Schooling the Freed People

Schooling the Freed People
Author: Ronald E. Butchart
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2010-09-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807899348

Conventional wisdom holds that freedmen's education was largely the work of privileged, single white northern women motivated by evangelical beliefs and abolitionism. Backed by pathbreaking research, Ronald E. Butchart's Schooling the Freed People shatters this notion. The most comprehensive quantitative study of the origins of black education in freedom ever undertaken, this definitive book on freedmen's teachers in the South is an outstanding contribution to social history and our understanding of African American education.

Self-Taught

Self-Taught
Author: Heather Andrea Williams
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2009-11-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807888974

In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom. Self-Taught traces the historical antecedents to freedpeople's intense desire to become literate and demonstrates how the visions of enslaved African Americans emerged into plans and action once slavery ended. Enslaved people, Williams contends, placed great value in the practical power of literacy, whether it was to enable them to read the Bible for themselves or to keep informed of the abolition movement and later the progress of the Civil War. Some slaves devised creative and subversive means to acquire literacy, and when slavery ended, they became the first teachers of other freedpeople. Soon overwhelmed by the demands for education, they called on northern missionaries to come to their aid. Williams argues that by teaching, building schools, supporting teachers, resisting violence, and claiming education as a civil right, African Americans transformed the face of education in the South to the great benefit of both black and white southerners.

The Teacher Wars

The Teacher Wars
Author: Dana Goldstein
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2015-08-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0345803620

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking history of 175 years of American education that brings the lessons of the past to bear on the dilemmas we face today—and brilliantly illuminates the path forward for public schools. “[A] lively account." —New York Times Book Review In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been embattled for nearly two centuries. She uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that recent popular ideas to improve schools—instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores, ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting “elite” graduates to teach—are all approaches that have been tried in the past without producing widespread change.

I've Been Here All the While

I've Been Here All the While
Author: Alaina E. Roberts
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-04-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812253035

Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction.

I Freed Myself

I Freed Myself
Author: David Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2014-04-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1107016495

This book examines the many ways in which African Americans made the Civil War about ending slavery. Abraham Lincoln's primary goal was to save the Union rather than to absolve the institution of slavery, yet slaves who escaped to Union lines refused to fight for the Union while remaining enslaved, ultimately forcing Lincoln to disband the institution.

Sick from Freedom

Sick from Freedom
Author: Jim Downs
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2012-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199758727

Sick from Freedom provides the first study of the health conditions of emancipated slaves and reveals the epidemics, illnesses, and poverty that former slaves suffered from when slavery ended and freedom began.