Of the many organizational changes that took place in public education in North America at the turn of the last century, few had greater impact on the school than the development of the principal. The creation of the principal's office revolutionized the internal organization of the school from a group of students supervised by one teacher to a collection of teachers managed by one administrator. In its very conception, the appointment of a school-based administrator who was authorized to supervise other teachers significantly restructured power relations in schools, realigning the source of authority from the classroom to the principal's office. Just as significant was the role that the principal played as a school based representative of the central educational office.

Samuel Chapman Armstrong is well known for establishing Hampton Institute, the institution most involved with training black teachers in the South after the Civil War. It is less known that he was born in Hawai'i to the missionary couple Reverend Richard and Clarissa Chapman Armstrong. His parents were members of the Fifth Company of missionaries that arrived in Hawai'i in 1831. Reverend Armstrong withdrew from the mission in 1848 to become the Minister of Public Instruction. Until Reverend Armstrong's death in 1860, he was the major force behind education for Hawaiians in both missionary and public schools

In September 1830 the U.S. government negotiated the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek with some leaders of the Choctaw Nation. The treaty reinforced the congressional Indian Removal Act of 1830, which paved the way for the large-scale physical removal of tens of thousands of tribal people of the southeast, including many of the Choctaw. It provided for the “removal” of the Choctaw from their traditional homeland in Mississippi to Indian Territory. Over a two-year period, from 1831 to 1833, roughly thirteen thousand to fifteen thousand Choctaw, or about half of the tribe, moved to the region we now call southeastern Oklahoma

Whether it be my religion, my aesthetic taste, my economic opportunity, my educational desire, whatever the craving is, I find a limitation because I suffer from the greatest known handicap, a Negro — a Negro woman. (Mary McLeod Bethune, “Closed Doors,” 1936).