The Transatlantic Kindergarten

Book excerpt: The kindergarten, which offered an innovative approach to early childhood education, was invented in the German-speaking world and arrived in the United States along with German political exiles in the 1850s. In both the United States and Germany, activist women worked to develop and promote this new form of education. Over the course of three generations they created one of the most successful transnational women's movements of the nineteenth century. In this book, Ann Taylor Allen presents the first transnational history of the kindergarten as it developed in both Germany and America between 1840 and 1919.