recursal/Fanatic-Fandom huggingface dataset:
Isserman, Maurice, If I had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left. Basic Books, 1987.

## Summary

Maurice
Isserman’s *If I Had a Hammer* illuminates
the historical roots of the New Left and establishes a link between the Old
Left and the New. This book looks at the American Communist Party, the various
groups led by Max Shachtman, the journal *Dissent*
*and the committee for non-violent action and to what event each influenced*
or failed to influence the New Left. Isserman argues that the New Left that
came to be ultimately concluded that “it should represent something very
different from what came before it.” (xvi) Echoing what James Miller would
similarly ague in his later book, *Democracy*
in the Streets, *Isserman writes: When the New Left did appear, the young*
people that did get involved believed that “they were different, that their
elders had compromised themselves, and that honesty, openness, and moral
intensity would prevent them from repeating the mistakes of the past. As it
turned out, honesty, openness, and moral intensity were not enough.” The
political climate that came to define the 1960s was a result, according to
Isserman, of these factors: baby boom, expansion of higher education, redistribution
of the black population from the rural south to the urban north, and the
general prosperity of the 1960s that encouraged politicians to consider the
plight of the “other America.” Isserman thus contends that the “Veterans of the
radical movements of the 1950s provided a political language in which those
swept up in the new movements of the 1960s could begin to make sense of their
own discontents and desires.” (xvii) Ultimately, the New Left did learned from
the mistakes of the Old Left (absolutism, idealization of class politics,
excessive sectarianism, distaste for ideology and rigid centralization). But,
it also failed to learn other important lessons: “the need for a patient,
long-term approach to building movements; an emphasis upon the value of winning
small victories as part of a strategy preparing the way for larger ones; a
willingness to work with others with differing viewpoints around limited goals;
a commitment to internal political education,” and an understanding of the need
for political/representative organizational structure.
Tyack, David. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

## Summary

This
book examines the “organizational revolution that took place in American school
during the last century,” in which schools were transformed from a “village
school” to an “urban system” as reformers sought to create a “one best system”
to prepare students for the demands of urbanization and industrialization.  It examines the politics of education and the
transformation of the U.S. into an urban-industrial nation (“modernity”) and
how these forces influenced the institutional structure and ideology of
education. Schools reflected the changes in society as well as shaped them.
Community control gave way to corporate-bureaucratic models under the guise of
depoliticizing schools and created new curriculums that reflected the
differentiation of economic roles in the larger social order. Seeking a “one
best system,” these changes, ironically, marginalized and left out minority
students (segregation) or limited their opportunities (tracking). He concludes
that the search for a “one best system” has “ill-served the pluralistic
character of American society”; that bureaucratization has resulted in the
displacement of goals and perpetuation of outworn practices; that schools have
rarely taught the poor effectively and in fact have perpetuated social
injustices; and the talk of “keeping schools out of politics” have often served
to obscure actual power alignments and patterns of privilege.
Katz, Michael. Reconstructing American Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.

## Summary

This
book is a collection of previous published essays that aim to reconstruct
American education in three senses: as history, reform, and historiography. The three central themese are:
**interpreting the present, understanding of history as a choice among**
alternative possibilities, and the realization of the contingent nature of
ideas and institutions**. In these**
essays, Katz argues that contemporary concepts such as public education, modern
organizational forms, especially bureaucracy, and institutional structures such
as the multiversity originated as **choices among alterative solutions to**
problems of public policy, such as paternalist voluntarisma and democratic localism**. Bureaucracy and its subsequent structures, for example,**
are not neutral shells, but “are structural details and operational rules that
reflect priorities, limit possibilities, and shape outcomes.”  Katz sees American public education is a product of the forces of capitalism as well as
the ideals of democracy; so, too, is bureaucracy, which sits at the juncture
between these competing forces. These concepts were
historical and contingent on process, *not*
inevitable.

Example:The creation of public school systems originated with: the emergence of democratic politics (male suffrage, party system, local political machines); industrialization, urbanization, and the *formation of a working class*; the state’s assumption of direct responsibility for some aspects of social welfare (progressivism); the invention of institutions as means for solving social problems and the redefinition of family (separation of home and work). \*Key: capitalism

Debate: Boston School Systems, 1850-1854

See also: Lawrence Cremin, David Tyack, David Tyack-Larry Cuban
K-12

Revisionists:

·
Historically,
Americans have placed enormous expectations on what public schools can
accomplish (Cremin, 1972; Perkinson, 1968)

·
Schools
have been designed to reproduced the existing social order (Bowles and Gintis,
1976; Karier, 1975; Spring, 1976)

