The research presented in this poster session highlights how the ideology of universal “public” rights, as a way to garner human equality, was central to a unique vision of a trans-Atlantic citizenship that was expressed in a complex network of cultural and educational institutions in New France, colonial and antebellum Louisiana, that embodied what I call “creole pedagogies.” The networks I will explore include: the teaching orders of the Ursulines and Jesuits, whose ideal of spiritual universalism provided education to all regardless of race, ethnicity, or class; the interracial Masonic lodges that promoted the ideal of universal brotherhood; the literary and social organizations founded by free men and women of color; the integrated academies founded by Haitian refugees in New Orleans in the aftermath of the Haitian revolution; the antebellum schools founded by Henriette Delille and the Sisters of the Holy Family, a black order of nuns; and the political activism of the interracial journalists and educators of The Tribune, the first black daily newspaper in the United States that advocated for public, integrated education during the Civil War. The story of these activists provides a much neglected and provocative site to reread the relationship between education, citizenship, and democracy that challenges the hegemonic narrative of the Common School movement as the exclusive site for envisioning the history of public education.
