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94 books about Educators
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Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work
Curt D. Meine
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

This biography of Aldo Leopold follows him from his childhood as a precocious naturalist to his profoundly influential role in the development of conservation and modern environmentalism in the United States.

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American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute
Jeffrey Abt
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Library of Congress D15.B67A26 2011 | Dewey Decimal 932.007202

James Henry Breasted (1865–1935) had a career that epitomizes our popular image of the archaeologist. Daring, handsome, and charismatic, he traveled on expeditions to remote and politically unstable corners of the Middle East, helped identify the tomb of King Tut, and was on the cover of Time magazine. But Breasted was more than an Indiana Jones—he was an accomplished scholar, academic entrepreneur, and talented author who brought ancient history to life not just for students but for such notables as Teddy Roosevelt and Sigmund Freud.

In American Egyptologist, Jeffrey Abt weaves together the disparate strands of Breasted’s life, from his small-town origins following the Civil War to his evolution into the father of American Egyptology and the founder of the Oriental Institute in the early years of the University of Chicago. Abt explores the scholarly, philanthropic, diplomatic, and religious contexts of his ideas and projects, providing insight into the origins of America’s most prominent center for Near Eastern archaeology.
 
An illuminating portrait of the nearly forgotten man who demystified ancient Egypt for the general public, American Egyptologist restores James Henry Breasted to the world and puts forward a brilliant case for his place as one of the most important scholars of modern times.
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Another City upon a Hill: A New England Memoir
Joseph Conforti
Tagus Press, 2013
Library of Congress F74.F2C66 2013 | Dewey Decimal 974.485

This gripping memoir is both a personal story and a portrait of a distinctive New England place—Fall River, Massachusetts, once the cotton cloth capital of America. Growing up, Joseph Conforti’s world was defined by rolling hills, granite mills, and forests of triple-deckers. Conforti, whose mother was Portuguese and whose father was Italian, recounts how he negotiated those identities in a city where ethnic heritage mattered. Paralleling his own account, Conforti shares the story of his family, three generations of Portuguese and Italians who made their way in this once-mighty textile city.
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Anthropological Lives: An Introduction to the Profession of Anthropology
Virginia R Dominguez
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Library of Congress GN41.8.D66 2020 | Dewey Decimal 301.023

Anthropological Lives introduces readers to what it is like to be a professional anthropologist.  It focuses on the work anthropologists do, the passions they have, the way that being an anthropologist affects the kind of life they lead. The book draws heavily on the experiences of twenty anthropologists interviewed by Virginia R. Dominguez and Brigittine M. French, as well as on the experiences of the two coauthors. Many different kinds of anthropologists are represented, and the book makes a point of discussing their commonalities as well as their differences. Some of the anthropologists included work in the academy, some work outside the academy, and some work in institutions like museums. Included are cultural anthropologists, linguistic anthropologists, medical anthropologists, biological anthropologists, practicing anthropologists, and anthropological archaeologists. A fascinating look behind the curtain, the stories in Anthropological Lives will inform anyone who has ever wondered what you do with a degree in anthropology.

Anthropologists profiled: Leslie Aiello, Lee Baker, João Biehl, Tom Boellstorff, Jacqueline Comito, Shannon Dawdy, Virginia R. Dominguez, T.J. Ferguson, Brigittine French, Agustín Fuentes, Amy Goldenberg, Mary Gray, Sarah Green, Monica Heller, Douglas Hertzler, Ed Liebow, Mariano Perelman, Jeremy Sabloff, Carolyn Sargent, Marilyn Strathern, Nandini Sundar, Alaka Wali.
 
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Arthur Morgan: A Progressive Vision for American Reform
Aaron D. Purcell
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
Library of Congress E748.H78 2014 | Dewey Decimal 370.92

On May 19, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the appointment of Arthur Morgan (1878–1975), a water-control engineer and college president from Ohio, as the chairman of the newly created Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). With the eyes of the nation focused on the reform and recovery promised by the New Deal, Morgan remained in the national spotlight for much of the 1930s, as his visionary plans for the TVA drew both support and criticism. In this thoughtful biography, Aaron D. Purcell re-assesses Morgan’s long life and career and provides the first detailed account of his post-TVA activities and fascination with utopian writer Edward Bellamy. As Purcell demonstrates, Morgan embraced an alternative type of Progressive Era reform throughout his life which was rooted in nineteenth-century socialism, an overlooked, but important, strain in American political thought.
            Purcell pinpoints Morgan’s reading of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward while a teenager as a watershed moment in the development of his vision for building modern American society. He recounts Morgan’s early successes as an engineer, budding Progressive leader, and educational reformer; his presidency of Antioch College; and his revolutionary but contentious tenure at the TVA. After his dismissal from the TVA, Morgan wrote extensively, eventually publishing over a dozen books, including a biography of Edward Bellamy, and countless articles. He also raised money to support an experimental community in Kerala, India, sharing Mahatma Gandhi’s belief in small, self-sustaining communities cooperatively supported by persons of strong moral character. At the same time, however, Morgan retained many of his late-nineteenth century beliefs, including eugenics, as part of his societal vision. His authoritarian administrative style and moral rigidity limited his ability to attract large numbers to his community-based vision.
            As Purcell demonstrates, Morgan remained an active reformer well into the second half of the twentieth century, carrying forward a vision for American reform decades after his Progressive Era contemporaries had faded into obscurity. By presenting Morgan’s life and career within the context of the larger social and cultural events of his day, this revealing biographical study offers new insight into the achievements and motivations of an important but historically neglected American reformer.
 
Aaron D. Purcell is director of special collections at Virginia Tech. He is the author of White Collar Radicals: TVA’s Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era and Academic Archives: Managing the Next Generation of College and University Archives, Records, and Special Collections. His articles have appeared in the The American Archivist, The Journal of East Tennessee History, The Historian, and the Tennessee Historical Quarterly.
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At the Crossroads of Fear and Freedom: The Fight for Social and Educational Justice
Robert L. Green
Michigan State University Press, 2016
Library of Congress LC2717.G726 2016 | Dewey Decimal 371.8

Robert L. Green, a friend and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr., served as education director for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference during a crucial period in Civil Rights history, and—as a consultant for many of the nation’s largest school districts—he continues to fight for social justice and educational equity today.
This memoir relates previously untold stories about major Civil Rights campaigns that helped put an end to voting rights violations and Jim Crow education; explains how Green has helped urban school districts improve academic achievement levels; and explains why this history should inform our choices as we attempt to reform and improve American education. Green’s quest began when he helped the Kennedy Administration resolve a catastrophic education-related impasse and has continued through his service as one of the participants at an Obama administration summit on a current academic crisis.
It is commonly said that education is the new Civil Rights battlefield. Green’s memoir, At the Crossroads of Fear and Freedom: The Fight for Social and Educational Justice, helps us understand that educational equity has always been a central objective of the Civil Rights movement.

 
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Becoming Historians
Edited by James M. Banner, Jr. and John R. Gillis
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Library of Congress D14.B43 2009 | Dewey Decimal 907.2022

In this unique collection, the memoirs of eleven historians provide a fascinating portrait of a formative generation of scholars. Born around the time of World War II, these influential historians came of age just before the upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s and helped to transform both their discipline and the broader world of American higher education. The self-inventions they thoughtfully chronicle led, in many cases, to the invention of new fields—including women’s and gender history, social history, and public history—that cleared paths in the academy and made the study of the past more capacious and broadly relevant. In these stories—skillfully compiled and introduced by James Banner and John Gillis—aspiring historians will find inspiration and guidance, experienced scholars will see reflections of their own dilemmas and struggles, and all readers will discover a rare account of how today’s seasoned historians embarked on their intellectual journeys.

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The Best of Pickering
Sam Pickering
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Library of Congress AC8.P6725 2004 | Dewey Decimal 814.54

Praise for Sam Pickering:

"Pickering has all of Thurber's humor, and he writes as well as E. B. White. He writes with passion, wit, and a strange personal note of self-mockery; he is humanely educated, wise, and capable of a wide range of stylistic effects."
----Jay Parini

". . . he writes in the tradition of Montaigne hammering together a ramshackle affair of surprising nooks, crannies and additions-all under the same roof."
---The Oxford American

"Pickering has the natural essayist's intimate yet distanced take on the world that combines a devotion to particulars . . . with a near-indifference to the status- and achievement-mongering that marks modern life."
---Publishers Weekly

"Pickering writes with the sensitivity and craft of a poet, finding meaning in the commonplace and ordinary."
---Library Journal

"Pickering's genre is unique, but I'm not sure anyone else can write this stuff. I can live with that, as long as Pickering himself continues to wend through the forests, classrooms, airports, billiards championships, hometown parades, and his inner world of Tennessee gags and characters."
---Hartford Courant


His writing is as unique and recognizable as the music of Mozart, the painting of Picasso, or the poetry of Dickinson. Yet most Americans likely know Sam Pickering, the University of Connecticut English professor, from the movie Dead Poets Society. In the film, Robin Williams plays an idiosyncratic instructor---based on Pickering---who employs some over-the-top teaching methods to keep his subjects fresh and his students learning.

Fewer probably know that Pickering is the author of more than 16 books and nearly 200 articles, or that he's inspired thousands of university students to think in new ways. And, while Williams may have captured Pickering's madcap classroom antics, he didn't uncover the other side of the author-Sam Pickering as one of our great American men of letters.

The Best of Pickering amply demonstrates Pickering's amazing powers of perception, and gives us insight into the mind of a writer nearly obsessed with turning his back on the conventional trappings of American success-a writer who seems to prefer lying squirrel's-eye-level next to a bed of daffodils in the spring or trespassing on someone else's property to pursue a jaunt through joe-pye weed and goldenrod. Indeed, Pickering's philosophy, at least on paper, may very well be "Now is the only time."

If you haven't met Sam Pickering before, prepare to be surprised and delighted by these wry and sometimes self-deprecating essays that are witty and elegant and concrete yet wander widely, and include Pickering's well-trod fictional Southern town of Carthage, Tennessee, full of strange goings-on. This definitive collection of the best of Pickering is a must for Pickering fans and a fine introduction for the uninitiated to one of our greatest men of letters.
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Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing
David S. Brown
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Library of Congress E175.45.B76 2009 | Dewey Decimal 973

As the world went to war in 1941, Time magazine founder Henry Luce coined a term for what was rapidly becoming the establishment view of America’s role in the world: the twentieth century, he argued, was the American Century. Many of the nation’s most eminent historians—nearly all of them from the East Coast—agreed with this vision and its endorsement of the vigorous use of power and persuasion to direct world affairs. But an important concentration of midwestern historians actively dissented. With Beyond the Frontier, David S. Brown tells their little-known story of opposition.

Raised in a cultural landscape that combined agrarian provincialism with reform-minded progressivism, these historians—among them Charles Beard, William Appleman Williams, and Christopher Lasch—argued strenuously against the imperial presidencies, interventionist foreign policies, and Keynesian capitalism that swiftly shaped cold war America. Casting a skeptical eye on the burgeoning military-industrial complex and its domestic counterpart, the welfare state, they warned that both components of the liberal internationalist vision jeopardized the individualistic, republican ethos that had long lain at the heart of American democracy.

Drawing on interviews, personal papers, and correspondence of the imoprtant players in the debate, Brown has written a fascinating follow-up to his critically acclaimed biography of Richard Hofstadter. Illuminating key ideas that link midwestern writers from Frederick Jackson Turner all the way to William Cronon and Thomas Frank, Beyond the Frontier is intellectual history at its best: grounded in real lives and focused on issues that remain salient—and unresolved—even today.

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Bringing Montessori to America: S. S. McClure, Maria Montessori, and the Campaign to Publicize Montessori Education
Gerald L. Gutek and Patricia A. Gutek
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Library of Congress LB1029.M75G88 2016 | Dewey Decimal 371.392

2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title!

Bringing Montessori to America traces in engrossing detail one of the most fascinating partnerships in the history of American education—that between Maria Montessori and S. S. McClure, from their first meeting in 1910 until their final acrimonious dispute in 1915.
 
Born on the Adriatic, Montessori first entered the world stage in 1906 as the innovator of a revolutionary teaching method that creates an environment where children learn at their own pace and initiate skills like reading and writing in a spontaneous way. As her school in Rome swiftly attracted attention, curiosity, and followers, Montessori recruited disciples whom she immersed in a rigorous and detailed teacher-training regimen of her own creation.
 
McClure was an Irish-born media baron of America’s Gilded Age, best known as the founder and publisher of McClure’s Magazine. Against the backdrop of Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose insurgency, the brilliant and mercurial McClure used his flagship publication as a vehicle to advance Progressive Party causes. After meeting in 1910, McClure and Montessori embarked on a five-year collaboration to introduce Montessori’s innovative teaching style in the United States.
 
Gerald and Patricia Gutek trace the dramatic arc of the partnership between the Italian teacher and American publisher united by a vision of educational change in the United States. After her triumphal lecture tour in 1913, Montessori, secure in her trust of her American partner, gave McClure her power of attorney and returned to Italy. The surge in popularity of Montessori education in America, however, deeply concerned Montessori, who had heretofore exerted total control over her method, apparatus, schools, and teacher training. The American entrepreneurial spirit, along with a desire to disseminate the Montessori method quickly, led to major conflicts between the Italian educator and American businesspeople, particularly McClure. Feeling betrayed, Montessori ended her relationship with her erstwhile collaborator.
 
Gutek and Gutek describe the fascinating story of this first wave of Montessori education in the United States, which did not sustain itself during Montessori’s lifetime. It would not be until the 1950s that Montessori education was revived with the successful establishment of Montessori academies throughout the United States.
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The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth
Dipesh Chakrabarty
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Library of Congress DS435.7.S26C53 2015 | Dewey Decimal 907.202

A leading scholar in early twentieth-century India, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958) was knighted in 1929 and became the first Indian historian to gain honorary membership in the American Historical Association. By the end of his lifetime, however, he had been marginalized by the Indian history establishment, as postcolonial historians embraced alternative approaches in the name of democracy and anti-colonialism. The Calling of History examines Sarkar’s career—and poignant obsolescence—as a way into larger questions about the discipline of history and its public life.

Through close readings of more than twelve hundred letters to and from Sarkar along with other archival documents, Dipesh Chakrabarty demonstrates that historians in colonial India formulated the basic concepts and practices of the field via vigorous—and at times bitter and hurtful—debates in the public sphere. He furthermore shows that because of its non-technical nature, the discipline as a whole remains susceptible to pressure from both the public and the academy even today. Methodological debates and the changing reputations of scholars like Sarkar, he argues, must therefore be understood within the specific contexts in which particular histories are written.

Insightful and with far-reaching implications for all historians, The Calling of History offers a valuable look at the double life of history and how tensions between its public and private sides played out in a major scholar’s career.
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Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist: Working the Margins of Law, Power, and Justice
Gregg Barak
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Library of Congress HV6023.B36A3 2020 | Dewey Decimal 364.92

Over the past five decades, prominent criminologist Gregg Barak has worked as an author, editor, and book review editor; his large body of work has been grounded in traditional academic prose. His new book, Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist, while remaining scholarly in its intent, departs from the typical academic format. The book is a a first-person account that examines the linkages between one scholar's experiences as a criminologist from the late 1960s to the present and the emergence and evolution of radical criminology as a challenge to developments in mainstream criminology. Barak draws upon his own experiences over this half-century as a window into the various debates and issues among radical, critical, and technocratic criminologies. In doing so, he revisits his own seminal works, showing how they reflect those periods of criminological development.
 
What holds this book together is the story of how resisting the crimes of the powerful while struggling locally for social justice is the essence of critical criminology. His seven chapters are divided into three parts—academic freedom, academic activism, and academic praxis—and these connected stories link the author's own academic career in Berkeley, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; Chicago; Alabama; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and across the United States. Barak's eventful scholarly life involved efforts to overcome laws against abortion and homosexuality; to formalize protective practices for women from domestic violence and sexual assault; to oppose racism and classism in the criminal justice system; to challenge the wars on gangs, drugs, and immigrants; and to confront the policies of mass incarceration and the treatment of juvenile offenders.
 
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Chronicles Of Faith: The Autobiography of Frederick D. Patterson
Frederick D. Patterson, edited by Martia Graham Goodson
University of Alabama Press, 1991
Library of Congress LC2851.T817P28 1991 | Dewey Decimal 378.111

Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4Chronicles of Faith records the life of a man who influenced the course of higher education for African Americans and Africans throughout the twentieth century. Patterson, orphaned soon after birth in 1901, became a veterinary scientist at Tuskegee Institute and soon thereafter--at the depths of the Depression--was selected as president of that most important institution. It was at Tuskegee that Patterson formulated the idea and the organization--the United Negro College Fund. In doing so he made a place for himself in U.S. and world history by providing the model of cooperative fund raising that enabled financially starved private black colleges to survive and serve the youth of the segregated North and South.