·
Public
schools were created to assimilate and Americanized and thus discriminated
against immigrants and minorities. (Greer, 1972; Kaestle, 1973; Tyack, 1974)

·
Public
high schools were established for the benefit for the middle and upper classes
(Katz, 1968)

·
The
bureaucratic organization of schooling was designed to inhibit working class
achievement (Katz, 1971, Tyack, 1974)

·
Vocational
education was created as a device to curb working class and immigrant
aspirations (Lazerson, 1971; 1974)

·
Urban
public school systems were organized in the image of “one best system” which
denied the legitimacy of public participation in educational decision-making,
undermined teacher professionalism, and rejected the validity of ethnic and
racial cultural values.
Rorabaugh, W.J. Berkeley at War: The 1960s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

## Summary

Too
much attention by scholars, Rorabaugh contends, have focused on the national
crises, rather than delve closely into the local level and understand the
experiences from “the bottom up.” In *Berkeley*
at War, *Rorabaugh uses Berkeley as a case study of the 1960s and argues*
that the social turmoil that came to define the decade was “really a battle
over power.” He writes: “College students, young blacks, members of the New
Left, and hippies believed that power should flow from the bottom up rather
than from the top down.” (x) The sixties, according to Rorabuagh, was thus a
decade of testing, when social, political and economic assumptions came under
attack and forced institutions to respond. The FSM movement, drawing on civil
rights tactics, “established that activist students could, under certain conditions,
win victories against larger powerful bureaucracies.” (170). The liberals
failed “to recognize that the radicals could negotiate, as they lacked
institutionalized forms of power. Ironically, Rorabaugh notes, Conservatives
and radicals shared similar contempt of the liberal university and policy. “At
the heart of the contempt for liberalism on the part of both the New Right and
the New Left,” Rorarbaugh writes, “was a seldom acknowledged but growing
libertarianism.” (170) The book is broken into four chapters: “White” about the
white student movement at UC Berkeley; “Black” about the black movement within
the city; “Red” about the New and Old Left, in particular the anti-war
movement; and “Green” about Hippies in the Berkeley area.
McGuinn, Patrick. No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965-2005. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2006.

## Summary

This
book is a political analysis of the evolution of federal elementary and
secondary education policy between 1965 and 2005 and argues that education
policy was shaped by broader *ideological changes* and also came to play a key
role in *electoral politics*. He argues that the federal in education was
dominated by a few groups and little public input from 1965 to the 1980s and
questions regarding the federal role in education garnered very little mass
public debate. The struggle to define the federal role in school reform became
a public concern (Nation at Risk) and thus played a central role in the
electoral politics and inter-intra party debates during he 1980s and 1990s over
the appropriate role of national government in promoting opportunity and social
welfare. President Bush (#1) made himself the first “education president” and based
on the findings from the “A Nation at Risk” report, proposed policy that
*de-emphasized inputs (funding) and underscored outputs (achievements)*. While
Bush moved policy in that direction, McGuinn argues that Clinton played a
central role. As a centrist democrat, he rejected conservative efforts to
reject the federal role in education and the liberal emphasis on inputs rather
than outputs. Education, as a result of these policies, became central to
*electoral politics*. The Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA, 1994) was the
first policy to introduce the idea of accountability. With the reelection of
Clinton, Republicans rescinded their calls to end the Dept. of Education and
accepted a limited federal role in education.  The NCLB was thus a grand compromise between
accountability and a federal role in education. It ended the *equity regime* that
began in 1965 and brought about what McGuinn sees a revolutionary education
policy approach: *accountability*.

Also see: James D. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education; Diane Ravitch, *The Death and Life****;*** David Tyack/Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia*;* William Reese, *America's Public Schools*;
Clark, Christopher. The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

## Summary

his
book explores how industrial capitalism emerged from rural societies in the
American Northeast (Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts). It examines this
phenomenon by looking at how rural people saw, responded to, and transformed
the world they lived in (household structure). He presents a **middle ground**
synthesis between “market and social interpretations”and argues that **“markets**
are not determinant **but are created in and derived from social circumstances.”**
The creation of **markets was only one part of a wider shift** in social and
cultural relationships. The social structure of the mid-19th century
resulted not from a single transition but from a **set of interactions**.
“**Demography, land shortage, the ‘market,’ household strategies, and capital**
accumulation **…came together… to alter the character of rural new England.”(318)**
It was the slow accretion of a series of distinctive forms and organizations – shifts
in the exchange systems, the use of credit, the emergence of cash and
negotiable paper instruments and the charging of interest on debts – together
came to form a new economic system. Clark challenges the
notion that rural people were “passive victims” of the extension of the market;
in contrast, he sees **rural household farms** (social structure – property
distribution and division of labor) as **shaping the terms** on which they agreed
to deal with developments taking place elsewhere. The absence of staple-crop
exports in the late 18th century and the relative autonomy of
independent farmers meant that sources of economic change in rural New England
were internal to the rural economy. *“The*
spring that drove the intensification of rural output in the late eighteenth
century was the confrontation between families’ aspirations and the prospect of
scarcities under the prevailing conditions of land distribution, production and
exchange.”*(325)*

