This study is the first extensive attempt to chart the rise and fall of popular educational movements across Europe following the 1848 revolutions to their demise at the outbreak of World War Two. It examines in detail the relationships between the educational political and social aspirations of the emergent nationalist workers and womens movements and the challenge to traditional intellectuals and academic knowledge. Following the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in the early modern period popular educational movements were central to the pursuit of democratic civil societies and also fertile ground for innovatory subjects of knowledge and interdisciplinary study which have frequently reshaped the academic curriculum.