, it recounts the conflicting priorities of one public research university in the post-war years—the University of Florida—as an exemplification of the nation’s ambivalent quest for international students at American colleges and universities.