Example: The
intensified rural production and the strains that it imposed led to an outward
turning of the economy. Young men and women began to seek careers outside of
farming. In particular, production and reproduction fell disproportionately to
women, who then shifted their strategies to ease the burdens on them
(textile/cloth). Moreover, the tension between parental authority and
children’s concern to set up their own independent households was part of the
spur to increased rural output between 1790 and 1820

See also: Charles Sellers, Joyce Boydston, Stuart Blumin,
Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014.

## Summary

This book argues that **African American students** transformed the American university
in the late 1960s. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the most prevalent demand in the
hundreds of campus protest from 1968-9 was African-American inclusion, not
opposition to Vietnam. “They insisted that public **universities should reflect**
and serve the people of their communities**; that private universities should**
**rethink the mission of elite education**; and that historically black colleges
should survive the era of integration and shift their **mission to community-based**
Black empowerment**.” (p. 2) These black students were influenced by both the**
experiences of SNCC and the political rhetoric of the Black Panther Party/black
power. Many of the black students students, integration should be a two-way process, not one in which a black person integrates on “white terms” (No recognition of the African American experience, both in the curriculum and on campus). Student activists were a **mix of preaffirmative action children of college-educated parents, first-generation college students from migrant, working class families.** Vast majority of the students financed college through a combination of scholarships, employment, parental contribution, and loans.  Their demands for black studies were shaped by three factors:
ideological disputes over what should serve as the intellectual basis for black
studies; the desire of some scholars to pursue conventional academic careers;
and the influence of feminism and Marxism within black studies. "They succeeded," Biondi argues, “in bringing a **black perspective to the entire process of**
integration**, forcing administrators and faculty to hear their views and**
accommodate their cultural interests and aspirations.” (271)

Example: San Francisco State (1968-9) first large mobilization: 900 black students out of 18,000 (1968) yet were able to organize a massive strike that brought university to a standstill
Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974.

## Summary

This
book examines the “black nation” within American and argues that slaves, as a
social class, laid the foundations for a separate black culture while also
enriching American culture as a whole. Genovese describes the interaction
between slaves and slaveholders on the plantation, arguing that slavery was
always a negotiated space. American slavery was a *pre-capitalist institution*, Genovese asserts, and American
slaveholders saw themselves as benevolent paternalists (rather than acquisitive
capitalists) who held the best interests of their slaves at heart. The slaves
themselves seized upon this worldview of the planters as an opportunity to
ameliorate the harshness of slavery and build some security into their own
lives. By accommodating slaveholders' ideas of paternalism, enslaved people
were able to control the pace of work, forge a unique and empowering Christian
religion, receive recognition for their marriages, and place various other
limits on slaveholders' powers. Thus slaves used accommodation to resist the
power of their masters, cultivating a unique and autonomous African-American
culture within the plantation system. Genovese writes: “Accommodation and
resistance developed as two forms of a single process by which the slaves
accepted what could not be avoided and simultaneously fought… for moral and
well as physical survival.” (658). In
Genovese's interpretation the daily negotiations between accommodation and
resistance, between submission and self-determination, added up to a flexible
system whose longevity and vitality was the result. In conclusion, Genovese
summarizes the cultural web of the plantation class system, writing “The
slaveholders established their hegemony over the slaves primarily brought the
development of an elaborate web of paternalistic relationships, but the slaves’
place in that hegemonic system reflected deep contradictions, manifest in the
dialectic of accommodation and resistance.” (658) While they were unable to
mobilize politically and toward an explicit class-consciousness, slaves did
contribute to the formulation of a protonational consciousness expressed through
religious sensibility. Such a consciousness enabled them to cohere as a people.

Theoretical Framework: Gramsci/Marx: cultural
hegemony describes the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling
class, who manipulate the culture of that society — the beliefs, explanations,
perceptions, values, and mores — so that their ruling-class worldview becomes
the worldview that is imposed and accepted as the cultural norm. He examines
material culture, gender, religion and other elements to show the dialectic of
accommodation and resistance with the paternalistic culture of the plantation
class system. (Key pages: 146-148)

See also: Walter Johnson, Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert
Adams, David Wallace. Education For Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1995.