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Confessions of an American Scholar
Simon O’Toole
University of Minnesota Press, 1970

Confessions of an American Scholar was first published in 1970. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Professor O'Toole, a well-known American literary scholar (Simon O'Toole is a pseudonym), gives us a candid, amusing, and, on the whole, frightening look at what really goes on in academic life. He has taught at black and white colleges, private and public colleges, Ivy Leagues and brick colleges; and over the years he has found himself transformed from a good teacher and no scholar into a prolific scholar and a tired teacher. Along the way he fought Joe McCarthy and told his students to burn their draft cards. At the conclusion of his tale he makes some serious proposals for a solution to what he calls the mess of American education. At the core of his suggestions is the opinion that America needs less education instead of more, an idea that seems certain to evoke cries of treason from many of his academic brethren.

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Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War
Franklin, H. Bruce
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Library of Congress E745.F73 2018 | Dewey Decimal 355.009730904

Growing up during the Second World War, H. Bruce Franklin believed what he was told: that America’s victory would lead to a new era of world peace. Like most Americans, he was soon led to believe in a world-wide Communist conspiracy that menaced the United States, forcing the nation into a disastrous war in Korea. But once he joined the U.S. Air Force and began flying top-secret missions as a navigator and intelligence officer, what he learned was eye-opening. He saw that even as the U.S. preached about peace and freedom, it was engaging in an endless cycle of warfare, bringing devastation and oppression to fledgling democracies across the globe.
 
Now, after fifty years as a renowned cultural historian, Franklin offers a set of hard-learned lessons about modern American history. Crash Course is essential reading for anyone who wonders how America ended up where it is today: with a deeply divided and disillusioned populace, led by a dysfunctional government, and mired in unwinnable wars. It also finds startling parallels between America’s foreign military exploits and the equally brutal tactics used on the home front to crush organized labor, antiwar, and civil rights movements.
 
More than just a memoir or a history book, Crash Course gives readers a unique firsthand look at the building of the American empire and the damage it has wrought. Shocking and gripping as any thriller, it exposes the endless deception of the American public, and reveals from inside how and why many millions of Americans have been struggling for decades against our own government in a fight for peace and justice.  
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Crossing: A Transgender Memoir
Deirdre N. McCloskey
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Library of Congress HQ77.8.M39A3 2019 | Dewey Decimal 306.768

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
 
“I visited womanhood and stayed. It was not for the pleasures, though I discovered many I had not imagined, and many pains too. But calculating pleasures and pains was not the point. The point was who I am.”
 
Once a golden boy of conservative economics and a child of 1950s privilege, Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald) had wanted to change genders from the age of eleven. But it was a different time, one hostile to any sort of straying from the path—against gays, socialists, women with professions, men without hats, and so on—and certainly against gender transition. Finally, in 1995, at the age of fifty-three, it was time for McCloskey to cross the gender line.
 
Crossing is the story of McCloskey’s dramatic and poignant transformation from Donald to Dee to Deirdre. She chronicles the physical procedures and emotional evolution required and the legal and cultural roadblocks she faced in her journey to womanhood. By turns searing and humorous, this is the unflinching, unforgettable story of her transformation—what she lost, what she gained, and the women who lifted her up along the way.
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Dewey, Russell, Whitehead: Philosophers as Educators
Brian Patrick Hendley
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986
Library of Congress LA126.H42 1986 | Dewey Decimal 370.1

In Philosophers as Educators Brian Patrick Hendley argues that philosophers of edu­cation should reject their preoccupation with defining terms and analyzing concepts and embrace the philosophical task of con­structing general theories of education.  Hendley discusses in detail the educational philosophies of John Dewey, Bertrand Rus­sell, and Alfred North Whitehead. He sees in these men excellent role models that contem­porary philosophers might well follow. Hendley believes that, like these men­tors, philosophers should take a more ac­tive, practical role in education. Dewey and Russell ran their own schools, and Whitehead served as a university admin­istrator and as a member of many com­mittees created to study education.

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The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties
Edited by Alan Sica and Stephen Turner
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Library of Congress HM478.D58 2005 | Dewey Decimal 301.0922

The late 1960s are remembered today as the last time wholesale social upheaval shook Europe and the United States. College students during that tumultuous period—epitomized by the events of May 1968—were as permanently marked in their worldviews as their parents had been by the Depression and World War II. Sociology was at the center of these events, and it changed decisively because of them.

The Disobedient Generation collects newly written autobiographies by an international cross-section of well-known sociologists, all of them "children of the '60s." It illuminates the human experience of living through that decade as apprentice scholars and activists, encountering the issues of class, race, the Establishment, the decline of traditional religion, feminism, war, and the sexual revolution. In each case the interlinked crises of young adulthood, rapid change, and nascent professional careers shaped this generation's private and public selves. This is an intensely personal collective portrait of a generation in a time of struggle.
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Dr. David Murray: Superintendent of Education in the Empire of Japan, 1873-1879
Duke, Benjamin
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Library of Congress LA2383.J3M874 2018 | Dewey Decimal 370.95209034

This is the first biography in English of an uncommon American, Dr. David Murray, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers College, who was appointed by the Japanese government as Superintendent of Education in the Empire of Japan in 1873. The founding of the Gakusei—the first public school system launched in Japan—marks the beginning of modern education in Japan, accommodating all children of elementary school age. Murray’s unwavering commitment to its success renders him an educational pioneer in Japan in the modern world. 

Benjamin Duke has compiled this comprehensive biography of David Murray to showcase Murray’s work, both in assisting around 100 samurai students in their studies at Rutgers, and in his unprecedented role in early Japanese-American relations. This fascinating story uncovers a little-known link between Rutgers University and Japan, and it is the only book to conclude that Rutgers made a greater contribution to the development of modern education in the early Meiji Era than any other non-Japanese college or university in the world.  
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Dream Not of Other Worlds: Teaching in a Segregated Elementary School,1970
Huston Diehl
University of Iowa Press, 2007
Library of Congress LC2802.V8D54 2007 | Dewey Decimal 371.829960755465

When Huston Diehl began teaching a fourth-grade class in a "Negro" elementary school in rural Louisa County, Virginia, the school’s white superintendent assured her that he didn't expect her to teach "those children" anything.  She soon discovered how these low expectations, widely shared by the white community, impeded her students' ability to learn. With its overcrowded classrooms, poorly trained teachers, empty bookshelves, and meager supplies, her segregated school was vastly inferior to the county's white elementary schools, and the message it sent her students was clear: "dream not of other worlds."
     In her often lyrical memoir, Diehl reveals how, in the intimacy of the classroom, her students reached out to her, a young white northerner, and shared their fears, anxieties, and personal beliefs.  Repeatedly surprised and challenged by her students, Diehl questions her long-standing middle-class assumptions and confronts her own prejudices. In doing so, she eloquently reflects on what the students taught her about the hurt of bigotry and the humiliation of poverty as well as dignity, courage, and resiliency.
      Set in the waning days of the Jim Crow South, Dream Not of Other Worlds chronicles an important moment in American history. Diehl examines the history of black education in the South and narrates the dramatic struggle to integrate Virginia's public schools. Meeting with some of her former students and colleagues and visiting the school where she once taught, she considers what has--and has not--changed after more than thirty years of integrated schooling. This provocative book raises many issues that are of urgent concern today: the continuing social consequences of segregated schools, the role of public education in American society, and the challenges of educating minority and poor children.  
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Ears, Eyes, and Hands: Reflections on Language, Literacy, and Linguistics
Deborah L. Wolter
Gallaudet University Press, 2018
Library of Congress LC151.W655 2018 | Dewey Decimal 302.2244

Ears, Eyes, and Hands presents the author’s reflections on language, literacy, and linguistics that have been shaped by her deafness and by her work as an educator. In short, engaging narratives, Deborah L. Wolter exposes deeply entrenched attitudes and stereotypes regarding language, bringing to bear her own experiences as a deaf person as well as her interactions with children from varying backgrounds.
​​      Wolter reveals and rectifies the impact of deficit mindsets in the educational system regarding race, ethnicity, economic status, gender, and disability. As a literacy specialist, she works with students who fall through the cracks in a system that strives to embrace the diverse backgrounds and abilities found in the classroom. Her passion for engaging students and cultivating literacy shines in the stories she tells, which serve as parables that allow readers to evaluate their own attitudes and assumptions. Educators, parents, and community members will benefit from Wolter’s examination of sociolinguistics and language privilege as she identifies how ethnocentrism and ableism are contributing to negative educational outcomes for some students. With humor and warmth, she offers a path toward approaching language and listening as a gateway to connection and understanding, both inside the classroom and beyond.
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Education and Democracy: The Meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn, 1872–1964
Adam R. Nelson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001
Library of Congress LB875.M332N45 2001 | Dewey Decimal 370.92

This definitive biography of the charismatic Alexander Meiklejohn tracks his turbulent career as an educational innovator at Brown University, Amherst College, and Wisconsin’s “Experimental College” in the early twentieth century and his later work as a civil libertarian in the Joe McCarthy era. The central question Meiklejohn asked throughout his life’s work remains essential today: How can education teach citizens to be free?

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The Education of a WASP
Lois M. Stalvey
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989
Library of Congress E185.61.S77 1989 | Dewey Decimal 305.800973

Brimming with honestly and passion, The Education of a WASP chronicles one white woman's discovery of racism in 1960s America. First published in 1970 and highly acclaimed by reviewers, Lois Stalvey's account is as timely now as it was then. Nearly twenty years later, with ugly racial incidents occurring on college campuses, in neighborhoods, and in workplaces everywhere, her account of personal encounters with racism remains deeply disturbing. Educators and general readers interested in the subtleties of racism will find the story poignant, revealing, and profoundly moving.

“Delightful and horrible, a singular book.” —Choice

“An extraordinarily honest and revealing book that poses the issue: loyalty to one’s ethnic group or loyalty to conscience.” —Publishers Weekly

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The Electric Edge of Academe: The Saga of Lucien L. Nunn and Deep Springs College
L. Jackson Newell
University of Utah Press, 2015
Library of Congress LC5301.D44N49 2015 | Dewey Decimal 378.15430979487

Here is a look at the life and legacy of an irrepressible innovator. Pushing against both social convention and technological boundaries, L.L. Nunn left enduring marks on economic and social history, labor development, and, educational reform. The Electric Edge of Academe is a bold portrayal of this progressive-era hydroelectric power magnate who, driven by a dynamic conscience, also became a force for social change and educational experimentation.

In 1891, Nunn, working with Tesla and Westinghouse, pioneered the world’s first commercial production of high-tension alternating current (AC) for long-distance transmission—something Thomas Edison deemed dangerous and irresponsible. After creating the Telluride Power Company, Nunn constructed the state-of-the-art Olmsted Power Plant in Provo Canyon and the Ontario Power Works at Niagara Falls. To support this new technology, he developed an imaginative model of industrial training that became so compelling that he ultimately abandoned his entrepreneurial career to devote his wealth and talents to experimenting with a new model of liberal education. In 1917, Nunn founded Deep Springs College in eastern California. The school remains one of the most daring, progressive, and selective institutions of higher learning in America. Newell examines how Nunn’s radical educational ideas have survived internal and external challenges for nearly a century and explores their relevance today. 


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Enhancing Diversity: Educators with Disabilities
Ronald J. Anderson
Gallaudet University Press, 1998
Library of Congress LB2844.1.H35E54 1998 | Dewey Decimal 371.10087

The 43 million people with disabilities form this country’s largest minority group, yet they are markedly under-employed as educators. Enhancing Diversity: Educators with Disabilities paves the way for correcting this costly omission. Editors Anderson, Karp, and Keller have called upon the knowledge of 19 other renowned contributors to address the important issues raised in Enhancing Diversity, including the place of disability in discussions of diversity in education, research on educators with disabilities that validates their capabilities, and information on the qualifications desired in and the demands made of education professionals. Legal precedents are cited and explained, and examples of efforts to place disabled educators are presented, along with recommendations on how disabled individuals and school administrators can work toward increased opportunities. Interviews with 25 disabled educators discussing how they satisfactorily fulfill their professional requirements completes this thoughtful-provoking book.
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Every Day A Holiday: A storyteller's memoir
Elizabeth Ellis
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2014
Library of Congress GR55.E56E45 2014 | Dewey Decimal 398.092

“Elizabeth Ellis’s words jump off the page and into the secret part of your heart where you keep treasured memories and sacred feelings. She sings to you of her life and the lives of others with whom she intersects. Compassionate and thought provoking, an Appalachian/Texan with a whole-world point of view with a little rabble rousing thrown in, Elizabeth Ellis is a true master of the written and spoken word.”
 
                --Robin Bady, Storyteller, Arts Educator, Brooklyn, New York
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Everybody In, Nobody Out: Inspiring Community at Michigan's University Musical Society
Ken Fischer with Robin Lea Pyle
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Library of Congress ML429.F568 | Dewey Decimal 780.92

Housed on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the University Musical Society is one of the oldest performing arts presenters in the country. A past recipient of the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest public artistic honor, UMS connects audiences with wide-ranging performances in music, dance, and theater each season.Between 1987 and 2017, UMS was led by Ken Fischer, who over three decades pursued an ambitious campaign to expand and diversify the organization’s programming and audiences—initiatives inspired by Fischer’s overarching philosophy toward promoting the arts, “Everybody In, Nobody Out.”

The approach not only deepened UMS’s engagement with the university and southeast Michigan communities, it led to exemplary partnerships with distinguished artists across the world. Under Fischer’s leadership, UMS hosted numerous breakthrough performances, including the Vienna Philharmonic’s final tour with Leonard Bernstein, appearances by then relatively unknown opera singer Cecilia Bartoli, a multiyear partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and artists as diverse as Yo-Yo Ma, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Elizabeth Streb, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Though peppered with colorful anecdotes of how these successes came to be, this book is neither a history of UMS nor a memoir of Fischer’s significant accomplishments with the organization. Rather it is a reflection on the power of the performing arts to engage and enrich communities—not by handing down cultural enrichment from on high, but by meeting communities where they live and helping them preserve cultural heritage, incubate talent, and find ways to make community voices heard.
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Expanding historical counsciousness: the development of the Holocaust Educational Foundation
Anita. Weiner
Northwestern University Press, 2003
Library of Congress D804.33.W45 2002 | Dewey Decimal 940.5318071073

The Family Silver: A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance
Sharon O'Brien
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Library of Congress CT275.O25A3 2004 | Dewey Decimal 973.9109239162

Finding herself struggling with depression ("like a rude houseguest, coming and going of its own accord"), Sharon O'Brien set out to understand its origins beyond the biochemical explanations and emotional narratives prevailing in contemporary American culture. Her quest for her inheritance took her straight into the pressures and possibilities of American culture, and then to the heart of her family—the generations who shaped and were shaped by one another and their moment in history. In The Family Silver, as O'Brien travels into her family's past, she goes beyond depression to discover courage, poetry, and grace.

A compassionate and engaging writer, O'Brien uses the biographer's methods to understand her family history, weaving the scattered pieces of the past—her mother's memo books, her father's reading journal, family photographs, tombstones, dance cards, hospital records, the family silver—into a compelling narrative. In the lives of her Irish-American relatives she finds that the American values of upward mobility, progress, and the pressure to achieve sparked both desire and depression, following her family through generations, across the sea, from the Irish famine of the 1840s to Harvard Yard in the late 1960s.

"Many people who write stories of depression or other chronic illnesses tell tales of recovery in the upward-mobility sense, the 'once I was ill, but now I am well' formula that we may find appealing, but doesn't match the messiness of our lives," she writes. "Mine is not such a tale. But it is a recovery tale in another sense—a story of salvage, of rescuing stories from silence." Told with humor and honesty, O'Brien's story will captivate all readers who want to know how they, and their families, have been shaped by the past.
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A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck
Suzanne Bordelon
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
Library of Congress HQ1413.B83B67 2007 | Dewey Decimal 305.42092

The first book-length investigation of a pioneering English professor and theorist at Vassar College, A Feminist Legacy:  The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck explores Buck’s contribution to the fields of education and rhetoric during the Progressive Era. By contextualizing Buck’s academic and theoretical work within the rise of women’s educational institutions like Vassar College, the social and political movement toward suffrage, and Buck’s own egalitarian political and social ideals, Suzanne Bordelon offers a scholarly and well-informed treatment of Buck’s achievements that elucidates the historical and contemporary impact of her work and life.

