Saltville, Virginia, is a former company town whose main employer, a soda ash plant, shut down on July 1, 1971. The closure of the chemical plant displaced 700 workers, and created a crisis that threatened not only the existence of the town, but of the entire region. In response, Virginia Highlands Community College (VHCC), in cooperation with the…

Almost unnoticed, growing numbers of working poor people are entering politics at the community level in dozens of major cities in Texas and across the United States. These people are unusual because they view politics as a long-term process to build relationships, new institutions, and humane communities. This book tells the story of a new kind…

This text presents the results of a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of the development and activities of the Six School Complex, a group of schools in Northwest Washington, D.C. The Complex was organized in 1975 to cope with population shifts by increasing the number of neighborhood children attending public schools, to broaden and improve the…

This book highlights episodes in the history of Hispano education in New Mexico, from early territorial days through the New Deal. The 90 years from 1850 to 1940 demonstrate the persistence of the notion that culture can be determined from above, and that schools are a viable tool for determining culture. The myth that Hispanos did not value…

This biography profiles the late Elizabeth (Betty) Murray, an educator and community leader from Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia (Canada). Chapter 1 looks at Murray's leadership skills as, at age 77, she prepared and directed her annual musical in which the people of Tatamagouche recreate a significant moment in their village history. Chapter 2 moves…

This illustrated book chronicles the history of the one-room school in the Midwest and its vital influence on American education from the pioneer era through consolidation after World War II. The Midwest's one-room schools were the most democratic in the nation. Located in small independent school districts, they were sustained with the barest of…

This book examines the life of the Reverend Moses Michael Coady (1890-1959), a Roman Catholic priest who led the Antigonish Movement. During the Antigonish Movement, residents of the small maritime town of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, worked to achieve a nonviolent alternative to communism and fascism and to effect the social and economic…

This book examines the history of supportive social services to examine ways in which those services have been helpful, and sometimes unhelpful, to poor families; the factors that have constrained service provision and reform; and what would make the service enterprise viable in the coming years. Discussed are formative influences on the…

This volume is the first published historical dictionary of Hispanic American voluntary organizations. The work analyzes the history, purposes, organizational structure, activities, and goals of nearly 200 national and local voluntary organizations and associations. Each entry includes source data. The book focuses on the three major Hispanic…

Grouse Creek is a small Mormon ranching community in the extreme northwest corner of Utah. A survey of that community was conducted during 1985 by a team of folklorists, architectural historians, and historians, with the purpose of testing the idea of combining in the same fieldwork a concern for architecture, folk arts, and folklife. The work was…

This book documents the story of Alice Lloyd, a Massachusetts woman who founded Caney Creek Community Center and Caney Junior College (now Alice Lloyd College) in eastern Kentucky during the early 20th century. For the past 70 years, the college has enabled thousands of students from Appalachia to obtain a college education at little or no cost.…

This book explores the country schoolhouses of Texas' rural past. Sources include interviews with dozens of former country schoolteachers and students and first-person narratives collected from written works. Chapters cover the following topics: (1) history of public education and country schools in Texas; (2) distance travelled by teachers and…

In the early 1970s, thousands of Mexican-origin students, parents, and community members participated in legal and political actions against the Houston public schools. Their actions were sparked by the school district's effort in 1970 to circumvent a desegregation court order by classifying Mexican American children as "white,"…

This biography for young readers recounts in 10 chapters, the life of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and focuses on his life as a civil rights litigator who played a key role in the integration of education in the United States. Marshall's family history; boyhood and schooling in Baltimore (Maryland) and New York City; decision to attend…

In the summer of 1925, national attention focused on Dayton, Tennessee, where John T. Scopes was on trial for teaching evolution in violation of state law. The Tennessee "monkey trial" symbolized the confrontation of modern, secular, urban America with conservative, religious, rural America. Although urban journalists and social critics…