## Summary

This
book is a history of the assimilation era in American Indian education and how
policymakers sought to use the schoolhouse – specifically the **boarding *schools***
– as an instrument for acculturating Indian youth to “American” ways of
thinking and living***.*** Adams contends that boarding schools were the federal
government's key means ***(central policy)*** for addressing its American Indian
issues. Balanced with academics, classes in “industrial training and domestic
science, a rotating system of institutional chores,” as well as Sunday sermons,
midweek prayer meetings, patriotic drills and football contests would all
contribute to the “cultural metamorphosis” of the native population.
Acculturation, however, was **not a smooth process**, as the reformers envisioned;
***Indians resisted***, in some cases bolting the institution, torching buildings, or
engage in other schemes to undermine the school program. Although the schools
failed to fully assimilate Indians as the reformers hoped, the schools left a
"psychological and cultural mark" on Indian students***.*** One impact was
the enlarged sense of being an “Indian,” in which distinctions between Comanche
and Navajo were lost by reformers’ gaze. Wallace explores this process through
three different lenses: how reformers and government officials looked upon
education as a central feature; how this policy was translated into institution
practice through Indian agents, school superintendents, teachers, and staff;
and finally how students responded and resisted these efforts, including the
story of what happened when they returned to the reservation-home.

Example: Indian Bureau envisioned a "one best system" for boarding schools and attempted to strip the outward signs of Indian identity by cutting the long hair, imposing western dress, renaming the students, and requiring English. Students in the schools also had citizenship training and workforce traing, including wagon building, shoe making, carpentry, and trailoring; domestic chores for girls).

See also: David Tyack, James D. Anderson, Michael Katz
Elkbadh, David. The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011

## Summary

Elkbadh’s
book looks at the place of **development ideas** (one set – modernization) in
American foreign relations during the twentieth century. Modernization was
defined in the Depression as liberals sought proof that they could master the
forces of modernity. Compelling models emerging from the New Deal (**Tennessee**
Valley Authority **as THE model) were bound for worldwide use and were often**
embedded in the social and political forces of the time period (1930s and the
dual menace of fascism and communism). The TVA was an expression of American
**mastery of applied technology within a liberal political framework**.  These approaches, newly labeled
"modernization," became a consensus view internationally and were
spread by states as well as institutions, private groups, and NGOs and applied
in Korea and other parts of Asia and during World War II. At home modernization
became an American mission that appealed to constituencies across society and
**influenced social science approaches to race and poverty** in the United States. It
also became a **strategic and central role in U.S.-led "nation**
building" programs **in critical parts of the "Third World" during**
the Cold War. In the 1960s and 1970s, modernization was brought to crisis by
its intimate connection to the war in Vietnam, growing criticism of the Western
modernity that was assumed to be its goal, and an environmental critique that
highlighted ecological and human costs. This discredited modernization in many
quarters, causing a “crisis in development” and a movement away from the state
as the primary agent that promoted development. Nevertheless, modernization's
influence continues to echo in institutions and approaches that remain in the
skeletal structure of the international community today.

Example: Johnson and the "Mekong TVA" in Vietnam

See also: Andrew Zimmerman, Daniel Immerwahr
Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860 – 1880. 1935. New York: Free Press, 1935.

## Summary:

DuBois’
*Black Reconstruction* is a political
statement: a stance against the “False histories” that have ignored the central
role of African-Americans during the Civil War and, especially, during
reconstruction. He writes in his conclusion: “In order to paint the South as a
martyr to inescapable fate, to make the North the magnanimous emancipator, and
to ridicule the Negro as the impossible joke in the whole development, we have
in fifty years, by libel, innuendo and silence, so completely misstated and
obliterated the history of the Negro in America and his relation to its work
and government that today it is almost unknown.” The covering of the African
American experience has political repercussions and turns the study of history
from a tool to guide mankind to a tool of propaganda to serve political and
personal interests. It was the black worker, DuBois argues, that was the
underlying cause of the civil war, because the foundation of the economic order
in America, especially the south, was rested upon the backs of black workers. Dubois
places the African American at the center
of the story. He is the laborer to which the economic system of the south is
built upon. His transition and role during and after the war is key to
understanding the Civil War and Reconstruction. “Out of the exploitation of the
dark proletariat,” DuBois writes, “comes the surplus value” of the controlling
nations. African Americans also played a fundamental role during the war
(200,000 as soldiers, another 300,000 as laborers). Furthermore, after the war,
the question of the “black” worker drove and inspired the deeper questions of
democracy in America, as it was a “test of the nation’s real belief in
democratic institutions.” Ultimately, Dubois shows how,
for brief moments, reconstruction presented the best of what democracy could
and should be in America, only to be subverted by economic interests.

