WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT an exclusive, 117-year-old private girls’ school would object to having its history written by a capable historian? For reasons that remain obscure, the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore is blocking publication of a book about the school that was originally written–with the school’s cooperation–as a Ph.D. dissertation at Tulane University. Professional historians are up in arms.
From the moment she stepped into Bryn Mawr’s archive in 1995, Andrea Hamilton was confronted by a rich history. Reporting from primary sources, including correspondence between the founders of the school, Hamilton told the story of a forward-looking, college preparatory school founded at the dawn of a great expansion in educational opportunities for women. Tulane approved her dissertation in 1997, and Johns Hopkins University Press and Rowman and Littlefield both offered to publish it as a book.
