This fine book is, at first glance, an extremely readable account of school creation in upstate New York. If that were the sum total of its contribution, the review could end here. Instead, Nancy Beadie offers an intensely detailed history of the foundation of the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, New York, as an example that could be repeated throughout most of the country. Economic historians generally abstain from local histories due to their unique, n = 1 nature; how general are the conclusions from a single case study, or even a handful of them? But for better or worse, the historical study of education is necessarily the study of education in particular locations. Without a centralized educational statistics agency, we are faced with the choice of either neglecting the history of institutional human capital accumulation and transmission until the twentieth century, after much of the interesting history had already occurred, or examining school making in towns, cities, even states (consider the role of Iowa in Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz's indisputably important Race Between Education and Technology [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008]). Thus, the book's subject is considerably narrower than the title suggests, but implications of this study, supported by exhaustive research, fully justify the title's broad claim.

The book proposes that schools, such as the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, grew out of the confluence of several networks. A necessary condition was the prior existence of social networks in the towns themselves that would allow the accumulation of both land and capital needed to initiate the school making process. While this sounds broadly Tocquevillian, enough so that the reader might presume that all manner of townsmen had formed such networks, Beadie examines the structure of such webs in Lima in such detail that she can identify its organizational precedents. There were two: Methodism and Freemasonry, with considerable overlap between them, at least early on. Methodist circuit riders brought not only the Word to pioneer communities but also a desire for words. They connected residents who were relatively far flung to the regional conference and thus, indirectly, to each other. Masonry connected men with capital and ambition in similar ways, but the rise of Anti-Masonic politics in the later 1820s dampened this aspect.

The geographic breadth of Methodist networks proved especially valuable following the Panic of 1837, when credit constraints pushed the local textile mill into bankruptcy. The other capital-intensive operation in town, the seminary, did not follow. It had raised funds by issuing what Beadie describes as shares, but what seem to have been closer to debt, in which the seminary promised free schooling in the future in exchange for one hundred dollars to be paid over time. Methodists throughout the Genesee Valley had bought shares, which set up a perfect political storm when they were unable to honor their promises, thus leaving the seminary in fiscal straits. Methodist support for Whig candidates had swept Jacksonian Democrats out of office in 1837, just in time to distribute the share of Jackson's transfer of the federal budget surplus that went to New York. The state of New York, in turn, distributed much of its windfall to schools, including, as directed by Whig legislators through their Methodist constitutents, the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary. The point is not to illustrate a particular method of early school finance as much as it is to demonstrate the more general power of networks that may remain inactive and hence concealed until a particular opportunity arises. The Jacksonian episode had a particular outcome owing to New York's particular political situation, but the fact that preexisting networks enabled a community school to thrive by taking advantage of the unexpected is more general, and such networks were everywhere in the Early Republic.

Perhaps Beadie's most provocative hypothesis is that the causation between local and regional networks, on the one hand, and school formation on the other, ran in both directions. That is, not only did the existence of Tocquevillian networks lead to school formation, but the process of founding a school created such networks. A case in point is the bond or equity system developed to fund a new school. A somewhat related example deserving of much closer inspection by economic historians is the role of banks in school foundations. New York common school funds invested in equity shares of banks, to the extent that interest income accounted for a third of the state fund in 1819, and even more following a new education finance law in 1827. The direct effect was an increase in the number of new schools. The indirect effect was to align the interests of bankers and other businessmen with local school communities, so that each would enjoy, in DeWitt Clinton's words, a “reciprocation of benefits” (p. 173).

This book will stand with distinguished company as a community study, as an episode in New York history, and most obviously as a history of education and schooling. It considers the social-scientific work of fellow historians with respect, and importantly for such a geographically focused study, never loses track of the greater picture of human capital development in antebellum America. If the price of the hardbound edition limits its readership, that would be a scholarly shame, but perhaps a more affordable paperback will come out in the next couple of years.