Historiography: More recent
arguments (Foner and ideology, Johnson and culture, Brown and gender, Blight
and memory/commemoration) are very much rooted in DuBois’ analysis (1935!) Foner:
Dubois portrayed the Reconstruction era as an idealistic effort to construct a
democratic, interracial political order from the ashes of slavery, as well as a
phase in a prolonged struggle between capital and labor for control of the
South’s economic resources.

See also: David Roedegger, Eric Foner, James Oakes, Chandra Manning
Greene, Jack. Pursuit of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

## Summary

This
book proposes a **“social development”** model to understand the emergence of
American cultural patterns. This model sees colonial development going through
three distinct stages: **simplification** (disorientation/new environment) to
**Elaboration** (acculturation/adaption/settlement and population expansion) to
**Replication** (acceptance). It thus challenges the assumption that the
development of American culture can be told within a framework derived from the
New England experience and treat the southern colonial experience as an
exception; this is what Greene defines as the “Declension Model.” Greene
contends that American culture emerged beginning around 1660 as a product of
the social convergence of the four broad cultural regions – the Chesapeake, New
England, the Middle Colonies, and the Lower South. Far from being a peripheral
area (deviant), the **southern colonies** and states were before 1800, the **mainstream**
of British-American development. It was a region that, he argues, exemplified
the most important element of British-American culture: the conception of
America as a place in which free people could pursue their own individual
happinesses in safety and with a fair prospect. Thus, New England was more of
the deviant region, rather than the normative.

See also: Edmund Morgan, *American Slavery, American Freedom*
Watson, Harry. Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990

## Summary

This
book argues that the **Jacksonian America’s political parties** (Democrats and
Whigs) represented a **serious policy debate** about the future of the Republic and
the nature of its society and economy. Watson writes: “Intensified involvement
in politics and the formation of enduring political parties in the government
and in the electorate were the two most fundamental elements in the political
changes of the Jacksonian era.” (6) Faced with accusations of corruption and
favoritism, a factory system that created a new classes of wage earners who found
they did not share common interest in the promised republican theory, expansion
of slavery and threat of slave revolt, and increased ethnic and cultural
diversity, an eager generation of politicians – represented by Andrew Jackson –
put together the structure of a second American party system. The two defining
features of Jackson’s presidency was the **relationship between the state and**
national power and the federal stance toward economic development **(Federal**
government’s role in promoting the “Market Revolution.”) His Whig opponents
found that the only way to challenge him was to **replicate his tactics** – party
politics. Jacksonian democrats represented small producers who were threatened
by the economic changes of their times and the Whigs were the champions of the
emerging market order, who called for the expansion of markets, development of
transportation systems, establishment of reliable networks of credit, and the
concentration of capital for larger purposes. Watson writes: “The two great
political parties, Democrats and Whigs, who dominated American antebellum
politics thus grew out of a contest over the relationship between the emerging
capitalist economy and the traditions of republican liberty and equality.”
(171) By the 1850s, American politics took competing public interests for
granted and accepted political parties as indispensable. The legacy of this new
system of American politics **brought Americans closer to a liberal view of**
society and government**, as each party celebrated the rights of the** common man, encouraged
individual self-improvement, and a balance between liberty and power**, though**
with differing views on how to do so.

Example: Jackson
associated government assistance to the Market Revolution with long and short
term forms of corruption. He challenged protective tariffs and opposed the
national bank, circulation of paper money, and most federal aid it internal
improvements. “Jackson hoped these policies would cripple the economic
developments that tended to restrict the ‘liberty’ and ‘virtue’ of America’s
small farmers and independent producers.” (133) These polices encouraged
Americans who felt trapped or threated by economic change to join the
Democratic party.

