In 1959, Virginia's Prince Edward County closed its public schools rather than obey a court order to desegregate. For five years, black children were left to fend for themselves while the courts decided if the county could continue to deny its citizens public education. Investigating this remarkable and nearly forgotten story of local, state, and…

The interplay between sociopolitical forces and economic agendas becomes apparent when one examines the June 28, 2007 United States Supreme Court Decision, Parents Involved In Community Schools v. Seattle School District . In a reversal of the 1954 Brown Decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not use race as a…

Jacob Eschbach Yoder was one of the many northern schoolteachers who went south to assist in educating the newly freed African American population in the years immediately following the Civil War. Impelled by a religious fervor stemming from his upbringing in the Mennonite faith and especially by the educational ideals he had absorbed from his…

The history of the institutional, governmental, and legal development of American higher education before 1820 is examined. This study portrays the early history of American higher education as the transformation of European institutions by American conditions, views the old as coexisting but also competing with the new, perceives institutional…

This book aims to understand Virginia's rural past through a study of its schools. Rural Virginia schools of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were affected by at least three distinctly southern influences: the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction, regional underdevelopment and poverty, and the dilemma of racial coexistence in the…