Bordelon argues that while Buck did not call herself a feminist, she embodied feminist ideals by demanding the full participation of her female students and by challenging power imbalances at every academic, social, and political level.

A Feminist Legacy reveals that Vassar College is an undervalued but significant site in the history of women’s argumentation and pedagogy. Drawing on a rich variety of archival sources, including previously unexamined primary material, A Feminist Legacy traces the beginnings of feminist theories of argumentation and pedagogy and their lasting legacy within the fields of education and rhetoric.

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Fireweed: A Political Autobiography
Gerda Lerner
Temple University Press, 2003
Library of Congress E175.5.L47A3 2002 | Dewey Decimal 973.91092

In Fireweed, Gerda Lerner, a pioneer and leading scholar in women's history, tells her story of moral courage and commitment to social change with a novelist's skill and a historian's command of context. Lerner's memoir focuses on the formative experiences that made her an activist for social justice before her academic career began. The child of a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family, she was still a teenager when a fascist regime came to power in 1934, and she became involved in the underground resistance movement. The Nazi takeover of Austria cast her into prison, then forced her and her family into exile; she alone was able to leave Europe. Once in the United States, she experienced the harshness of the Depression and despair over the fate of her family. Still, she persisted in adapting to the new culture and to becoming a writer. Here she met and married her life-long partner, Carl Lerner, a film editor and director. Together they become deeply involved in left-wing activities, from struggling to unionize the film industry and resisting the blacklist in Hollywood to community organizing for peace, for an interracial civil rights movement, and for better schools in New York City. Lerner insists that her decades of grassroots organizing largely account for the theoretical insights she was later able to bring to the development of women's history. In Fireweed, Lerner presents her life in the context of the major historical events of the twentieth century and the repression of dissent. Hers is a gripping story about surviving hardship and summoning the courage to live according to one's convictions.
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For Duty and Destiny: The Life and Civil War Diary of William Taylor Stott, Hoosier Soldier and Educator
Lloyd A. Hunter
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2011
Library of Congress E506.5 18th.S76 2010 | Dewey Decimal 973.7472092

William Taylor Stott was a native Hoosier and an 1861 graduate of Franklin College, who later became the president who took the college from virtual bankruptcy in 1872 to its place as a leading liberal arts institution in Indiana. The story of Franklin College is the story of W. T. Stott, yet his influence was not confined to the school’s parameters. Stott was an inspirational and intellectual force in the Indiana Baptist community, and a foremost champion of small denominational colleges and of higher education in general. He also fought in the Eighteenth Indiana Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War, rising from private to captain by 1863. Stott’s diary reveals a soldier who was also a scholar.
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Free Spirit: A Biography of Mason Welch Gross
Thomas W. Gross
Rutgers University Press, 2022

Mason Welch Gross, philosopher, educator, athlete, and musician, was inaugurated as president of Rutgers in 1959, when American universities were seen as the key to America's future success. Within ten years, during the turbulent sixties, with its struggles over civil rights and the Vietnam War that played out on college campuses, these same universities were viewed as seeds of discord and communism by a conservative populace that had grown tired of riots, inflation, and general unrest.

Mason Gross was instrumental in building Rutgers from a sleepy private college to a major state university, but he is best known for taking a stand on controversial public issues, including improving the educational opportunities for minorities and defending the civil rights of a professor who chose to speak his mind about Vietnam. This biography builds the story of how he came to believe so strongly about these issues, and why he was willing to stand up for what is right, eventually, and tragically, at the cost of his own health.

For his support of academic freedom and civil rights, in 1966 he received the prestigious Alexander Meiklejohn Award from the American Association of University Professors.

 
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French Lessons: A Memoir
Alice Kaplan
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Library of Congress PC2064.K36A3 2018 | Dewey Decimal 448.0071173

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.

The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.

When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.

French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.
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From Vienna to Chicago and Back: Essays on Intellectual History and Political Thought in Europe and America
Gerald Stourzh
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Library of Congress JA84.E9S75 2007 | Dewey Decimal 320.092

Spanning both the history of the modern West and his own five-decade journey as a historian, Gerald Stourzh’s sweeping new essay collection covers the same breadth of topics that has characterized his career—from Benjamin Franklin to Gustav Mahler, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Charles Beard, from the notion of constitution in seventeenth-century England to the concept of neutrality in twentieth-century Austria.

This storied career brought him in the 1950s from the University of Vienna to the University of Chicago—of which he draws a brilliant picture—and later took him to Berlin and eventually back to Austria. One of the few prominent scholars equally at home with U.S. history and the history of central Europe, Stourzh has informed these geographically diverse experiences and subjects with the overarching themes of his scholarly achievement: the comparative study of liberal constitutionalism and the struggle for equal rights at the core of Western notions of free government. Composed between 1953 and 2005 and including a new autobiographical essay written especially for this volume, From Vienna to Chicago and Back will delight Stourzh fans, attract new admirers, and make an important contribution to transatlantic history.

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Get Your Elbow Off the Horn: Stories through the Years
Jack R. Gannon
Gallaudet University Press, 2020
Library of Congress HV2426.G36G36 2020 | Dewey Decimal 371.912092

Get Your Elbow Off the Horn is a collection of interactions and observations written by Jack R. Gannon, a lifelong advocate for the Deaf community. Warm and amusing, Gannon’s stories begin with his rural childhood in the Ozarks and continue through his experiences as a student, educator, coach, husband, parent, and community leader. These vignettes reveal a down-to-earth family man who believed in making a difference one person at a time.

       Many of his recollections are brief sketches that reveal much about being Deaf—and about being human. From reflecting on the difficult choices parents must make for their children, to recounting awkward communication exchanges, Gannon marries good humor with a poignant advocacy for sign language rights. His stories preserve and share Deaf American life and culture as he experienced it.
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Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility
Scott Slovic
University of Nevada Press, 2008
Library of Congress PS169.E25S58 2008 | Dewey Decimal 810.936

Scott Slovic has spent his life as a teacher, writer, environmental activist, and leader in the field of ecocritical literary studies. In Going Away to Think, he reflects on the twin motivations of his life—the commitment to do some good in the world and the impulse to enjoy life and participate fully in its most intense moments—and he examines the tension created by his efforts to balance these two poles of his responsibility. These essays reveal the complex inner life of one of this generation’s most important environmental critics and literary activists. They range from profound discussions of the role and responsibilities of scholarship to deeply personal ruminations on the impact of family crises and the influence of his wide-ranging travels.
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The Guardian Poplar: A Memoir of Deep Roots, Journey, and Rediscovery
Chase Nebeker Peterson
University of Utah Press, 2012
Library of Congress R154.P46A3 2012 | Dewey Decimal 610.92

When Barney Clark received the Jarvik-7 artificial heart in 1983 and Cold Fusion came under fire in 1989, Chase Peterson, as the University of Utah president, was inevitably pulled into these campus events. While these episodes may be the best known in Peterson’s professional history, they are certainly not the only stories that make his autobiography worth reading.

The Guardian Poplar tells of a man who grew up in small-town Utah and carried his pioneer and Mormon heritage to a New England prep school and later to Harvard. He then returned to Utah as a doctor, but unexpectedly found himself back at Harvard as its dean of admissions, handling issues such as the Vietnam War and racial and gender reform. The book explains how Peterson’s home state recruited him back to become an administrator at the University of Utah and how he would eventually become the university president, taking on new issues and challenges. Peterson recounts these years by drawing on anecdotes that recall the people he served and the moments that brought his life meaning.

This autobiography is a compelling account of how Peterson has managed to balance family and career, handle the tensions that have arisen between his faith and his scientific training, and remain solid in the face of his newest challenge—cancer. The book’s engaging prose and honest reflections are sure to intrigue and inspire readers who know the man well, as well as those readers who simply want to know a man who can be described as dedicated, faithful, hardworking, and hopeful about the future.

“When I first met Chase Peterson as a Harvard freshman—along with our joint friend and brother David Evans—something deeply touched me. It was not only his sincere smile and open embrace but also a sense that here was a kind and courageous man comfortable in his own skin, secure in who he was yet eager to encounter new persons, new experiences, and new challenges. . . . He was from Utah but in New England, a Mormon in old Harvard, and a medical doctor in the deanship of admissions. Little did I know that his journey would enhance and enrich my own—owing to his critical allegiance to his family, his faith, his friends, and to his citizenship of country and world. His prophetic witness at Harvard in the turbulent ‘60s and ‘70s, his promotion of black priesthood in the Mormon church, his support of antiapartheid protests in the ‘80s, and his steadfast defense of academic freedom in the Cold Fusion controversy in the early ‘90s all express his quiet and humble effort to be true to himself—a self grounded in, but
not limited by, a rich Mormon tradition.”—from the foreword by Cornel West

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Hermon Carey Bumpus, Yankee Naturalist
Hermon C. Bumpus, Jr.
University of Minnesota Press, 1947

Hermon Carey Bumpus, Yankee Naturalist was first published in 1947. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In this small volume, Dr. Bumpus' son has outlined the personal history and professional career of his distinguished father, who will be known to countless associates through his work with American museums, and his outstanding career as educator and administrator: as director of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts; as professor of biology at Brown University; as the first director of the American Museum of Natural History; as business manager of the University of Wisconsin; as president of Tufts College; and as chairman of the advisory board of the National Park Service.

The trailside museums and natural history shrines that have taught thousands of Americans the story behind the scenic and natural wonders of our national parks are an enduring memorial to this man of enthusiasm and unceasing energy.

The habitat exhibits in our museums of natural history bear further witness to the imagination and practical originality of this distinguished American naturalist, who was the first president of the American Association of Museums and who contributed so much to the change of attitude and policy at a time when museums of every type were just thawing out of their ice age.

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Incidents in an Educational Life: A Memoir (of Sorts)
John M. Swales
University of Michigan Press, 2009
Library of Congress PE64.S927A3 2009 | Dewey Decimal 428.0092

Incidents in an Educational Life chronicles the educational journey of John M. Swales. A leading scholar in the field of Applied Linguistics and its subfield of English for Specific Purposes, Swales has taught across the globe in places such as Italy, Sweden, Libya, the United Kingdom, and the University of Michigan. His memoir offers a rare glimpse into the professional journey of a prominent scholar and educator.
 
Incidents in an Educational Life explores the lessons Swales learned by teaching and by being taught.  The story follows his gradual transformation from an English as a Second Language teacher to one of the leading international figures in his field, stopping along the way to tell the sometimes amusing, sometimes painful anecdotes that have made him the recognized educator he is today. His entertaining prose make this volume a must-read for anyone considering the field, or the many ways in which we all become teachers.
 
John M. Swales is one of the leading international scholars in the field of English for Specific Purposes. He retired in the summer of 2006 from the University of Michigan after teaching at multiple universities overseas. He is the co-author of the international bestseller Academic Writing for Graduate Students (3rd ed.).
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The Indomitable Mary Easton Sibley: Pioneer of Women's Education in Missouri
Kristie C. Wolferman
University of Missouri Press, 2008
Library of Congress LA2317.S584W65 2008 | Dewey Decimal 370.92

Acknowledged as a significant figure in the history of women on the early western frontier, Mary Easton Sibley may be little known to many modern readers. Yet she was involved in most of the important events in nineteenth-century Missouri, pursued and practiced educational innovations, and founded a school that continues to thrive today. This first biography of Sibley sheds new light on this important pioneer.
            Kristie Wolferman retraces the course of an exciting life, beginning with four-year-old Mary’s arrival in St. Louis in 1804 when her father was appointed attorney general for the District of Louisiana—and the Eastons became one of the first American families to settle in this bustling French town. At fifteen, Mary married George Champlin Sibley, the factor of Fort Osage in Western Missouri, where the young bride lived among the Indians on the edge of the frontier and took up her teaching vocation. She then went on to found Linden Wood in St. Charles, the first college for women west of the Mississippi, and she also taught classes for African American and immigrant children. Throughout the story, Wolferman shows us a life intimately entwined with the history of the state, as Mary witnessed St. Louis in its primitive years and frontier life at Fort Osage, as well as changes in Indian policy and citizenship for former slaves.
Although Sibley’s life has been told in older accounts, Wolferman’s is the first to draw fully on Mary and George Sibley’s journals and letters, with Mary’s journal especially shedding light on her views regarding women’s social and political roles, slavery, temperance, religion, and other topics. By reconstructing Sibley’s inner life as well as her career, Wolferman depicts not merely a frontier heroine and educational pioneer but an assertive woman who did not hesitate to express unconventional views.
            Today, Lindenwood University is a major coeducational institution that continues to honor Mary Sibley’s philosophy and dedication. This biography not only brings to life one of Missouri’s most remarkable women educators but also demonstrates how her story reflects educational, religious, and social developments in both the state and the nation. The Indomitable Mary Easton Sibley recognizes her as a key player on the frontier and as a major part of Missouri’s heritage.
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Inside Academia: Professors, Politics, and Policies
Cahn, Steven M
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Library of Congress LC2341.C34 2018 | Dewey Decimal 378.101

Drawing on decades of experience as a renowned teacher, advisor, administrator, and philosopher, Steven M. Cahn diagnoses problems plaguing America’s universities and offers his prescriptions for improvement. He explores numerous aspects of academic life, including the education of graduate students, the quality of teaching, the design of liberal arts curricula, and the procedures for appointing faculty and considering them for tenure.
 
Inside Academia uses real cases to illustrate how faculty members, deans, and provosts often do not serve the best interests of schools or students. Yet the book also highlights efforts of those who have committed themselves and their institutions to the pursuit of academic excellence.
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An Invitation to Laughter: A Lebanese Anthropologist in the Arab World
Fuad I. Khuri
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Library of Congress GN21.K48A3 2007 | Dewey Decimal 305.80092

For the late Fuad I. Khuri, a distinguished career as an anthropologist began not because of typical concerns like accessibility, money, or status, but because the very idea of an occupation that baffled his countrymen made them—and him—laugh. “When I tell them that ‘anthropology’ is my profession . . . they think I am either speaking a strange language or referring to a new medicine.” This profound appreciation for humor, especially in the contradictions inherent in the study of cultures, is a distinctive theme of An Invitation to Laughter, Khuri’s astute memoir of life as an anthropologist in the Middle East.

A Christian Lebanese, Khuri offers up in this unusual autobiography both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective on life in Lebanon, elsewhere in the Middle East, and in West Africa. Khuri entertains and informs with clever insights into such issues as the mentality of Arabs toward women, eating habits of the Arab world, the impact of Islam on West Africa, and the extravagant lifestyles of wealthy Arabs, and even offers a vision for a type of democracy that could succeed in the Middle East. In his life and work, as these astonishing essays make evident, Khuri demonstrated how the discipline of anthropology continues to make a difference in bridging dangerous divides.

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It All Began in Nuremberg: Between History and Memory
Rita Thalmann
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Library of Congress DS134.42.T43A3 2015 | Dewey Decimal 940.5318092

It All Began in Nuremberg is a translation of Rita Thalmann’s moving memoir, Tout Commença à Nuremberg, originally published in France in 2004. Thalmann’s memoir represents one of the last voices to witness personally the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. The author, a scholar of significance in France, died on August 18, 2013.

Rita Thalmann was born in Nuremberg in 1926 and lived there until 1933, when anti-Semitic events made life intolerable.  Her father abandoned his successful business and moved the family to Switzerland, where they were unwelcome, and then to France.  After settling in Dijon, Rita attended public school until Jews were no longer allowed to pursue an education.  At age fourteen, she took private lessons in English at the home of her teacher, Henriette Connes, who saved Rita from deportation and death by providing her with false identification papers and passing her to the Free Zone with a group of students going on a field trip. Although Rita and her brother managed to escape to Switzerland during the war, most of her family died in the Holocaust.

After the war, Rita Thalmann was determined to continue her education and participate in the struggle against anti-Semitism and discrimination of all types. She achieved the highest level of university teaching in France while publishing seven books. This memoir relates her personal experience of the historical events she spent most of her adult life researching.
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John Bascom and the Origins of the Wisconsin Idea
J. David Hoeveler Jr.
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
Library of Congress LA2317.B2H64 2016 | Dewey Decimal 378.0092

In the Progressive Era of American history, the state of Wisconsin gained national attention for its innovative economic and political reforms. Amidst this ferment, the "Wisconsin Idea" was popularized—the idea that a public university should improve the lives of people beyond the borders of its campus.

