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Faith, Class and Politics: The Role of the Churches in Teacher Training, 1914–1945, by Mark Lofthouse

specifically, play in the politics of western states? Although Herbst covers both school issues and politics well, he does not connect the dots between them. A second issue worth further consideration is the meaning of education in a context of racial and cultural conflict. Herbst duly documents the antipathy of white settlers to Native Americans, for example in an 1884 petition in which ‘prominent businessmen’ objected to ‘the continual quartering of a useless, idle, predatory and dangerous band of savages ... on a strip of land known as the Southern Ute reservation’ (p. 59). He also provides ample documentation of the inflammatory public rhetoric that led to the expulsion of Chinese workers from Silverton in 1901, as indicated by the following poem published by the Silverton Standard: And soon to all the outside world this message will be sent: We’ve whitened up old Silverton and the Chinaman ‘has went.’ (p. 132) This poem was published a year before the town proudly graduated its first (allfemale) high school class. What did the high school mean in this context? More specifically, what does it mean to identify the small number of white women who taught in such schools as bringing ‘culture to the Wild West’? Herbst never really spells out this claim. These and other questions can fruitfully be pursued with reference to the New Western History. Unfortunately, Herbst invokes this literature without making much use of it in analysing his material. His study nonetheless is an important building block for such scholarship in the future. Although the New Western History, now three decades old, is substantial and has been synthesised in textbook surveys, it so far includes virtually no work on the history of education. Herbst’s account of early schooling in a mining region of Colorado is an important contribution to research on that largely untapped subject.