See also: Charles Sellers, Scott Sandage,
Suri, Jeremi. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

## Summary

Jeremi
Suri’s *Power and Protest* looks at how
the U.S. USSR, and China had to “accommodate themselves to a stalemated Cold
War world that restricted policy flexibility.” (1) Suri writes (p. 213): The
protests – controlled in China, independent in the U.S. and Western Europe –
attempted to “escape the limits” of the Cold War stalemate. As a result, Suri
argues that “the widespread unrest of the 1960s had a direct effect on each
state’s foreign policy” and, simultaneously, relations among “the most powerful
nations inflamed domestic contention.” The Détente, then, had a social origin
in the “convergent response to disorder among the great powers.” (2) The decade
of the 1960s began with he charismatic politics of Kennedy, de Gaulle,
Khrushchev, and Mao who offered grandeur politics: “Kennedy would conquer new
frontiers, Krushchev would build real-existing communism, de Gaulle would
restore French grandeur, and Mao would guide China in a great industrial leap.”
(260) These promises, however, confronted nuclear dangers, Cold War divisions,
and large bureaucratic divisions and optimistic and college-educated citizens
quickly soured. Over time, as leaders accepted compromises, young men and women
grew more violent and adopted a “language of dissent” and accused “their elders
of hypocrisy and corruption.”  The global
disruption of 1968 – university students in all countries destructing symbols
of government power – is a direct result of these un-kept promises. (Thus,
domestic unrest combined with nuclear power to create a balance of power) The
result: a détente, as leaders “refrained from challenging one another as they
had throughout the Cold War” and, in a sense, created a secret group of men
that coordinated the political order and excluded most advocates of change. Suri
argues: “International collaboration among leaders furthered international
disillusion among citizens,” and only benefitted the leaders of each nation. Thus,
Suri contends, “large segments of each nation’s population remain politically
alienated as a consequence of détente.” (5
Wallerstein, Peter. Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement: White Supremacy, Black Southerners, and College Campuses. Gainesville, Florida: University Press Florida, 2009.

## Summary

This
collection of essays tells a more complicated (though at time less dramatic)
story of the efforts to desegregate college and universities (moving beyond
just the Meredith story). Wallersein makes the claim (interestingly and
convincingly) that the desegregation was an effort to allow black students into
what he calls non-black universities. Throughout the 20th century,
many of the universities in the south had accepted Asian-Americans. The focus
of this collection, then, is on the black applicants, litigants, lawyers,
students, teachers and communities. This process of desegregation, from 1930 to
1970, merged with and reinforced the modern civil rights movement.

Example: Robert
Pratt, in his study on Georgia, notes that the NAACP focused on higher
education for two reasons: First, there may be less push back from whites
because there were less black undergraduates and, second, because there was not
post-baccalaureate training for blacks, whites could not rely on the separate
but equal argument.

Example: Joy
Ann Williamson looks at how Jackson State College and Tougaloo College
“provided movement centers, instructional spaces and base from which black
southerners could plan and carry out attacks on segregation beyond their
campuses.” (13) Tougaloo, as a private institution, “shielded it from overt
government interference” while Jackson State, a public institution, was
severely constrained by a state government that wanted to maintain the status
quo.

See also: Robert Cohen, *Rebellion in Black and White**;* Martha Biondi, *The Black Revolution on Campus*
Ewing, Adam. The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

## Summary

Despite
the recognition of UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Assoc.) and Garveyism’s
historical significance, participants, observers and scholars have struggled to
explain its rise and success. Ewing writes that the “historical memory around
the image of Garvey” as simply someone that “lit up the sky before crashing
down to earth” has influenced how Garvey is remembered and failed to
acknowledge Garvey’s accomplishments; in particular his influenced not just in
the United States, but throughout the diasporic world. To move beyond this
structured narrative of Garvey, Ewing’s book focuses on the influence of
Garveyism “on the construction of diasporic politics in the diverse context
that the movement bridged: within urban and rural black communities stretched
across the United States,” migrants and labor activists in the Carib.,  welfare associations and independent churches
in central and Southern Africa. Thus, Ewing argues, what was most “important
about Garveyis” was not the parades and shipping lines and colonization schemes
“but the engagement of its proponents in a sustained and more informal project
of organizing, networking, and consciousness raising.” (5) The spread of
Garveyism required a broad political network that shared common view on global
events and diasporic identity, but also responded to specific local conditions.
Ewing sees Garveyism not as an ideology “but as a method of organic mass
politics”; he was an organizer that drew on dominant ideas of the 19th
century and believed (like his followers) in process. As a form of mass
politics, it was also a project in diasporic identity building; Garveyism
embodied the “practice of diaspora” big and small. “The inauguration of two
shipping lines” and the “execution of parades, elocution contest, newspaper
distribution, poor relief, uniform wearing, and local institution building”
Ewing writes, enabled Garveyites to “broadcast a global sense of race dynamic
enough to seem real, and seem useful, for black subjects across the world.” (9)
After its decline in the U.S. in which many Garveyites moved into CIO and
communist parties, it provided a “powerful ideological and political vehicle”
for African activists during the interwar period.
Bailyn, Bernard. Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1960.