During his term as governor (1901–1906), Robert La Follette routinely consulted with University of Wisconsin researchers to devise groundbreaking programs and legislation. Although the Wisconsin Idea is often attributed to a 1904 speech by Charles Van Hise, then president of the University of Wisconsin, David Hoeveler argues that it originated decades earlier, in the creative and fertile mind of John Bascom.

A philosopher, theologian, and sociologist, Bascom (1827–1922) deeply influenced a generation of students at the University of Wisconsin, including La Follette and Van Hise. Hoeveler documents how Bascom drew concepts from German idealism, liberal Protestantism, and evolutionary theory, transforming them into advocacy for social and political reform. He was a champion of temperance, women's rights, and labor, all of which brought him controversy as president of the university from 1874 to 1887. In a way unmatched by any of his peers at other institutions, Bascom outlined a social gospel that called for an expanded role for state governments and universities as agencies of moral improvement.

Hoeveler traces the intellectual history of the Wisconsin Idea from the nineteenth century to such influential Progressive Era thinkers as Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons, who believed university researchers should be a vital source of expertise for government and citizens.
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John Dewey, America's Peace-Minded Educator
Charles F. Howlett and Audrey Cohan
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Library of Congress B945.D44H69 2016 | Dewey Decimal 327.172092

One of America’s preeminent educational philosophers and public intellectuals, John Dewey is perhaps best known for his interest in the study of pragmatic philosophy and his application of progressive ideas to the field of education. Carrying his ideas and actions beyond the academy, he tied his philosophy to pacifist ideology in America after World War I in order to achieve a democratic world order. Although his work and life have been well documented, his role in the postwar peace movement has been generally overlooked.
 
In John Dewey, America’s Peace-Minded Educator, authors Charles F. Howlett and Audrey Cohan take a close look at John Dewey’s many undertakings on behalf of world peace. This volume covers Dewey’s support of, and subsequent disillusionment with, the First World War as well as his postwar involvement in trying to prevent another world war. Other topics include his interest in peace movements in education, his condemnation of American military intervention in Latin America and of armaments and munitions makers during the Great Depression, his defense of civil liberties during World War II, and his cautions at the start of the atomic age. The concluding epilogue discusses how Dewey fell out of favor with some academics and social critics in the 1950s and explores how Dewey’s ideas can still be useful to peace education today.
 
Exploring Dewey’s use of pragmatic philosophy to build a consensus for world peace, Howlett and Cohan illuminate a previously neglected aspect of his contributions to American political and social thought and remind us of the importance of creating a culture of peace through educational awareness.
 
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John Dewey's Essays in Experimental Logic
John Dewey. Edited by D. Micah Hester, and Robert B. Talisse. Introduction by
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
Library of Congress BC50.D42 2007 | Dewey Decimal 160

Offering a new edition of Dewey’s 1916 collection of essays

This critical edition of John Dewey’s 1916 collection of writings on logic, Essays in Experimental Logic—in which Dewey presents his concept of logic as the theory of inquiry and his unique and innovative development of the relationship of inquiry to experience—is the first scholarly reprint of the work in one volume since 1954. Essays in Experimental Logic, edited by D. Micah Hester and Robert B. Talisse, uses the authoritative texts from the Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 (published by Southern Illinois University Press) and includes as well articles from leading journals representing various contemporary schools of philosophy that criticized Dewey’s experimentalism.

Culling materials from six volumes of the chronologically arranged Collected Works, this single-volume edition of Essays marks a crucial point in Dewey’s intellectual development: one in which Dewey critically engages idealistic and intuitionist theorists and lays the groundwork for his mature theory of inquiry. The text includes a new introduction by renowned Dewey scholar Tom Burke that places Essays in philosophical and historical context. In addition to the original essays, Essays in Experimental Logic also features five critical essays by Dewey’s contemporaries, including Bertrand Russell, Wendell T. Bush, R. F. Alfred Hoernlé, H. T. Costello, and C. S. Peirce. 

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Joseph Carter Corbin: Educator Extraordinaire and Founder of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff
Gladys Turner Finney
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2017
Library of Congress LA2317.C634165F56 2017 | Dewey Decimal 370.92

Having operated now for more than 140 years, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB) was founded in 1875 as Branch Normal College by Joseph Carter Corbin, a native of Ohio and the son of former slaves. Corbin, who had a classical education, was the first African American superintendent of public education in Arkansas and literally built the school from the ground up. There was a desperate need for teachers in Arkansas, as there was a great desire for education by former slaves who had been prohibited from learning to read and write.

Corbin himself cleared the land that would soon house the college and then set about to create a school that would produce the first African American teachers following the Reconstruction years. For almost three decades, he worked tirelessly on behalf of Arkansas’s black community to meet the need for educators.

In the early days, Corbin worked both as the president and the janitor so that he could control costs and keep the school going. He often waived matriculation fees and other expenses to allow impoverished students the opportunity to graduate and become qualified to teach throughout Arkansas.

Although he might not have realized it at the time, Corbin was a member of the so-called aristocrats of color, the African American elite of national prominence and a group that included such luminaries as Booker T. Washington. Corbin was a true giant in the history of education in Arkansas. His story, told by a former UAPB student, is monumental for the scope of what one man was able to accomplish.

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Journal of Rehearsals: A Memoir by Wallace Fowlie
Wallace Fowlie
Duke University Press

Renowned writer, critic, and teacher, Wallace Fowlie has devoted his life to the study and teaching of the French language and literature. Author and translator of thirty books, Fowlie’s contributions include translations of Rimbaud (the complete works), Molieré, Claudel, Baudelaire, and Cocteau, and literary studies of, among others, Rimbaud, Stendhal, Gide, and Mallarmé. His widely acclaimed Journal of Rehearsals, originally published in 1977, is the first in his series of memoirs. In this passionate book, Fowlie explores his "love affair" with the literature and culture of France, and offers insights into his own intellectual and social life, his early love for the French language, and his encounters and relationships with an impressive cast of characters: Kenneth Burke, Jean Cocteau, Martha Graham, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, and others.
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Kane from Canada
Mary Kane
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016

Learning on the Left: Political Profiles of Brandeis University
Stephen J. Whitfield
Brandeis University Press, 2020

Brandeis University is the United States’ only Jewish-sponsored nonsectarian university, and while only being established after World War II, it has risen to become one of the most respected universities in the nation. The faculty and alumni of the university have made exceptional contributions to myriad disciplines, but they have played a surprising formidable role in American politics.

Stephen J. Whitfield makes the case for the pertinence of Brandeis University in understanding the vicissitudes of American liberalism since the mid-twentieth century. Founded to serve as a refuge for qualified professors and students haunted by academic antisemitism, Brandeis University attracted those who generally envisioned the republic as worthy of betterment.  Whether as liberals or as radicals, figures associated with the university typically adopted a critical stance toward American society and sometimes acted upon their reformist or militant beliefs. This volume is not an institutional history, but instead shows how one university, over the course of seven decades, employed and taught remarkable men and women who belong in our accounts of the evolution of American politics, especially on the left. In vivid prose, Whitfield invites readers to appreciate a singular case of the linkage of political influence with the fate of a particular university in modern America.
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Let’s Go In: My Journey to a University Presidency
T. Alan Hurwitz
Gallaudet University Press, 2020
Library of Congress HV2534.H87A3 2019 | Dewey Decimal 378.753092

Alan Hurwitz ascended the ranks of academia to become the president of not one, but two, universities—National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology and Gallaudet University. In Let’s Go In: My Journey to a University Presidency, Hurwitz discusses the unique challenges he encountered as a Deaf person, and the events, people, and experiences that shaped his personal and professional life. He demonstrates the importance of building a strong foundation for progressive leadership roles in higher education, and provides insights into the decision-making and outreach required of a university president, covering topics such as community collaboration, budget management, and networking with public policy leaders. He also stresses that assessing students’ needs should be a top priority. As he reflects on a life committed to service in higher education, Hurwitz offers up important lessons on the issues, challenges, and opportunities faced by deaf and hard of hearing people, and in doing so, inspires future generations of deaf people to aim for their highest goals.

Additional images, videos, and supplemental readings are available at the Gallaudet University Press/Manifold online platform. Visit the GU Press website to access this multimedia resource.
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The Life and Legacy of Fred Newton Scott
Donald C. Stewart
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997
Library of Congress PE64.S39S74 1997 | Dewey Decimal 428.0092

By the end of the nineteenth century, rhetoric had not yet been established as a legitimate discipline. Fred Newton Scott (1860-1931) spent his life broadening the scope of rhetoric studies through his imaginative, interdisciplinary research. Scott was both a pragmatic reformer and a visionary scholar who used empirical methods and cognitive psychology to expand this field. In this study, Donald Stewart and his wife Patricia examine Scott's essays, speeches, and books to write the first comprehensive biography of the man who became one of the most influential figures in language studies during the early twentieth century.
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A Life on the Middle West's Never-Ending Frontier
Willard L. Boyd
University of Iowa Press, 2019
Library of Congress LD2566.B69A3 2019 | Dewey Decimal 378.0092

University of Iowa legend Willard L. “Sandy” Boyd is a proud middle westerner. His decades of service to the university began in 1954, when he arrived as a law professor. He later became president of the University of Iowa from 1969 to 1981, and led the school through times that were fraught not just for the university but for the country. During the intense polarization of the late sixties and early seventies, Sandy’s compassion and steady leadership ensured that dissent on campus would be honored and would not stop the university’s educational mission. He quickly became admired, not simply for his professional achievements but also for his personal integrity.

His memoir, interspersed with personal wisdom gleaned over more than six decades of service and leadership, encapsulates Sandy’s shrewd yet optimistic view of the public university as an institution. At every stage in his life—in the U.S. Navy during World War II, while practicing law or teaching, and in leadership positions at Chicago’s Field Museum and the University of Iowa— Sandy relied on his principles of open disclosure, inclusiveness, and respect for differences to guide him on issues that matter.

This chronicle of Sandy’s experiences throughout his life shows us the evolution both of the University of Iowa and of the nation writ large. More importantly, this book gives us a lens through which to examine our present situation, whether debating free speech on campus, the role of the arts and humanities in civil society, or the importance of funding for educational and cultural institutions.
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Man of Vision: Arkansas Education and the Legacy of Arch Ford
Cindy Burnett Beckman
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2016
Library of Congress LA240.B43 2016 | Dewey Decimal 370.9767

As commissioner of the Arkansas Department of Education from 1953 to 1978, Arch Ford served under five governors. His vision was to expand educational opportunities because he believed education was the foundation for improving people’s lives. Throughout his career, he campaigned for increased educational funding, better-qualified teachers, and higher teachers’ salaries. Ford helped lead the state in peacefully integrating its schools and established twenty-three vocational-technical schools across the state. During Ford’s tenure, the Arkansas Children’s Colony was established to provide educational services to the developmentally disabled, and the Arkansas Educational Television Network was set up to provide instructional programming across the state.

The state also expanded educational opportunities to include kindergarten, special education, community colleges, and adult education. His leadership left Arkansas with a strong educational system that continued to advance. This was his legacy.
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Metamorphoses: Memoirs of a Life in Medicine
William G. Anlyan, M. D.
Duke University Press, 2004
Library of Congress R154.A59A3 2004 | Dewey Decimal 610.92

William G. Anlyan, a dedicated doctor and gifted administrator, was a leader in the transformation of Duke University Hospital from a regional medical center into one of America’s foremost biomedical research and educational institutions. Anlyan’s fifty-five-year career at Duke University spanned a period of extraordinary change in the practice of medicine. He chronicles those transformations—and his role in them—in this forthright memoir.

Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1925, and schooled in the British tradition, Anlyan attended Yale University as an undergraduate and medical student before coming to the relatively unknown medical school at Duke University in 1949 for an internship in general and thoracic surgery. He stayed on, first as a resident, then as a staff surgeon. By 1961, he was a full professor of surgery. In 1964, Anlyan was named dean of the medical school, the first in a series of administrative posts at the medical school and hospital. Anlyan’s role in the transformation of the Duke University Medical Center into an internationally renowned health system is manifest: he restructured the medical school and hospital and supervised the addition of almost four million square feet of new or renovated space. He hired outstanding administrators and directed a staff that instituted innovative programs and groundbreaking research centers, such as the Cancer Center and the Physician’s Assistant Program.

Anlyan describes a series of metamorphoses in his own life, in the world of medicine, in Durham, and at Duke. At the time of his prep school upbringing in Egypt, medicine was a matter of controlling infectious diseases like tuberculosis and polio. As he became an immigrant medical student and then a young surgeon, he observed vast advances in medical practice and changes in the financing of medical care. During his tenure at Duke, Durham was transformed from a sleepy mill and tobacco town into the “City of Medicine,” a place where patients routinely travel for open-heart surgery and cutting-edge treatments for cancer and other diseases.

Anyone interested in health care, medical education, and the history of Duke University will find Anlyan’s memoir of interest.

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Module 10: Teaching with Archives: A Guide for Archivists, Librarians, and Educators
Sammie Morris
Society of American Archivists, 2016

Provides practical guidance to archivists, librarians,and educators on teaching with archival materials,offering tips for beginners as well as seasoned instructors.
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My Iowa Journey: The Life Story of the University of Iowa's First African American Professor
Philip G. Hubbard
University of Iowa Press, 1999
Library of Congress LD2567.H83A3 1999 | Dewey Decimal 378.120973

Philip Hubbard's life story begins in 1921 in Macon, a county seat in the Bible Belt of north central Missouri, whose history as a former slave state permeated the culture of his childhood. When he was four his mother moved her family 140 miles north to Des Moines in search of the greater educational opportunity that Iowa offered African American students. In this recounting of the effects of that journey on the rest of his life, Phil Hubbard merges his private and public life and career into an affectionate, powerful, and important story.

Hubbard graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in electrical engineering in 1946; by 1954 he had received his Ph.D. in hydraulics. The College of Engineering extended a warm academic welcome, but nonacademic matters were totally different: Hubbard was ineligible for the housing and other amenities offered to white students. Intelligent, patient, keenly aware of discrimination yet willing to work from within the university system, he advanced from student to teacher to administrator, retiring in 1991 after decades of leadership in the classroom and the conference room.

Hubbard's major accomplishments included policies that focused on human rights; these policies transformed the makeup of students, faculty, and staff by seeking to eliminate discrimination based on race, religion, or other nonacademic factors and by substituting affirmative action for the traditional old-boy methods of selecting faculty and administrators. At the same time that he was advancing the cause of human rights and cultural diversity in education, his family was growing and thriving, and his descriptions of home life reveal one source of his strength and inspiration.

The decades that Hubbard covers were vital in the evolution of the nation and its educational institutions. His dedication to the agenda of public higher education has always been matched by his sensitivity to the negative effects of discrimination and his gentle perseverance toward his goals of inclusion, acceptance, and fairness. His vivid personal and institutional story will prove valuable at this critical juncture in America's racial history.

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My Life of Language: A Memoir
ogden
Gallaudet University Press, 2017
Library of Congress HV2534.O43A3 2017 | Dewey Decimal 371.912092

Paul W. Ogden has dedicated his life to educating young deaf and hard of hearing people and raising awareness of what it means to be deaf in a hearing world. He has taught and mentored a generation of teachers, and his classic volume, The Silent Garden, has served as a guide for parents and educators for over thirty years. Now he tells his personal story of challenges faced and lessons learned, revealing that the critical, guiding factors for him have always been language and successful communication.
               Born in a time when many deaf children had no access to language, Paul learned spoken and written language skills at a young age through the painstaking efforts of his mother. His tight-knit family, which included one deaf and two hearing older brothers, facilitated open and constant communication using a variety of methods. His father was a pastor who was involved in the civil rights movement. Despite the family’s closeness, his father struggled with depression, an illness that would take the life of one of Paul’s brothers. As a student at a residential deaf school where the use of American Sign Language (ASL) was suppressed, Paul continued to build on the speech and lipreading skills he had learned at home. He returned home for high school and graduated as co-valedictorian—unaware of the standing ovation he received as he walked to the podium.
               Following a rewarding experience as an undergraduate at Antioch College, Paul went on to earn a PhD from the University of Illinois, a rare accomplishment for a deaf person at that time. During his graduate studies, he finally had the opportunity to learn ASL. As an award-winning professor of Deaf Studies at California State University, Fresno, he successfully petitioned for the university to recognize ASL as a language, and he established the Silent Garden program, which has grown into a flourishing provider of training and resources to support the Deaf community. In My Life of Language, Paul offers eloquent reflections on both the joyful and difficult periods of his life as he navigated relationships, faced discrimination, questioned his faith, and found great happiness in his marriage.
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My Many Selves: The Quest for a Plausible Harmony
Wayne C. Booth
Utah State University Press, 2006
Library of Congress PN75.B62A3 2006 | Dewey Decimal 809

In his autobiography, My Many Selves, Wayne C. Booth is less concerned with his professional achievements---though the book by no means ignores his distinguished career---than with the personal vision that emerges from a long life lived thoughtfully. For Booth, even the autobiographical process becomes part of a quest to harmonize the diverse, often conflicting aspects of who he was. To see himself clearly and whole, he broke the self down, personified the fragments, uncovered their roots in his experience and background, and engaged those selves and experiences in dialogue. Basic to his story and to its lifelong concern with ethics and rhetoric was his Mormon youth in rural Utah. In adulthood he struggled with that background, abandoning most Mormon doctrines, but he retained the identity, ethical questions, and concern with communication that this upbringing gave him.

