In his presidential address Graff argued that traditional historians had successfully counterattacked against quantification and the innovations of the "new social history": Written in 1979, this book studies 19th century educators who supported the "literacy myth", as Graff calls it, which is the assumption that literacy translates to economic, social, and cultural success.
[6] The assumption has been made by scholars and the general populace alike “that children have followed in the paths marked out for them by adults, and the possibility that they developed their own reactions and behavior in the course of their maturation has been ignored”.
Conflicting Paths looks at over five-hundred narratives dating from 1750 to 1920 to try and follow the actual process of growing up in America and, if it has, how it has changed over time as well as the effects of factors such as class, gender and ethnicity.
According to the description provided in Google Books:[9] "Interdisciplinarity — or the interrelationships among distinct fields, disciplines, or branches of knowledge in pursuit of new answers to pressing problems — is one of the most contested topics in higher education today.
Arranged chronologically, the book tells the engaging story of how various academic fields both embraced and fought off efforts to share knowledge with other scholars.