## Summary

The
history of American Education has “suffered at the hands of specialists who,
with the development of public education at heart sought historical arguments
to strengthen their ‘cause.’” Moreover, the school has been interpreted in a
vacuum, separate from society. Bailyn’s essay places **the development of educationin the context of Puritanism, philanthropy, race**
relations, and the growth of sectarianism**.** For
example: The Family, Community, and the Church were the key instruments of
education (traditions, behavior, and traditions) in England. The early colonial
days, however, transformed this and **required the creation of a more formalized education**
to control and maintain the next generations being reared in a new environment. Schools also functioned to convert and control native populations. Bailyn writes: In a heterogenous society, with competing and conflicting groups (denominational and natives), "education became an instrument, deliberately used, in which dominant groups sought to recreate an ideal unity and miniroies struggled to retain their groups identity." (100) The aim of the
essays was to entice a new generation of scholars into a field that suffered
from neglect and ill-founded conclusions.

Example: The various education acts in Massachusetts (Laws of 1642 and 1647) were attempts to protect against the frontier, the disruption of familiar English patterns, and the breakup of the Elizabethan familiy.

See also: Lawrence Cremin, Craig Steve Wilder, Mary Kelley
Sugrue, Thomas J. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008.

## Summary

Thomas
Sugrue’s *Sweet Land of Liberty* “turns
northward” and examines the forgotten struggle for civil rights in the North.
Most accounts focuses on the South and the battles between nonviolent
protestors and the defenders of Jim Crow, making it a *sectional* rather than a *national*
history. The histories of the northern experience are only post-1965, when
cities exploded and black power came onto the scene. Sugrue contends, “to
understand the history of civil rights – indeed, to understand modern America –
it is essential to bring the North back in.” (xiv) Long before 1965, a coalition
of black and white (and some Latin and Asian allies) fought for a prohibition
against discrimination in the workplace, opening of housing markets, the
provision of quality education, and the economic development of impoverished
communities. Their battles broaden the term “civil rights movement” beyond just
an issue of race and Jim Crow. Sugrue writes: “The keyword linking these
battles was ‘rights.’” This book thus focuses on the “rights revolution” – “the
extension of citizenship to include positive rights” – in the North. These
activists used “civil rights” and “freedom struggle” interchangeably and to
“separate these terms artificially, or to favor one over the others, would
obscure than clarify.” It is a political history that explores the social
movements that “civil rights activists created, joined, and transformed – from
churches to civil rights advocacy groups to political parties.” (xxiii) These
activists in the north, in particular black activists, cultivated a politics
not easily defined by nonviolent or violent, integrationist or separationist.
Morris, Aldon, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. Free Press, 1986.

## Summary

Morris’
book looks at the origins of the movement during what he sees as the crucial *first decade,* 1953-1963. He focuses on
this decade to provide an in-depth analysis, but contrary to the more recent
long-civil rights movement thesis, he sees the movement beginning in 1950 and
lasting to 1970. Morris does write: “The modern civil rights movement rest solidly
into this rich tradition of protest,” such as the slave revolts, the Garvey
movement, and the March on Washington Movement. However, he argues that the
modern civil rights movement was distinct because it was the “first time large
masses of blacks directly confronted and effectively disrupted the normal
function of groups and institutions” and secondly blacks adopted “nonviolent
tactics as a mass technique for bringing about social change.” (xi) In the case
of the modern civil rights movement, Morris contends that the indigenous base
was “the basic funding patterns, social resources, and organized masses are
concentrated and activated for protest.” (xii) Black community members thus
used accessible resources to accomplish political ends. The internal organization
of the community was the “critical factor that enabled the movement to gather
momentum and endure in the face of state power and widespread repression.”
(xii) The communication networks between different organizations (SCLC,
Highlander, SCEF, FOR, and SNCC) enabled community members to spread such
tactics as the sit-in. The movement provided the black community with concrete
organization and tactical models to use against racial suppression. It also
served as a training ground for many activists that would play key roles in the
women movement and the student movement. Thus, it was the indigenous
leadership, grassroots organizing of churches and organizations that made the
CRM successful.
Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford, 1990.