The uncommon wisdom and careful attention that empower Wayne Booth's many other books cause My Many Selves to transcend its genre, as the best memoirs always do. The book becomes a window through which we who read it will see our own conflicts, our own ongoing struggle to live honestly and ethically in the world.

Wayne Booth died in October 2005, soon after completing work on this autobiography.

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A New Day in the Delta: Inventing School Desegregation As You Go
David W. Beckwith
University of Alabama Press, 2008
Library of Congress LA2317.B34B43 2009 | Dewey Decimal 371.10092

A New Day in the Delta is a fresh and appealing memoir of the experience of a young white college graduate in need of a job as the Vietnam War reached its zenith. David Beckwith applied and was accepted for a teaching position in the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1969. Although it seemed to him a bit strange that he was accepted so quickly for this job while his other applications went nowhere, he was grateful for the opportunity. Beckwith reported for work to learn that he was to be assigned to an all-black school as the first step in Mississippi’s long-deferred school desegregation.
 
The nation and Mississippi alike were being transformed by war and evolving racial relations, and Beckwith found himself on the cutting edge of the transformation of American education and society in one of the most resistant (and poor) corners of the country. Beckwith’s revealing and often amusing story of the year of mutual incomprehension between an inexperienced white teacher and a classroom full of black children who had had minimal contact with any whites. This is history as it was experienced by those who were thrust into another sort of "front line."
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Not Even Past: A History of the Department of English, The Ohio State University, 1870–2000
Morris Beja and Christian K. Zacher
Impromptu Press, 2019
Library of Congress LD4249.5.E44B45 2019 | Dewey Decimal 378.77157

Not Even Past: A History of the Department of English, The Ohio State University, 1870–2000 provides a thorough and fascinating institutional history of a program central to the mission of the university and a history of an entire complex discipline. OSU’s Department of English is one of the largest and most prominent in the US and, in fact, the world. Inevitably, then, a study of that department entails an account of the role of English and American literature in higher education from the nineteenth century to modern and contemporary times; an exploration of the expanding role of the modern “English” department and discipline; the role—or, at times, the lack of a significant role—of women and minorities within the department; and the careers and accomplishments of numerous prominent critics, scholars, and creative writers—including, for example, James Thurber and his work with a number of OSU faculty.  Due attention is paid to the controversies and troubles of the late 1960s and the shutdown of the university in 1970. In addition to the two major authors, ten experts provide extended sections on the history of their own fields. The result is both comprehensive and deeply felt.
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Obsessed: The Cultural Critic’s Life in the Kitchen
Elisabeth Bronfen
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Library of Congress TX714.B774 2019 | Dewey Decimal 641.5

Winner of the 2020 Gourmand Awards, Translation Section, USA

Even the most brilliant minds have to eat. And for some scholars, food preparation is more than just a chore; it’s a passion. In this unique culinary memoir and cookbook, renowned cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen tells of her lifelong love affair with cooking and demonstrates what she has learned about creating delicious home meals. She recounts her cherished food memories, from meals eaten at the family table in postwar Germany to dinner parties with friends. Yet, in a thoughtful reflection on the pleasures of cooking for one, she also reveals that some of her favorite meals have been consumed alone.
 
Though it contains more than 250 mouth-watering recipes, Obsessed is anything but a conventional cookbook. As she shares a lifetime of knowledge acquired in the kitchen, Bronfen hopes to empower both novice and experienced home chefs to improvise, giving them hints on how to tweak her recipes to their own tastes. And unlike cookbooks that assume readers have access to an unlimited pantry, this book is grounded in reality, offering practical advice about food storage and reusing leftovers. As Bronfen serves up her personal stories and her culinary wisdom, reading Obsessed is like sitting down to a home-cooked meal with a clever friend.
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Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir
David Grene
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Library of Congress PA85.G646A3 2007 | Dewey Decimal 880.9

A fiercely independent thinker, colorful storyteller, and spirited teacher, David Grene devoted his life to two things: farming, which he began as a boy in Ireland and continued into old age; and classics, which he taught for several decades that culminated in his translating and editing, with Richmond Lattimore, of The Complete Greek Tragedies.

In this charming memoir, which he wrote during the years leading up to his death in 2002 at the age of eighty-nine, Grene weaves together these interests to tell a quirky and absorbing story of the sometimes turbulent and always interesting life he split between the University of Chicago—where he helped found the Committee on Social Thought—and the farm he kept back in Ireland.

Charting the path that took him from Europe to Chicago in 1937, and encompassing his sixty-five-year career at the university, Grene’s book draws readers into the heady and invigorating climate of his time there. And it is elegantly balanced with reflections stemming from his work on the farm where he hunted, plowed and regularly traveled on horseback to bring his cows home for milking. Grene’s form and humor are quite his own, and his brilliant storytelling will enthrall anyone interested in the classics, rural Ireland, or twentieth-century intellectual history, especially as it pertains to the University of Chicago.

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Once a Professor: A Memoir of Teaching in Turbulent Times
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
Library of Congress LA2317.A63A3 2018 | Dewey Decimal 378.12092

Farm boy professor shares a life of lessons.  

“I never wanted to be a professor,” writes Jerry Apps in the introduction to Once a Professor. Yet a series of unexpected events and unplanned experiences put him on an unlikely path—and led to a thirty-eight-year career at the University of Wisconsin. 

In this continuation of the Apps life story begun in his childhood memoir Limping through Life, Wisconsin’s celebrated rural storyteller shares stories from his years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1957 to 1995, when he left the university to lecture and write fulltime. During those years Apps experienced the turmoil of protests and riots at the UW in the 1960s, the struggles of the tenure process and faculty governance, and the ever-present pressure to secure funding for academic research and programs. 

Through it all, the award-winning writer honed a personal philosophy of education—one that values critical thinking, nontraditional teaching approaches, and hands-on experiences outside of the classroom. Colorful characters, personal photos, and journal entries from the era enrich this account of an unexpected campus career.
 
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One Version of the Facts: My Life in the Ivory Tower
Henry E. Duckworth
University of Manitoba Press, 2000

In his engaging memoirs, One Version of the Facts: My Life in the Ivory Tower, Dr. Henry Duckworth takes readers from his student days in Winnipeg and Chicago in the 1930s to his time as president of the University of Winnipeg (1971-1981) and chancellor of the University of Manitoba. An accomplished physicist, he wrote the first definitive text in English on mass spectroscopy, discovered the last stable isotope (platinum), and helped create important programs at universities and at the National Research Council. He also served on numerous councils for scientific and university organizations, and rubbed shoulders with Nobel Prize winners at international conferences.With humour and modesty, Henry Duckworth recalls trends, changes, and crises he witnessed throughout his long university career. He offers his observations, his opinions, his "version of the facts," providing a special insight into critical years in Canada's university education history, as well as his own specialty, atomic research.
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Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American
Blumberg, Ilana
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Library of Congress DS113.8.A4B58 2018 | Dewey Decimal 378.56948092

Fifteen years into a successful career as a college professor, Ilana Blumberg encounters a crisis in the classroom that sends her back to the most basic questions about education and prompts a life-changing journey that ultimately takes her from East Lansing to Tel Aviv.  As she explores how civic and religious commitments shape the culture of her humanities classrooms, Blumberg argues that there is no education without ethics. When we know what sort of society we seek to build, our teaching practices follow.
 
In vivid classroom scenes from kindergarten through middle school to the university level, Blumberg conveys the drama of intellectual discovery as she offers novice and experienced teachers a pedagogy of writing, speaking, reading, and thinking that she links clearly to the moral and personal development of her students.
 
Writing as an observant Jew and as an American, Blumberg does not shy away from the difficult challenge of balancing identities in the twenty-first century: how to remain true to a community of origin while being a national and global citizen. As she negotiates questions of faith and citizenship in the wide range of classrooms she traverses, Blumberg reminds us that teaching - and learning - are nothing short of a moral art, and that the future of our society depends on it.
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Out of the Red: My Life of Gangs, Prison, and Redemption
Christian L. Bolden
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Library of Congress HV6439.U7T36 2020 | Dewey Decimal 364.1066092

Frank Tannenbaum Outstanding Book Award from the American Society of Criminology​

Out of the Red is one man’s pathbreaking story of how social forces and personal choices combined to deliver an unfortunate fate. After a childhood of poverty, institutional discrimination, violence, and being thrown away by the public education system, Bolden's life took him through the treacherous landscape of street gangs at the age of fourteen. The Bloods offered a sense of family, protection, excitement, and power. Incarcerated during the Texas prison boom, the teenage former gangster was thrust into a fight for survival as he navigated the perils of adult prison. As mass incarceration and prison gangs swallowed up youth like him, survival meant finding hope in a hopeless situation and carving a path to his own rehabilitation. Despite all odds, he forged a new path through education, ultimately achieving the seemingly impossible for a formerly incarcerated ex-gangbanger.
 
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Privilege and Prejudice: The Life of a Black Pioneer
Clifton R. Wharton
Michigan State University Press, 2015
Library of Congress E185.97.W58A3 2015 | Dewey Decimal 338.8

Privilege and Prejudice is a stereotype-defying autobiography. It reveals a Black man whose good fortune in birth and heritage and opportunity of time and place helped him to forge breakthroughs in four separate careers. Clifton R. Wharton Jr. entered Harvard at age 16. The first Black student accepted to the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, he went on to receive a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago—another first. For twenty-two years he promoted agricultural development in Latin America and Southeast Asia, earning a post as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation. He again pioneered higher education firsts as president of Michigan State University and chancellor of the sixty-four-campus State University of New York system. As chairman and CEO of TIAA-CREF, he was the first Black CEO of a Fortune 500 company. His commitment to excellence culminated in his appointment as deputy secretary of state during the Clinton administration. A remarkable story of persistence and courage, Privilege and Prejudice also documents the challenges of competing in a society where obstacles, negative expectations, and stereotypical thinking remained stubbornly in place. An absorbing and candid narrative, it describes a most unusual childhood, a remarkable family, and a historic career.
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The Professor and the Profession
Robert Bechtold Heilman
University of Missouri Press, 1999
Library of Congress PE68.U5H45 1999 | Dewey Decimal 420.71173

Robert Bechtold Heilman is one of the last survivors of a remarkable generation of American critics that included such literary giants as Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson, men to whom literary criticism was not a profession or an academic necessity but a calling. In a distinguished career that has spanned nearly six decades, Heilman has influenced generations of scholars and critics through his exquisitely written commentaries on subjects ranging from William Shakespeare to Thomas Hardy.

In The Professor and the Profession, Heilman looks back over his life and times from his perspective as both an academic and an American. Differing in theme and subject matter, the essays included in this collection are ultimately unified by the author himself. Whether the topic is football, Robert Penn Warren, or education, Heilman's generous and intelligent voice emerges on every page. Yet this collection is more than one academic's personal reminiscences; it is a reflection upon American literary history itself.

In the first section of essays, "The Self Displayed," Heilman reveals how he developed from a small-town boy into a distinguished critic and teacher, touching upon his participation in baseball and love of football along the way. "Writers Portrayed" and "Literary Types and Problems Inspected," the following sections, offer his opinions on the past and on the current state of American literary criticism, including personal portraits of such renowned friends as Eric Voegelin, Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roethke, and Malcolm Cowley. The final section, "Education Examined," is an enlightening inquiry into the development of American universities in the twentieth century.

A fascinating chronicle of a significant academic life, The Professor and the Profession will appeal to a broad array of scholars, from young academics wanting to know where they came from to those of Heilman's generation who can appreciate this personal reminiscence into the world of letters.

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A Professor at the End of Time: The Work and Future of the Professoriate
Best, John
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Library of Congress LB1778.2.B474 2017 | Dewey Decimal 378.12

A Professor at the End of Time tells one professor’s story in the context of the rapid reconfiguration of higher education going on now, and analyzes what the job included before the supernova of technological innovation, the general influx of less-well-prepared students, and the diminution of state and federal support wrought wholesale changes on the profession.
 
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Raised at Rutgers: A President's Story
McCormick, Richard L
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Library of Congress LD4752.7.M44A3 2014 | Dewey Decimal 378.74941

In Raised at Rutgers, Richard L. McCormick tells what it is like to run a major state university and vividly portrays the often contentious environment in which a university president operates today. He unsparingly recounts his decade of leadership, including his own missteps—those we know about and those we didn’t—as he strove to obtain adequate resources for the university, to overhaul the often confusing organization of the New Brunswick campus, to manage the growth and success of intercollegiate athletics, and to deepen Rutgers’s acceptance of its obligations as the state university of New Jersey.

With understandable pride, McCormick recalls and relates Rutgers’s academic achievements during his presidency, including a renewed focus on undergraduate education and a significant increase in funding for research. Most dramatically, he chronicles the University’s protracted efforts to reclaim Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (and ultimately to acquire most of UMDNJ), a goal that was finally realized with crucial help from Governor Chris Christie and former governor Tom Kean.

Among the most honest accounts ever written of a college presidency, Raised at Rutgers takes the reader inside one of the best, and liveliest, public universities in America and highlights many of the most critical issues facing higher education today.
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Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography
David S. Brown
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Library of Congress E175.5.H55B76 2006 | Dewey Decimal 973.07202

Richard Hofstadter (1916-70) was America’s most distinguished historian of the twentieth century. The author of several groundbreaking books, including The American Political Tradition, he was a vigorous champion of the liberal politics that emerged from the New Deal. During his nearly thirty-year career, Hofstadter fought public campaigns against liberalism’s most dynamic opponents, from McCarthy in the 1950s to Barry Goldwater and the Sun Belt conservatives in the 1960s. His opposition to the extreme politics of postwar America—articulated in his books, essays, and public lectures—marked him as one of the nation’s most important and prolific public intellectuals. 

In this masterful biography, David Brown explores Hofstadter’s life within the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism. A fierce advocate of academic freedom, racial justice, and political pluralism, Hofstadter charted in his works the changing nature of American society from a provincial Protestant foundation to one based on the values of an urban and multiethnic nation. According to Brown, Hofstadter presciently saw in rural America’s hostility to this cosmopolitanism signs of an anti-intellectualism that he believed was dangerously endemic in a mass democracy. 

By the end of a life cut short by leukemia, Hofstadter had won two Pulitzer Prizes, and his books had attracted international attention. Yet the Vietnam years, as Brown shows, culminated in a conservative reaction to his work that is still with us. Whether one agrees with Hofstadter’s critics or with the noted historian John Higham, who insisted that Hofstadter was “the finest and also the most humane intelligence of our generation,” the importance of this seminal thinker cannot be denied. As this fascinating biography ultimately shows, Hofstadter’s observations on the struggle between conservative and liberal America are relevant to our own times, and his legacy challenges us to this day.
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The Rise of Roosevelt University: Presidential Reflections
Theodore L. Gross
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005
Library of Congress LD4724.R617G76 2005 | Dewey Decimal 378.7731

Underscoring professional and educational issues pertinent to higher learning at universities across the country, Theodore L. Gross’ s memoir of his years in academia chronicles his successful fourteen-year presidency at Chicago’ s Roosevelt University, a period of leadership that resulted in an upsurge of fund-raising, sharp increases in enrollment and endowment, and the transformation of an urban campus into a metropolitan university.

