During the ninety-three years of John Dewey's long life, the United States experienced the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, industrialization, mass immigration, the emergence of public (and compulsory) schooling, the women's suffrage movement, the Gilded Age, Prohibition, the Great Depression, unionization, and the adaptation of society to such technological innovations as automobiles, electricity, airplanes, and early computers. Dewey, philosopher of education and public intellectual, adopted a version of progressive living that saw change as something to explore and investigate, not as something to decry and keep at arm's length.

Born in Burlington, Vermont, on 20 November 1859 to Lucina Artemesia Rich Dewey and Archibald Sprague Dewey, John Dewey was a "replacement child." Exactly nine months before his birth, another son (John Archibald) was scalded to death in a tragic accident, leaving Lucina (in her early twenties) and Archibald (in his mid forties) with one...