More Than Science and Sputnik: The National Defense Education Act of 1958

More Than Science and Sputnik: The National Defense Education Act of 1958. By Wayne J. Urban. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c. 2010. Pp. [xvi], 247. $44.00, ISBN 978-0-8173-1691-4.)

For years, anyone looking to understand the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) had only one place to go, Barbara Barksdale Clowse's Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958 (Westport, Conn., 1981), a book that offers a detaUed account of the legislative wrangling and behind-the-scenes negotiations that led to the passage in 1958 of this important piece of legislation. Given the NDEA's historic role in breaking through the long-standing resistance to federal aid to education in the United States, it is somewhat surprising that nearly thirty years went by before another book on this topic surfaced. Wayne J. Urban's new book, with its greater historical distance...