 

Beginning with a description of his childhood and adolescent education and experiences, Gross recalls his years as a faculty member and academic administrator at the City College of New York from 1958 to 1978, when the college was moving from selective admissions to open enrollment. He also served in administrative positions at Penn State University and SUNY Purchase before accepting the Roosevelt presidency in 1988. Focusing on the tension between the promise of open admissions and aspirations of academic excellence, The Rise of Roosevelt University: Presidential Reflections relates Gross’ s perceptions of the failure of open admissions at CCNY and his resolution to learn from those mistakes while at Roosevelt.

           

Drawing on private correspondence and conversations, essays, university documents, and other archival materials and research, Gross re-creates the highs and lows of his quest to make Roosevelt distinctive. His strategic plan included the appointment of senior executives and deans, the creation of a performing arts conservatory, the development of an educational alliance with other universities, online instruction, an honors program, a Chicago School of Real Estate, an MBA for Chinese students, the Partners in Corporate Education program, and the implementation of a second comprehensive campus. He describes the creation of the Albert A. Robin campus in Schaumburg and the realization of Roosevelt as a metropolitan university, creating a vivid portrait of the suburban culture, the educational context of large community colleges throughout the northwest suburbs, the development of a community advisory board that helped secure funds, and the improved morale of faculty and administration.

 

Gross’ s fund-raising efforts increased the endowment from $3 million to $33 million, and a capital campaign surpassed the goal of $45 million. In this volume, he describes meetings with major donors, the successes and failures of contributions, and the development of greater alumni support in the context of fund-raising throughout Chicago. He also analyzes the highly publicized legal dispute between the Auditorium Theatre Council and Roosevelt University over ownership of the world renowned theatre, pointing out how the case epitomizes issues that all universities confront: the university’ s need to control its entities, detrimental publicity, sectional and regional conflicts, and a split in the arts community. Throughout this narrative, Gross juxtaposes his personal life and professional career, dramatizing how the two are related.

 

More than a retelling of anecdotes and statistics, the volume provides a rare perspective on the intersection of higher education and politics in Chicago. Gross analyzes the different public and private universities in the city and in surrounding Cook County to describe their relationships with ethnicity, religion, class, and with city hall. He also covers the Daley political machine’ s influence on higher education, the politics of university governance, the spectacular growth of the western suburbs, and city versus suburban identities.

 

A personal road map of the development of higher education through the post– World War II decades, The Rise of Roosevelt University: Presidential Reflections mirrors the social climate that affected the country’ s universities at large, from the open admissions policies and student rebellions of the ’ 60s and ’ 70s, to the urban blight and suburban sprawl of the ’ 80s, to the strategic planning and expansion of the ’ 90s and the new century. The result is a captivating account of the issues involved in presidential transition and leadership, the strategic development of metropolitan universities, and the future role of Roosevelt and similar institutions.  

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The Sage in the Cathedral of Books: The Distinguished Chinese American Library Professional Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee
Yang, Yang
Ohio University Press, 2016
Library of Congress Z720.L38Y3613 2016 | Dewey Decimal 020.92

The biography of Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee, who was awarded the highly prestigious Melvil Dewey Medal by the American Library Association in 2015, will be welcomed by readers interested in knowing not only more about Lee’s personal achievements and contributions in librarianship but also about the rapid changes in the library profession in general. The biography, written by Ms. Yang Yang of China Central Television in Beijing, was first published in Chinese in China in 2011. It was republished in Taiwan with added information in 2014. This English edition, translated by Dr. Ying Zhang of the University of California in Irvine, was updated by Lee.

Throughout his childhood and youth, Lee experienced tremendous hardship during the brutal Sino-Japanese War and then the Chinese civil war, described in the first three chapters. After arriving in the United States as a graduate student from Taiwan in 1957, he struggled to realize the American dream by studying hard and working diligently in the field of librarianship for nearly half a century.

The biography explores Lee’s career at major academic libraries, beginning at the University of Pittsburgh to his retirement from Ohio University, including his seven years of library directorship at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand, under the sponsorship of the U.S. Agency for International Development. After his first retirement, Lee was invited by OCLC to become a Visiting Distinguished Scholar. From there he was appointed Chief of the Asian Division at the Library of Congress and retired for the second time in 2008.

The biography also highlights Lee’s contributions in international librarianship, especially in the promotion of library cooperation between the United States and China.
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Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning
Paul E. Peterson
Harvard University Press, 2011
Library of Congress LA226.P44 2010 | Dewey Decimal 370.973

In this book Peterson interprets the history of American schools by placing major educational reformers in the context of their times and relates their thinking to our own era by scrutinizing the often unanticipated consequences of their commitments and ideas. These extraordinary individuals provided the critical ideas and articulated the ideals that motivated many others to search for ways to save the schools from the limitations in which they were embedded: Horace Mann, John Dewey, Martin Luther King, Al Shanker, William Bennett, and James S. Coleman. The drive to centralize was pervasive despite repeatedly expressed reform desire to customize education. Peterson argues that education has become an increasingly labor intensive industry that must reverse direction and become more capital intensive or it will descend in quality. Fortunately, technological change is making it possible radically alter the way in which education services are delivered, providing a new chance to save our schools.
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Schooling Without Labels: Parents, Educators, and Inclusive Education
Douglas Biklen
Temple University Press, 1992
Library of Congress LC4031.B48 1992 | Dewey Decimal 371.90973

Douglas Biklen closely examines the experiences of six families in which children with disabilities are full participants in family life in order to understand how people who have been labeled disabled might become full participants in the other areas of society as well. He focuses on the contradictions between what some families have achieved, what they want for their children, and what society and its social policies allow. He demonstrates how the principles of inclusion that govern the lives of these families can be extended to education, community life, and other social institutions.

The parents who tell their stories here have actively sought inclusion of their children in regular schools and community settings; several have children with severe or multiple disabilities. In discussing issues such as normalization, acceptance, complete schooling, circles of friends, and community integration, these parents describe the challenge and necessity of their children's "leading regular lives."



In the series Health, Society, and Policy, edited by Sheryl Ruzek and Irving Kenneth Zola.
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The Secret Lives of Teachers
Anonymous
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Library of Congress LB1777.3.N4D49 2016 | Dewey Decimal 373.1102097471

Welcome to “East Hudson,” an elite private school in New York where the students are attentive, the colleagues are supportive, and the tuition would make the average person choke on its string of zeroes. You might think a teacher here would have little in common with most other teachers in America, but as this veteran educator—writing anonymously—shows in this refreshingly honest account, all teachers are bound by a common thread. Stripped of most economic obstacles and freed up by anonymity, he is able to tell a deeper story about the universal conditions, anxieties, foibles, generosities, hopes, and complaints that comprise every teacher’s life. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes scandalous, but always recognizable to anyone who has ever walked into a classroom, closed the door, and started their day.
           
This is not a how-to manual. Rather, the author explores the dimensions of teaching that no one else has, those private thoughts few would dare put into a book but that form an important part of the day-to-day experience of a teacher. We see him ponder the clothes that people wear, think frankly about money (and the imbalance of its distribution), get wrangled by parents, provide on-the-fly psychotherapy, drape niceties over conversations that are actually all-out warfare, drop an f-bomb or two, and deal with students who are just plain unlikeable. We also see him envy, admire, fear, and hope; we see him in adulation and uncertainty, and in energy and exhaustion. We see him as teachers really are: human beings with a complex, rewarding, and very important job.

There has been no shortage of commentary on the teaching profession over the decades, but none quite like this. Unflinching, wry, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, it’s written for every teacher out there who has ever scrambled, smirked, or sighed—and toughed it out nonetheless. 
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Seeing Language in Sign: The Work of William C. Stokoe
Jane Maher
Gallaudet University Press, 2010

In 1955 William C. Stokoe arrived at Gallaudet College (later Gallaudet University) to teach English where he was first exposed to deaf people signing. While most of his colleagues dismissed signing as mere mimicry of speech, Stokoe saw in it elements of a distinctive language all its own. Seeing Language in Sign traces the process that Stokoe followed to prove scientifically and unequivocally that American Sign Language (ASL) met the full criteria of linguistics—phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and use of language—to be classified a fully developed language.

     This perceptive account dramatically captures the struggle Stokoe faced in persuading the establishment of the truth of his discovery. Other faculty members ridiculed or reviled him, and many deaf members of the Gallaudet community laughed at his efforts. Seeing Language in Sign rewards the reader with a rich portrayal of an undaunted advocate who, like a latter-day Galileo, pursued his vision doggedly regardless of relentless antagonism. He established the Linguistics Research Laboratory, then founded the journal Sign Language Studies to sustain an unpopular dialogue until the tide changed. His ultimate vindication corresponded with the recognition of the glorious culture and community that revolves around Deaf people and their language, ASL.


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Stanley Fish, America's Enfant Terrible: The Authorized Biography
Gary A. Olson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Library of Congress PN75.F57O47 2016 | Dewey Decimal 801.95092

One of the twentieth century’s most original and influential literary theorists, Stanley Fish is also known as a fascinatingly atypical, polarizing public intellectual; a loud, cigar-smoking contrarian; and a lightning rod for both the political right and left. The truth and the limitations of this reputation are explored in Stanley Fish, America’s Enfant Terrible by Gary A. Olson. At once a literary biography and a traditional life story, this engrossing volume details Fish’s vibrant personal life and his remarkably versatile career.
 
Born into a tumultuous family, Fish survived life with an emotionally absent father and a headstrong mother through street sports and troublemaking as much as through his success at a rigorous prep school. As Olson shows, Fish’s escape from the working-class neighborhoods of 1940s and 1950s Providence, Rhode Island, came with his departure for the university life at the University of Pennsylvania and then Yale. His meteoric rise through the academic ranks at a troubled Vietnam-era UC-Berkeley was complemented by a 1966 romp through Europe that included drag racing through the streets of Seville in his Alfa Romeo. He went on to become an internationally prominent scholar at Johns Hopkins before moving to Duke, where he built a star-studded academic department that became a key site in the culture and theory wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Olson discusses Fish’s tenure as a highly visible dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago who clashed publicly with the state legislature. He also covers Fish’s most remarkable and controversial books, including Fish’s masterpiece, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost," which was a critical sensation and forever changed the craft of literary criticism, as well as Professional Correctness and Save the World on Your Own Time, two books that alienated Fish from most liberal-minded professors in English studies.
 
Olson concludes his biography of Fish with an in-depth analysis of the contradictions between Fish’s public persona and his private personality, examining how impulses and events from Fish’s childhood shaped his lifelong practices and personality traits. Also included are a chronology of the major events of Fish’s life and never-before-published photos.
 
Based on hundreds of hours of recorded interviews with friends, enemies, colleagues, former students, family members, and Fish himself, along with material from the Stanley Fish archive, Stanley Fish, America’s Enfant Terrible is a clearly written narrative of the life of an important and controversial scholar. 
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Straddling Worlds: The Jewish-American Journey of Professor Richard W. Leopold
Steven J. Harper
Northwestern University Press, 2008
Library of Congress E184.37.L46H37 2007 | Dewey Decimal 973.049240092

Author Steven J. Harper pays tribute to a well-respected teacher with this biography of a distinguished William Smith Mason Professor of History at Northwestern University, Richard W. Leopold. Harper had maintained contact with his former professor, as had hundreds of other alumni, meeting with him in the apartment to which his age and health confined him. When Leopold invited him to review his biographical materials to prepare a New York Times obituary, Harper began to catch glimpses of a deeper history in Leopold’s life: that of Jews in America after the turn of the century.

Across two years of Sundays, Leopold’s life came together and Harper began to notice parallels between the life of his professor and the life of his recently deceased father-in-law. Both grew up in less orthodox households but were still identified as Jewish by others; both attended Ivy League colleges, fighting (and beating) anti-Semitism there; and both served their country with distinction in World War II. The two men persevered through a twentieth century Jewish-American experience that they and many others shared, but rarely discussed. Steven Harper has caught them both on the page just in time to document their lives, their culture, and the nation that grew and changed alongside them.

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Street of Dreams: The Nature and Legacy of the 1960s
Douglas M. Knight
Duke University Press, 1989
Library of Congress E841.K58 1989 | Dewey Decimal 973.922

The 1960s are well documented but not well understood; the rhetoric of and reaction to the decade continues to trouble American public discourse. This work by Douglas Knight, who served as president of Duke University from 1963 to 1969 during clashes on that campus, is not only an honest account of one institution’s experience, but draws parallels to the situations on other campuses and seeks to comprehend the time and its enduring influence.
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Teaching from the Heart and Soul: The Robert F. Panara Story
Harry G. Lang
Gallaudet University Press, 2007
Library of Congress HV2534.P36L36 2007 | Dewey Decimal 371.912

The Sixth Volume in the Deaf Lives Series

Robert F. Panara lost his hearing from spinal meningitis in 1931 at the age of ten. However, he could read and write, and with his friends’ help, Bob (as he was known), made it through high school. His new solitude created a new passion – reading, reading, and reading. The stage was set for the emergence of one of the great deaf educators in modern time, a life fully captured in Harry G. Lang’s Teaching from the Heart and Soul: The Robert F. Panara Story.

Bob Panara’s many achievements began after his discovery of Gallaudet College in the 1940s. There, he wrote “The Significance of the Reading Problem,” which first expressed his belief that teaching “comes from the heart and soul.” The article secured him his first job at the New York School for the Deaf in White Plains. Bob returned to teach at Gallaudet College from 1948 until 1965, when he left to help found the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) and the National Theatre of the Deaf (NTD) — all in the same year. He continued to expand arts and literature at NTID until his retirement in 1987.

Bob Panara’s genius resides in the people he inspired with his vivacious teaching style. He believed ardently in involving students, that they should “be the book.” Former students tell story after story about his fabulous interpretations of drama and poetry, a legacy confirmed by his own story in Teaching from the Heart and Soul.

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Teaching in the Terrordome: Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach for America
Heather Kirn Lanier
University of Missouri Press, 2012
Library of Congress LC5133.B35L36 2012 | Dewey Decimal 373.238

Only 50 percent of kids growing up in poverty will earn a high school diploma. Just one in ten will graduate college. Compelled by these troubling statistics, Heather Kirn Lanier joined Teach For America (TFA), a program that thrusts eager but inexperienced college graduates into America’s most impoverished areas to teach, asking them to do whatever is necessary to catch their disadvantaged kids up to the rest of the nation.
With little more than a five-week teacher boot camp and the knowledge that David Simon referred to her future school as “The Terrordome,” the altruistic and naïve Lanier devoted herself to attaining the program’s goals but met obstacles on all fronts. The building itself was in such poor condition that tiles fell from the ceiling at random. Kids from the halls barged into classes all day, disrupting even the most carefully planned educational activities. In the middle of one lesson, a wandering student lit her classroom door on fire. Some colleagues, instantly suspicious of TFA’s intentions, withheld their help and supplies. (“They think you’re trying to ‘save’ the children,” one teacher said.) And although high school students can be by definition resistant, in west Baltimore they threw eggs, slashed tires, and threatened teachers’ lives. Within weeks, Lanier realized that the task she was charged with—achieving quantifiable gains in her students’ learning—would require something close to a miracle.
Superbly written and timely, Teaching in the Terrordome casts an unflinching gaze on one of America’s “dropout factory” high schools. Though Teach For America often touts its most successful teacher stories, in this powerful memoir Lanier illuminates a more common experience of “Teaching For America” with thoughtful complexity, a poet’s eye, and an engaging voice. As hard as Lanier worked to become a competent teacher, she found that in “The Terrordome,” idealism wasn’t enough. To persevere, she had to rely on grit, humility, a little comedy, and a willingness to look failure in the face. As she adjusted to a chaotic school administration, crumbling facilities, burned-out colleagues, and students who perceived their school for the failure it was, she gained perspective on the true state of the crisis TFA sets out to solve. Ultimately, she discovered that contrary to her intentions, survival in the so-called Charm City was a high expectation.
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The The Best Weapon for Peace: Maria Montessori, Education, and Children's Rights
Erica Moretti
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

The Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori (1870–1952) is best known for the teaching method that bears her name. She was also a lifelong pacifist, although historians tend to consider her writings on this topic as secondary to her pedagogy. In The Best Weapon for Peace, Erica Moretti reframes Montessori’s pacifism as the foundation for her educational activism, emphasizing her vision of the classroom as a gateway to reshaping society. Montessori education offers a child-centered learning environment that cultivates students’ development as peaceful, curious, and resilient adults opposed to war and invested in societal reform.
 
Using newly discovered primary sources, Moretti examines Montessori’s lifelong pacifist work, including her ultimately unsuccessful push for the creation of the White Cross, a humanitarian organization for war-affected children. Moretti shows that Montessori’s educational theories and practices would come to define chilren’s rights once adopted by influential international organizations, including the United Nations. She uncovers the significance of Montessori’s evolving philosophy of peace and early childhood education within broader conversations about internationalism and humanitarianism.
 
