Century West Point and the Invention of the Blackboard
An Officer and a Scholar: Nineteenth-Century West Point and the Invention of the Blackboard Christopher J. Phillips Over two centuries after the invention of blackboards, they still fea- ture prominently in many American classrooms. The blackboard has outlasted most other educational innovations and technologies, and has always been more than an aide memoire. Students and teachers have long assumed inscriptions on its surface made mental processes visible. As early as 1880, in fact, the A.H. Andrews & Co. catalog described the blackboard as a “mirror reflecting the workings, character, and quality of the individual mind.”1 The blackboard’s ultimate origins are un- clear but in North America one institution, the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, played a particularly important Christopher J. Phillips is an Assistant Professor & Faculty Fellow at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study and has been appointed assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of History. For help with the preparation of this arti- cle, he would like to especially acknowledge Michael Barany, Bruno Belhoste, Stephanie Dick, Peggy Kidwell, Fred Rickey, David Roberts, Brittany Shields, and Alma Steingart, as well as audiences at meetings of the History of Science Society and American Math- ematical Society, and the anonymous referees for History of Education Quarterly. He also wishes to thank the librarians and archivists of the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. 1A.H. Andrews & Co., Illustrated Catalogue of School Merchandise (Chicago, IL: A.H. Andrews & Co.,1881), 73, quoted in David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 121.
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