In 1945, a Harvard committee issued the extraordinarily influential report General Education in a Free Society, also known as the Red Book (or, often, the Redbook, which shouldn’t be confused with the women’s magazine, though that would be amusing). Issued under the leadership of, and with an introduction from, Harvard President James Bryant Conant, the report has received a great deal of attention from intellectual historians and from historians of education, so I will not repeat their labors here. What I do want to do is look at an earlier Conant project that I stumbled onto in the long digital Read more