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When eight-year-old Amy Erdman Farrell moved with her family to Akron, Ohio, in 1972, she found herself adrift in a sea of taunting boys and mean girls. Shy by nature, she dreaded her long, unhappy days at school. But a few years later, Farrell found an escape from bullying, the promise of sisterhood, a rising sense of confidence, adventure, and—best of all—lifelong friendship when she joined a Girl Scout troop. Decades later, award-winning author Farrell returns to those formative experiences to explore the complicated and surprising history of the Girl Scouts of the USA. Drawing from extensive archival research, visits to iconic Girl Scout sites around the world, and vivid personal ref...
The 250th anniversary of the founding of Rutgers University is a perfect moment for the Rutgers community to reconcile its past, and acknowledge its role in the enslavement and debasement of African Americans and the disfranchisement and elimination of Native American people and culture. Scarlet and Black documents the history of Rutgers’s connection to slavery, which was neither casual nor accidental—nor unusual. Like most early American colleges, Rutgers depended on slaves to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty; it depended on the sale of black people to fund its very existence. Men like John Henry Livingston, (Rutgers president from 1810–1824), the Reverend Philip ...
From the United States' earliest days, African Americans considered education essential for their freedom and progress. Linda M. Perkins’s study ranges across educational and geographical settings to tell the stories of Black women and girls as students, professors, and administrators. Beginning with early efforts and the establishment of abolitionist colleges, Perkins follows the history of Black women's post–Civil War experiences at elite white schools and public universities in northern and midwestern states. Their presence in Black institutions like Howard University marked another advancement, as did Black women becoming professors and administrators. But such progress intersected with race and education in the postwar era. As gender questions sparked conflict between educated Black women and Black men, it forced the former to contend with traditional notions of women’s roles even as the 1960s opened educational opportunities for all African Americans. A first of its kind history, To Advance the Race is an enlightening look at African American women and their multi-generational commitment to the ideal of education as a collective achievement.
The 250th anniversary of the founding of Rutgers University is a perfect moment for the Rutgers community to reconcile its past, and acknowledge its role in the enslavement and debasement of African Americans and the disfranchisement and elimination of Native American people and culture. Scarlet and Black, Volume 2, continues to document the history of Rutgers’s connection to slavery, which was neither casual nor accidental—nor unusual. Like most early American colleges, Rutgers depended on slaves to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty; it depended on the sale of black people to fund its very existence. This second of a planned three volumes continues the work of the Co...
A Smithsonian Best History Book of 2019 “Sparkling.” —Genevieve Valentine, NPR Kristen Richardson traces the social seasons of debutantes on both sides of the Atlantic, sharing their stories in their own words, through diaries, letters, and interviews conducted at contemporary balls. Richardson takes the reader from Georgian England to colonial Philadelphia, from the Antebellum South and Wharton’s New York to the reimagined rituals of African American communities. Originally conceived as a way to wed daughters to suitable men, debutante rituals have adapted and evolved as marriage and women’s lives have changed. An inquiry into the ritual’s enduring cultural significance, The Season also reveals the complex emotional world of the girls at its center, whose every move was scrutinized and judged, and on whose backs family fortunes rested.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize Winner of the David J. Langum Prize Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Order of the Coif Book Award Winner of the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of the Year “This extraordinary book is a powerful addition to the history of travel segregation...Mia Bay shows that Black mobility has always been a struggle.” —Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist “In Mia Bay’s superb history of mobility and resistance, the question of literal movement becomes a way to understand the civil rights movement writ large.” —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times “Traveling Black is well worth the fare. Indeed...
Race and Place considers the everyday experiences of community members throughout the process of school desegregation and how race, place, and truth came to matter in this process in Prince George’s County, Maryland, from 1945 through 1973. The book is organized around several successive policies that emerged in this time: school equalization, school choice, neighborhood schools, school construction, school closure, busing for racial integration, and school discipline. Dougherty shows how these policies contained and reinforced assumptions about place and created new racial truths about people and schooling.
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