“…Studies that have identified recapitulation in early progressive education have either failed to explore fully its pervasiveness and ethnocentric/racist repercussions (Egan, 2002; Strickland, 1967), or they have been limited to studies of eugenics in education (Selden, 1999; Winfield, 2007), the education of African Americans (Anderson, 1988; Watkins, 2001), Native Americans (Adams, 1995; Jacobs, 2009), and foreign students under U.S. control (Coloma, 2009; Paulet, 2007) without tracing the impact of the theory on the broader curriculum for White students. Although some historians have addressed aspects of the impact of recapitulation theory on educational thinkers, this attention has largely been limited exclusively to so-called child study advocates such as G. Stanley Hall and the American followers of Johann Herbart (Cleverley & Phillips, 1986; Cremin, 1961; Curti, 1963; Garrison, 2008; Goodchild, 2012; Kliebard, 1995; Ross, 1972); Thomas Jesse Jones, architect of the social studies curriculum at the Hampton Institute (Kliebard, 2002; Watkins, 2001); and more recently—and controversially—the work of John Dewey (Fallace, 2010, 2011; Margonis, 2009; Sullivan, 2003). This study builds on this scholarship by demonstrating that the influence of the theory of recapitulation extended well beyond Dewey, Jones, Hall, and the Herbartians to key child-centered pedagogues such as Colonel Francis W. Parker, Lester Frank Ward, William Torrey Harris, Charles Judd, William Bagley, Charles Eliot, and many others.…”