## Summary

This
book examines **housework** in the United States prior to the Civil War. Boydston
argues that unpaid domestic labor was a **central force in the emergence of an**
industrialized society'*in the northeastern United States**. '***Through an analysis
of the economic contributions that housewives made, and of the implications of
rhetoric about housework’s decline as labor, she argues that the **ideology of**
separate spheres obscured **the ways that** unpaid housework bolstered American
capitalism. **By clarifying the paradoxical status of housework and the nature of**
its changes in antebellum America, illuminates the intimated relationship
between the gender and labor systems that characterized industrializing
America. While domestic labor was recognized in the early colonial years and
again during the Revolutionary War, they were exceptional to the larger
economic trend in American society. America’s economic development led **domestic**
labor to become invisible, especially as a result of growing market relations
and the growth in the cash/exchange economy. “Over the course of the second
quarter of the nineteenth century… Americans embrace[d] a growing conviction
that housework was not really labor at all, but rather merely a new form of
leisure reserved to married women.” (141) The paradigm of womanhood had shifted
from the **good wife to mother – that is from worker to nurturer**. This ideology
of “spheres” represented the final phase in the industrialization of housework
– the denial that it produced any economic value at all. Boydston terms the
invisibility of women’s labor “the pastoralization of housework.” By the 1820s
and 1830s, **economic life and labor were “spherized”** such that women’s labor was
**ideologically separated from the “productive” labor of men**. This notion was
cemented in Americans’ imagination although housework was physically taxing,
time-consuming, and supported family life and the emerging capitalist economy.

Example: Labor
activists frequently invoked the rhetoric of the ideology of spheres and
specifically pastoral images of the household to imply a sharp contrast between
the cruel system of the factor which exhausts the mechanic and his physical and
mental powers and the presumably rejuvenating powers of the home.

See also: Charles Sellers, Christopher Clark, James Henretta, Stuart Blumin
Bagchi, Barnita; Eckhardt Fuchs; Rousmaniere, Kate, ed. Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross Cultural Exchanges in Post-Colonial Education. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014.

## Summary

This
collection of essays highlights the **interconnectedness of histories of**
education**in the modern world. It uses a transnational history of education**
located in a non-Eurocentric framework to examine the encounters taking place
between south Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, and the Americas. Each chapter
shows that transnational discourses and cross cultural transfer have never been
unidirectional but are characterized by ***adaptation, re-conceptualization, and***
hybridization.

Example: Simone
Holzwarth analyses the way in which Indian Independence movement perceived the
ideas of Reform Pedagogy and tried to adapt them to an Indian context. Gandhi’s
“Nail Talim” was proposed as the national model. It was an educational system
that combined intellectual work and manual labor, with the goal of achieving
Indian self sufficiency and ending the caste-based social hierarchy. The principles
of Nai Talim developed in an international context of progressive education
discourses. Connections between Tagore, Marjorie Sykes, and Marie Anee Peterson
(Denmark).

See Also: Margaret Jacobs,
Rotter, Andrew. Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947-1964. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.

## Summary

As a
cultural history of diplomatic relations, Rotter’s book argues that “what
happened between the United States and India after 1947 had origins not in the
use of the atomic bomb, the Iron Curtain, and Zhdanov speeches, or even in the
partition of the subcontinent, but in the **symbols and myths Americans and**
Indians created about each other **many decades before the Cold War, and in**
events that occurred as far back as the early nineteenth century.” (xxvii) For
Americans (tourist writing, popular novels, and encounters), what emerges from
the 19th and 20th century Western accounts of India and
Indians “is the conviction that this was a disorderly place, these an unruly
people.” (12) This view was held amongst policy makers in the Truman and other
administrations after India’s independence and when it became a key player in
the geopolitics of the Cold War. Yet, Indians also held **stereotypical views** of
Americans as well. Rotter summarizes both as follows: “While Americans regarded
Indians as hypersensitive, arrogant, unrealistic, mired in superstition,
indolent, irresponsible, and disorderly, Indians believed Americans were
hypersensitive, arrogant, overly rational, materialistic, racist, vulgar,
shallow, hasty, and violent.” This, in many ways, resulted in an inverted view:
**Americans saw in India chaos, a jungle, and uncleanliness; yet, Indians saw the**
same in America**. Indians also formed an identity that contrasted with the**
materialistic/modernist Western view, emphasizing its more spiritual
traditions, restraint, and moral sensibility. Each thus **constructed an Other**
that framed and complicated the geo-political and foreign policy relations between
each country. Ultimately, Rotter argues (and is the premise of this whole
book), “how a nation defines its strategic interests is partly determined by
its history and identity, by the way in which people **imagine themselves as**
members of a society **of individuals and their nation as a member of a society**
of nations.” (249) The book is broken down to chapters that look at how
cultural (mis)understanding **affected strategy making, economics, governance,**
race, gender, religion, and class caste and status.

See also: Christine Klein