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Toward a Feminist Rhetoric: The Writing of Gertrude Buck
Joann Campbell
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996
Library of Congress PN183.B83 1996 | Dewey Decimal 808.0092

The nature of Gertrude Buck, professor of English at Vassar College from 1897 until her death in 1922, is well-known to anyone interested in the history of composition.  Her writing is less well-known, much of it now out of print.  JoAnn Campbell gathers together for the first time the major work of this innovative thinker and educator, including her most important articles on rhetorical theory; The Social Criticism of Literature, a forerunner of reader-response literary theory; selections from her textbooks on argumentative and expository writing; poetry; fiction; her play Mother-Love, and unpublished reports and correspondence from the English department at Vassar.

In her introduction, Campbell describes the masculine rhetorical tradition within which Buck wrote and taught.  Her theories of language and composition quietly challenged the dominant rhetorics issuing from Harvard and Amherst.  An unusually productive scholar, Buck wrote textbooks for her female students that affirmed women’s intellectual abilities and trained them to participate in political debate.  In the Vassar English Department she found a community of women among whom she could practice and develop her theories regarding rhetoric, pedagogy, and the role of the individual in society.

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Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt
William J. Edwards
University of Alabama Press, 1993
Library of Congress LC2851.S575E35 1993 | Dewey Decimal 378.76138

Born in Snow Hill, in 1869, William J. Edwards graduated in 1893 from Tuskegee Institute, then under the direction of Booker T. Washington, and set out to find a way to use in his own life the values he had learned at Tuskeegee. He did not have to look far. Edwards toured Wilcox, Monroe, Butler, and Dallas counties and found a large black population in need of both liberal and practical education. Following the model set by Tuskegee, Edwards founded Snow Hill Institute in 1893 and was its principal and guiding hand for 31 years.

Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt is a memoir written by Edwards in 1918, when the school was 25 years old. It not only provided a fascinating portrait of the conditions of black people and the state of race relations in Alabama at the time, but also tells of one person's determination to uplift his race, particularly through eductation, in the years following Reconstruction.
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Undercurrents: From Oceanographer to University President
John V. Byrne
Oregon State University Press, 2018
Library of Congress LD4346.O417B95 2018 | Dewey Decimal 378.0092

Undercurrents recounts the life and career of John Byrne, who started as a geologist at an oil company and retired as president of a major land grant university. He came to Oregon State in 1960 as a faculty member, later becoming department chair, dean, director of the Hatfield Marine Science Center, and vice president for Research and Graduate Studies. Along the way, he took leave from the university to serve the US government, first as a program director for oceanography at the National Science Foundation, and later as the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, before returning to OSU in 1984 as its twelfth president.

As president of OSU, John Byrne used the lessons learned in industry and government to guide the university through a period of turbulence caused by severe state budget restrictions. During this period of economic contraction, OSU continued under Byrne’s leadership to grow in programs, facilities, and external funding. Byrne was one of the first to introduce Total Quality Management techniques to higher education. He emphasized the importance of international education and was a supporter of significant academic reform in higher education.

While focusing on his professional career, Byrne’s memoir also shares personal stories of a childhood and youth shaped by the Great Depression and World War II. Undercurrents demonstrates on every page the curiosity, intellect, and humanity that made John Byrne successful as a scientist, educator, and administrator. Anyone pursuing a career in science or academia, and anyone interested in the history and legacy of land grant universities will welcome this richly detailed and warmly written account of Byrne’s career.
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White Boy: A Memoir
Mark D. Naison
Temple University Press, 2002
Library of Congress E185.98.N35A3 2002 | Dewey Decimal 974.723

How does a Jewish boy who spent the bulk of his childhood on the basketball courts of Brooklyn wind up teaching in one of the city's pioneering black studies departments? Naison's odyssey begins as Brooklyn public schools respond to a new wave of Black migrants and Caribbean immigrants, and established residents flee to virtually all-white parts of the city or suburbs. Already alienated by his parents' stance on race issues and their ambitions for him, he has started on a separate ideological path by the time he enters Columbia College. Once he embarks on a long-term interracial relationship, becomes a member of SDS, focuses his historical work on black activists, and organizes community groups in the Bronx, his immersion in the radical politics of the 1960s has emerged as the center of his life. Determined to keep his ties to the Black community, even when the New Left splits along racial lines, Naison joined the fledgling African American studies program at Fordham, remarkable then as now for its commitment to interracial education.This memoir offers more than a participant's account of the New Left's racial dynamics; it eloquently speaks to the ways in which political commitments emerge from and are infused with the personal choices we all make.
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William J. Spillman and the Birth of Agricultural Economics
Laurie Winn Carlson
University of Missouri Press, 2005
Library of Congress HD1771.5.S65C37 2005 | Dewey Decimal 338.1092

William J. Spillman (1863–1931), considered the founder of agricultural economics, was a scientist and popular agricultural educator for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). As the author of more than three hundred articles and four books, Spillman left a lasting mark on American agriculture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with his pioneering solutions for the problems of overproduction and low prices.
Spillman grew up in Lawrence County, Missouri, and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Missouri in Columbia. In this biography, Laurie Winn Carlson looks at Spillman’s career as he moved from Missouri to Washington, D.C., where his concepts shaped what became the agricultural New Deal and, eventually, the current farm allotment programs. By placing Spillman’s story within the larger context of American agricultural history, Carlson takes readers inside the USDA during the years our nation’s agricultural policy took shape. She studies the development of the field of genetics, the conflicts regarding agricultural education and the creation of the Cooperative Extension Service, the overproduction crisis after World War I and Spillman’s ideas for allotment, and the commercial fertilizer industry and the Law of Diminishing Returns. She also looks at efforts to restrict research, the censorship of publications directed toward farmers, and personal rivalries within the USDA.
This examination of agriculture through Spillman’s eyes reveals that industrialized agriculture was not inevitable but a carefully crafted ideology that farmers were pushed to embrace. Although highly contested by farmers as well as employees within the USDA, industry, government, politics, and technology, industrialized agriculture moved people off the land, replacing them with large-scale mechanized production.
An iconoclast within the USDA bureaucracy, Spillman was a “farm evangelist,” taking his message of diversified farming across the country. He believed that farmers should integrate livestock and rotate crops, rather than continue the monoculture production that was evolving due to the increasing industrialization of farming. Those issues, as well as the Law of Diminishing Returns, sustainability, and popular education, all matters to which Spillman devoted his career, are more important today than ever.
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William Watts Folwell: The Autobiography and Letters of a Pioneer of Culture
William Folwell
University of Minnesota Press, 1933

William Watts Folwell: The Autobiography and Letters of a Pioneer Culture was first published in 1933. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original In a three-room farmhouse in Romulus, New York, where a spinning wheel stood by the fireplace and home-dipped candles lighted the long evenings, William Watts Folwell was born on February 14, 1833. His life of ninety-six years spanned the Century of Progress. It was on February 14, 1933, exactly one hundred years from the day of his birth, that the University of Minnesota Press brought out this volume containing Dr. Folwell’s own story of his long life. He traveled in early Victorian Europe, met Browning in Italy and Jakob Grimm in Germany, corresponded with Matthew Arnold, served as an officer in the Civil War, and in 1869 became the first president of the University of Minnesota. From that time until his death in September 1929, he maintained an unflagging interest in the affairs of the university and the state, finishing the four-volume History of Minnesota only a few months before his death.
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With a Critical Eye: An Intellectual and His Times
Arthur J. Vidich
University of Tennessee Press, 2009

Internationally renowned sociologist, Arthur J. Vidich (1922-2006), was an active researcher and teacher whose career spanned the second half of the twentieth century. With a Critical Eye: An Intellectual and His Times recounts Vidich’s career in the wider cultural context of his life and work. Providing a window into post-World War II intellectual life, the richness of the autobiography lies not only in Vidich’s perspectives on the academic world, but also in his personal and sociological observations about the world around him.

Best known for his book, Small Town in Mass Society (co-authored with Joseph Bensman, 1958), Vidich taught for more than forty years at the New School for Social Research in New York. He published eighteen books, co-edited a book series with Robert Jackall, and was the founding editor of the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society.
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Women and the Society of Biblical Literature
Nicole L. Tilford
SBL Press, 2019
Library of Congress BS501.A1W66 2019 | Dewey Decimal 220.0601

Celebrate 125 years of women's history in the Society of Biblical Literature.

Fourteen years after eight male biblical scholars met in Philip Schaff's study to create the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, the Society admitted its first woman, Anna Ely Rhoads, in 1894. Since Rhoads joined, the careers and lives of women in SBL have changed radically from those earliest members, whose careers were largely tied to the careers of their fathers or spouses and to institutions concerned with the education of young women. Current members now serve on editorial boards and committees; women present papers and publish books; they teach and mentor students. Leading women biblical scholars from around the world reflect on their experiences studying the Bible academically in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This volume is a valuable tool for scholars and students interested in the lives and experiences of women in academic fields, the history of the SBL, and developments in the academic study of the Bible.

Features

  • An essay on the history of women in the SBL, tracing some of the struggles and accomplishments of the Society's earliest members
  • More than twenty-five autobiographical reflections from former SBL presidents, Council members, editors, and active members
  • Reflections from members who specialize in a variety of subdisciplines, representing a range of academic and alternative academic careers
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Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography
Eli Goldblatt
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012
Library of Congress LC151.G653 2012 | Dewey Decimal 302.2244

In this engrossing memoir, poet and literacy scholar Eli Goldblatt shares the intimate ways reading and writing influenced the first thirty years of his life—in the classroom but mostly outside it. Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography traces Goldblatt’s search for home and his growing recognition that only through his writing life can he fully contextualize the world he inhabits.
 
Goldblatt connects his educational journey as a poet and a teacher to his conception of literacy, and assesses his intellectual, emotional, and political development through undergraduate and postgraduate experiences alongside the social imperatives of the era. He explores his decision to leave medical school after he realized that he could not compartmentalize work and creative life or follow in his surgeon father’s footsteps. A brief first marriage rearranged his understanding of gender and sexuality, and a job teaching in an innercity school initiated him into racial politics. Literacy became a dramatic social reality when he witnessed the start of the national literacy campaign in postrevolutionary Nicaragua and spent two months finding his bearings while writing poetry in Mexico City.

Goldblatt presents a thoughtful and exquisitely crafted narrative of his life to illustrate that literacy exists at the intersection of individual and social life and is practiced in relationship to others. While the concept of literacy autobiography is a common assignment in undergraduate and graduate writing courses, few books model the exercise. Writing Home helps fill that void and, with Goldblatt’s emphasis on “out of school” literacy, fosters an understanding of literacy as a social practice.

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94 books about Educators
Aldo Leopold
His Life and Work
Curt D. Meine
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

This biography of Aldo Leopold follows him from his childhood as a precocious naturalist to his profoundly influential role in the development of conservation and modern environmentalism in the United States.

[more]

American Egyptologist
The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute
Jeffrey Abt
University of Chicago Press, 2011

James Henry Breasted (1865–1935) had a career that epitomizes our popular image of the archaeologist. Daring, handsome, and charismatic, he traveled on expeditions to remote and politically unstable corners of the Middle East, helped identify the tomb of King Tut, and was on the cover of Time magazine. But Breasted was more than an Indiana Jones—he was an accomplished scholar, academic entrepreneur, and talented author who brought ancient history to life not just for students but for such notables as Teddy Roosevelt and Sigmund Freud.

In American Egyptologist, Jeffrey Abt weaves together the disparate strands of Breasted’s life, from his small-town origins following the Civil War to his evolution into the father of American Egyptology and the founder of the Oriental Institute in the early years of the University of Chicago. Abt explores the scholarly, philanthropic, diplomatic, and religious contexts of his ideas and projects, providing insight into the origins of America’s most prominent center for Near Eastern archaeology.
 
An illuminating portrait of the nearly forgotten man who demystified ancient Egypt for the general public, American Egyptologist restores James Henry Breasted to the world and puts forward a brilliant case for his place as one of the most important scholars of modern times.
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Another City upon a Hill
A New England Memoir
Joseph Conforti
Tagus Press, 2013
This gripping memoir is both a personal story and a portrait of a distinctive New England place—Fall River, Massachusetts, once the cotton cloth capital of America. Growing up, Joseph Conforti’s world was defined by rolling hills, granite mills, and forests of triple-deckers. Conforti, whose mother was Portuguese and whose father was Italian, recounts how he negotiated those identities in a city where ethnic heritage mattered. Paralleling his own account, Conforti shares the story of his family, three generations of Portuguese and Italians who made their way in this once-mighty textile city.
[more]

Anthropological Lives
An Introduction to the Profession of Anthropology
Virginia R Dominguez
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Anthropological Lives introduces readers to what it is like to be a professional anthropologist.  It focuses on the work anthropologists do, the passions they have, the way that being an anthropologist affects the kind of life they lead. The book draws heavily on the experiences of twenty anthropologists interviewed by Virginia R. Dominguez and Brigittine M. French, as well as on the experiences of the two coauthors. Many different kinds of anthropologists are represented, and the book makes a point of discussing their commonalities as well as their differences. Some of the anthropologists included work in the academy, some work outside the academy, and some work in institutions like museums. Included are cultural anthropologists, linguistic anthropologists, medical anthropologists, biological anthropologists, practicing anthropologists, and anthropological archaeologists. A fascinating look behind the curtain, the stories in Anthropological Lives will inform anyone who has ever wondered what you do with a degree in anthropology.

Anthropologists profiled: Leslie Aiello, Lee Baker, João Biehl, Tom Boellstorff, Jacqueline Comito, Shannon Dawdy, Virginia R. Dominguez, T.J. Ferguson, Brigittine French, Agustín Fuentes, Amy Goldenberg, Mary Gray, Sarah Green, Monica Heller, Douglas Hertzler, Ed Liebow, Mariano Perelman, Jeremy Sabloff, Carolyn Sargent, Marilyn Strathern, Nandini Sundar, Alaka Wali.
 
[more]

Arthur Morgan
A Progressive Vision for American Reform
Aaron D. Purcell
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
On May 19, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the appointment of Arthur Morgan (1878–1975), a water-control engineer and college president from Ohio, as the chairman of the newly created Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). With the eyes of the nation focused on the reform and recovery promised by the New Deal, Morgan remained in the national spotlight for much of the 1930s, as his visionary plans for the TVA drew both support and criticism. In this thoughtful biography, Aaron D. Purcell re-assesses Morgan’s long life and career and provides the first detailed account of his post-TVA activities and fascination with utopian writer Edward Bellamy. As Purcell demonstrates, Morgan embraced an alternative type of Progressive Era reform throughout his life which was rooted in nineteenth-century socialism, an overlooked, but important, strain in American political thought.
            Purcell pinpoints Morgan’s reading of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward while a teenager as a watershed moment in the development of his vision for building modern American society. He recounts Morgan’s early successes as an engineer, budding Progressive leader, and educational reformer; his presidency of Antioch College; and his revolutionary but contentious tenure at the TVA. After his dismissal from the TVA, Morgan wrote extensively, eventually publishing over a dozen books, including a biography of Edward Bellamy, and countless articles. He also raised money to support an experimental community in Kerala, India, sharing Mahatma Gandhi’s belief in small, self-sustaining communities cooperatively supported by persons of strong moral character. At the same time, however, Morgan retained many of his late-nineteenth century beliefs, including eugenics, as part of his societal vision. His authoritarian administrative style and moral rigidity limited his ability to attract large numbers to his community-based vision.
            As Purcell demonstrates, Morgan remained an active reformer well into the second half of the twentieth century, carrying forward a vision for American reform decades after his Progressive Era contemporaries had faded into obscurity. By presenting Morgan’s life and career within the context of the larger social and cultural events of his day, this revealing biographical study offers new insight into the achievements and motivations of an important but historically neglected American reformer.
 
