Philadelphia's Progressive Orphanage: The Carson Valley School - Softcover

Contosta, David R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0271027711 ISBN 13: 9780271027715

Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997

Synopsis

The story of Carson College is one of many stories that, taken together, answer the question, What happened to progressivism? . . . Contosta tells this story clearly and succinctly while avoiding the trap of excessive detail that characterizes many institutional histories. Based solidly on primary materials and interwoven with relevant secondary literature, Philadelphia's Progressive Orphanage is a model institutional study.-Journal of American History"The Carson Valley School has been an institutional embodiment of Progressivism. David Contosta is very effective in making the links between the larger Progressive ideology and the specifics of Carson. He has cast the story of this unique institution in a way that will maximize its interest for the history of education, social work, philanthropy, and urban institutions."-Robert Fishman, Rutgers University, Camden For more than seventy-five years, the Carson Valley School has served the needs of orphaned girls and other dependent children from Philadelphia and neighboring Pennsylvania counties. Its hundred-acre campus is remarkable for its rolling terrain, neo-medieval buildings, and design as a fantasy village.A legacy of the progressive education movement of the early decades of the twentieth century, the school was formally opened in 1918 as the Carson College for Orphan Girls. Its first president, Elsa Ueland, was a former settlement house worker who was a student of John Dewey and Maria Montessori, and her life story is closely intertwined with that of the school she oversaw for nearly half a century.The institution was originally endowed by the $5 million estate of Philadelphia trolley magnate Robert N. Carson, who had stipulated in his will that it could receive only white, parentless girls. Over the decades, Ueland and her successors were able to remove these restrictions, so that by the 1970s Carson Valley was admitting children regardless of race or gender, as well as neglected and dependent youths

About this title

About the Author:

David R. Contosta is Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia. He is the author of many books, including Henry Adams and the American Experiment and Villanova University, 1842,Äģ1992: American,ÄīCatholic,ÄīAugustinian (Penn State, 1995).

About this edition

• Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0271027711
• ISBN 13: 9780271027715
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272