Aaron D. Purcell is director of special collections at Virginia Tech. He is the author of White Collar Radicals: TVA’s Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era and Academic Archives: Managing the Next Generation of College and University Archives, Records, and Special Collections. His articles have appeared in the The American Archivist, The Journal of East Tennessee History, The Historian, and the Tennessee Historical Quarterly.
[more]

At the Crossroads of Fear and Freedom
The Fight for Social and Educational Justice
Robert L. Green
Michigan State University Press, 2016
Robert L. Green, a friend and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr., served as education director for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference during a crucial period in Civil Rights history, and—as a consultant for many of the nation’s largest school districts—he continues to fight for social justice and educational equity today.
This memoir relates previously untold stories about major Civil Rights campaigns that helped put an end to voting rights violations and Jim Crow education; explains how Green has helped urban school districts improve academic achievement levels; and explains why this history should inform our choices as we attempt to reform and improve American education. Green’s quest began when he helped the Kennedy Administration resolve a catastrophic education-related impasse and has continued through his service as one of the participants at an Obama administration summit on a current academic crisis.
It is commonly said that education is the new Civil Rights battlefield. Green’s memoir, At the Crossroads of Fear and Freedom: The Fight for Social and Educational Justice, helps us understand that educational equity has always been a central objective of the Civil Rights movement.

 
[more]

Becoming Historians
Edited by James M. Banner, Jr. and John R. Gillis
University of Chicago Press, 2009

In this unique collection, the memoirs of eleven historians provide a fascinating portrait of a formative generation of scholars. Born around the time of World War II, these influential historians came of age just before the upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s and helped to transform both their discipline and the broader world of American higher education. The self-inventions they thoughtfully chronicle led, in many cases, to the invention of new fields—including women’s and gender history, social history, and public history—that cleared paths in the academy and made the study of the past more capacious and broadly relevant. In these stories—skillfully compiled and introduced by James Banner and John Gillis—aspiring historians will find inspiration and guidance, experienced scholars will see reflections of their own dilemmas and struggles, and all readers will discover a rare account of how today’s seasoned historians embarked on their intellectual journeys.

[more]

The Best of Pickering
Sam Pickering
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Praise for Sam Pickering:

"Pickering has all of Thurber's humor, and he writes as well as E. B. White. He writes with passion, wit, and a strange personal note of self-mockery; he is humanely educated, wise, and capable of a wide range of stylistic effects."
----Jay Parini

". . . he writes in the tradition of Montaigne hammering together a ramshackle affair of surprising nooks, crannies and additions-all under the same roof."
---The Oxford American

"Pickering has the natural essayist's intimate yet distanced take on the world that combines a devotion to particulars . . . with a near-indifference to the status- and achievement-mongering that marks modern life."
---Publishers Weekly

"Pickering writes with the sensitivity and craft of a poet, finding meaning in the commonplace and ordinary."
---Library Journal

"Pickering's genre is unique, but I'm not sure anyone else can write this stuff. I can live with that, as long as Pickering himself continues to wend through the forests, classrooms, airports, billiards championships, hometown parades, and his inner world of Tennessee gags and characters."
---Hartford Courant


His writing is as unique and recognizable as the music of Mozart, the painting of Picasso, or the poetry of Dickinson. Yet most Americans likely know Sam Pickering, the University of Connecticut English professor, from the movie Dead Poets Society. In the film, Robin Williams plays an idiosyncratic instructor---based on Pickering---who employs some over-the-top teaching methods to keep his subjects fresh and his students learning.

Fewer probably know that Pickering is the author of more than 16 books and nearly 200 articles, or that he's inspired thousands of university students to think in new ways. And, while Williams may have captured Pickering's madcap classroom antics, he didn't uncover the other side of the author-Sam Pickering as one of our great American men of letters.

The Best of Pickering amply demonstrates Pickering's amazing powers of perception, and gives us insight into the mind of a writer nearly obsessed with turning his back on the conventional trappings of American success-a writer who seems to prefer lying squirrel's-eye-level next to a bed of daffodils in the spring or trespassing on someone else's property to pursue a jaunt through joe-pye weed and goldenrod. Indeed, Pickering's philosophy, at least on paper, may very well be "Now is the only time."

If you haven't met Sam Pickering before, prepare to be surprised and delighted by these wry and sometimes self-deprecating essays that are witty and elegant and concrete yet wander widely, and include Pickering's well-trod fictional Southern town of Carthage, Tennessee, full of strange goings-on. This definitive collection of the best of Pickering is a must for Pickering fans and a fine introduction for the uninitiated to one of our greatest men of letters.
[more]

Beyond the Frontier
The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing
David S. Brown
University of Chicago Press, 2009

As the world went to war in 1941, Time magazine founder Henry Luce coined a term for what was rapidly becoming the establishment view of America’s role in the world: the twentieth century, he argued, was the American Century. Many of the nation’s most eminent historians—nearly all of them from the East Coast—agreed with this vision and its endorsement of the vigorous use of power and persuasion to direct world affairs. But an important concentration of midwestern historians actively dissented. With Beyond the Frontier, David S. Brown tells their little-known story of opposition.

Raised in a cultural landscape that combined agrarian provincialism with reform-minded progressivism, these historians—among them Charles Beard, William Appleman Williams, and Christopher Lasch—argued strenuously against the imperial presidencies, interventionist foreign policies, and Keynesian capitalism that swiftly shaped cold war America. Casting a skeptical eye on the burgeoning military-industrial complex and its domestic counterpart, the welfare state, they warned that both components of the liberal internationalist vision jeopardized the individualistic, republican ethos that had long lain at the heart of American democracy.

Drawing on interviews, personal papers, and correspondence of the imoprtant players in the debate, Brown has written a fascinating follow-up to his critically acclaimed biography of Richard Hofstadter. Illuminating key ideas that link midwestern writers from Frederick Jackson Turner all the way to William Cronon and Thomas Frank, Beyond the Frontier is intellectual history at its best: grounded in real lives and focused on issues that remain salient—and unresolved—even today.

[more]

Bringing Montessori to America
S. S. McClure, Maria Montessori, and the Campaign to Publicize Montessori Education
Gerald L. Gutek and Patricia A. Gutek
University of Alabama Press, 2017
2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title!

Bringing Montessori to America traces in engrossing detail one of the most fascinating partnerships in the history of American education—that between Maria Montessori and S. S. McClure, from their first meeting in 1910 until their final acrimonious dispute in 1915.
 
Born on the Adriatic, Montessori first entered the world stage in 1906 as the innovator of a revolutionary teaching method that creates an environment where children learn at their own pace and initiate skills like reading and writing in a spontaneous way. As her school in Rome swiftly attracted attention, curiosity, and followers, Montessori recruited disciples whom she immersed in a rigorous and detailed teacher-training regimen of her own creation.
 
McClure was an Irish-born media baron of America’s Gilded Age, best known as the founder and publisher of McClure’s Magazine. Against the backdrop of Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose insurgency, the brilliant and mercurial McClure used his flagship publication as a vehicle to advance Progressive Party causes. After meeting in 1910, McClure and Montessori embarked on a five-year collaboration to introduce Montessori’s innovative teaching style in the United States.
 
Gerald and Patricia Gutek trace the dramatic arc of the partnership between the Italian teacher and American publisher united by a vision of educational change in the United States. After her triumphal lecture tour in 1913, Montessori, secure in her trust of her American partner, gave McClure her power of attorney and returned to Italy. The surge in popularity of Montessori education in America, however, deeply concerned Montessori, who had heretofore exerted total control over her method, apparatus, schools, and teacher training. The American entrepreneurial spirit, along with a desire to disseminate the Montessori method quickly, led to major conflicts between the Italian educator and American businesspeople, particularly McClure. Feeling betrayed, Montessori ended her relationship with her erstwhile collaborator.
 
Gutek and Gutek describe the fascinating story of this first wave of Montessori education in the United States, which did not sustain itself during Montessori’s lifetime. It would not be until the 1950s that Montessori education was revived with the successful establishment of Montessori academies throughout the United States.
[more]

The Calling of History
Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth
Dipesh Chakrabarty
University of Chicago Press, 2015
A leading scholar in early twentieth-century India, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958) was knighted in 1929 and became the first Indian historian to gain honorary membership in the American Historical Association. By the end of his lifetime, however, he had been marginalized by the Indian history establishment, as postcolonial historians embraced alternative approaches in the name of democracy and anti-colonialism. The Calling of History examines Sarkar’s career—and poignant obsolescence—as a way into larger questions about the discipline of history and its public life.

Through close readings of more than twelve hundred letters to and from Sarkar along with other archival documents, Dipesh Chakrabarty demonstrates that historians in colonial India formulated the basic concepts and practices of the field via vigorous—and at times bitter and hurtful—debates in the public sphere. He furthermore shows that because of its non-technical nature, the discipline as a whole remains susceptible to pressure from both the public and the academy even today. Methodological debates and the changing reputations of scholars like Sarkar, he argues, must therefore be understood within the specific contexts in which particular histories are written.

Insightful and with far-reaching implications for all historians, The Calling of History offers a valuable look at the double life of history and how tensions between its public and private sides played out in a major scholar’s career.
[more]

Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist
Working the Margins of Law, Power, and Justice
Gregg Barak
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Over the past five decades, prominent criminologist Gregg Barak has worked as an author, editor, and book review editor; his large body of work has been grounded in traditional academic prose. His new book, Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist, while remaining scholarly in its intent, departs from the typical academic format. The book is a a first-person account that examines the linkages between one scholar's experiences as a criminologist from the late 1960s to the present and the emergence and evolution of radical criminology as a challenge to developments in mainstream criminology. Barak draws upon his own experiences over this half-century as a window into the various debates and issues among radical, critical, and technocratic criminologies. In doing so, he revisits his own seminal works, showing how they reflect those periods of criminological development.
 
What holds this book together is the story of how resisting the crimes of the powerful while struggling locally for social justice is the essence of critical criminology. His seven chapters are divided into three parts—academic freedom, academic activism, and academic praxis—and these connected stories link the author's own academic career in Berkeley, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; Chicago; Alabama; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and across the United States. Barak's eventful scholarly life involved efforts to overcome laws against abortion and homosexuality; to formalize protective practices for women from domestic violence and sexual assault; to oppose racism and classism in the criminal justice system; to challenge the wars on gangs, drugs, and immigrants; and to confront the policies of mass incarceration and the treatment of juvenile offenders.
 
[more]

Chronicles Of Faith
The Autobiography of Frederick D. Patterson
Frederick D. Patterson, edited by Martia Graham Goodson
University of Alabama Press, 1991

Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4Chronicles of Faith records the life of a man who influenced the course of higher education for African Americans and Africans throughout the twentieth century. Patterson, orphaned soon after birth in 1901, became a veterinary scientist at Tuskegee Institute and soon thereafter--at the depths of the Depression--was selected as president of that most important institution. It was at Tuskegee that Patterson formulated the idea and the organization--the United Negro College Fund. In doing so he made a place for himself in U.S. and world history by providing the model of cooperative fund raising that enabled financially starved private black colleges to survive and serve the youth of the segregated North and South.

[more]

Confessions of an American Scholar
Simon O’Toole
University of Minnesota Press, 1970

Confessions of an American Scholar was first published in 1970. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Professor O'Toole, a well-known American literary scholar (Simon O'Toole is a pseudonym), gives us a candid, amusing, and, on the whole, frightening look at what really goes on in academic life. He has taught at black and white colleges, private and public colleges, Ivy Leagues and brick colleges; and over the years he has found himself transformed from a good teacher and no scholar into a prolific scholar and a tired teacher. Along the way he fought Joe McCarthy and told his students to burn their draft cards. At the conclusion of his tale he makes some serious proposals for a solution to what he calls the mess of American education. At the core of his suggestions is the opinion that America needs less education instead of more, an idea that seems certain to evoke cries of treason from many of his academic brethren.

[more]

Crash Course
From the Good War to the Forever War
Franklin, H. Bruce
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Growing up during the Second World War, H. Bruce Franklin believed what he was told: that America’s victory would lead to a new era of world peace. Like most Americans, he was soon led to believe in a world-wide Communist conspiracy that menaced the United States, forcing the nation into a disastrous war in Korea. But once he joined the U.S. Air Force and began flying top-secret missions as a navigator and intelligence officer, what he learned was eye-opening. He saw that even as the U.S. preached about peace and freedom, it was engaging in an endless cycle of warfare, bringing devastation and oppression to fledgling democracies across the globe.
 
Now, after fifty years as a renowned cultural historian, Franklin offers a set of hard-learned lessons about modern American history. Crash Course is essential reading for anyone who wonders how America ended up where it is today: with a deeply divided and disillusioned populace, led by a dysfunctional government, and mired in unwinnable wars. It also finds startling parallels between America’s foreign military exploits and the equally brutal tactics used on the home front to crush organized labor, antiwar, and civil rights movements.
 
More than just a memoir or a history book, Crash Course gives readers a unique firsthand look at the building of the American empire and the damage it has wrought. Shocking and gripping as any thriller, it exposes the endless deception of the American public, and reveals from inside how and why many millions of Americans have been struggling for decades against our own government in a fight for peace and justice.  
[more]

Crossing
A Transgender Memoir
Deirdre N. McCloskey
University of Chicago Press, 2019
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
 
“I visited womanhood and stayed. It was not for the pleasures, though I discovered many I had not imagined, and many pains too. But calculating pleasures and pains was not the point. The point was who I am.”
 
Once a golden boy of conservative economics and a child of 1950s privilege, Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald) had wanted to change genders from the age of eleven. But it was a different time, one hostile to any sort of straying from the path—against gays, socialists, women with professions, men without hats, and so on—and certainly against gender transition. Finally, in 1995, at the age of fifty-three, it was time for McCloskey to cross the gender line.
 
Crossing is the story of McCloskey’s dramatic and poignant transformation from Donald to Dee to Deirdre. She chronicles the physical procedures and emotional evolution required and the legal and cultural roadblocks she faced in her journey to womanhood. By turns searing and humorous, this is the unflinching, unforgettable story of her transformation—what she lost, what she gained, and the women who lifted her up along the way.
[more]

Dewey, Russell, Whitehead
Philosophers as Educators
Brian Patrick Hendley
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986

In Philosophers as Educators Brian Patrick Hendley argues that philosophers of edu­cation should reject their preoccupation with defining terms and analyzing concepts and embrace the philosophical task of con­structing general theories of education.  Hendley discusses in detail the educational philosophies of John Dewey, Bertrand Rus­sell, and Alfred North Whitehead. He sees in these men excellent role models that contem­porary philosophers might well follow. Hendley believes that, like these men­tors, philosophers should take a more ac­tive, practical role in education. Dewey and Russell ran their own schools, and Whitehead served as a university admin­istrator and as a member of many com­mittees created to study education.

[more]

The Disobedient Generation
Social Theorists in the Sixties
Edited by Alan Sica and Stephen Turner
University of Chicago Press, 2005
The late 1960s are remembered today as the last time wholesale social upheaval shook Europe and the United States. College students during that tumultuous period—epitomized by the events of May 1968—were as permanently marked in their worldviews as their parents had been by the Depression and World War II. Sociology was at the center of these events, and it changed decisively because of them.

The Disobedient Generation collects newly written autobiographies by an international cross-section of well-known sociologists, all of them "children of the '60s." It illuminates the human experience of living through that decade as apprentice scholars and activists, encountering the issues of class, race, the Establishment, the decline of traditional religion, feminism, war, and the sexual revolution. In each case the interlinked crises of young adulthood, rapid change, and nascent professional careers shaped this generation's private and public selves. This is an intensely personal collective portrait of a generation in a time of struggle.
[more]

Dr. David Murray
Superintendent of Education in the Empire of Japan, 1873-1879
Duke, Benjamin
Rutgers University Press, 2018
This is the first biography in English of an uncommon American, Dr. David Murray, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers College, who was appointed by the Japanese government as Superintendent of Education in the Empire of Japan in 1873. The founding of the Gakusei—the first public school system launched in Japan—marks the beginning of modern education in Japan, accommodating all children of elementary school age. Murray’s unwavering commitment to its success renders him an educational pioneer in Japan in the modern world. 

Benjamin Duke has compiled this comprehensive biography of David Murray to showcase Murray’s work, both in assisting around 100 samurai students in their studies at Rutgers, and in his unprecedented role in early Japanese-American relations. This fascinating story uncovers a little-known link between Rutgers University and Japan, and it is the only book to conclude that Rutgers made a greater contribution to the development of modern education in the early Meiji Era than any other non-Japanese college or university in the world.  
[more]

Dream Not of Other Worlds
Teaching in a Segregated Elementary School,1970
Huston Diehl
University of Iowa Press, 2007
When Huston Diehl began teaching a fourth-grade class in a "Negro" elementary school in rural Louisa County, Virginia, the school’s white superintendent assured her that he didn't expect her to teach "those children" anything.  She soon discovered how these low expectations, widely shared by the white community, impeded her students' ability to learn. With its overcrowded classrooms, poorly trained teachers, empty bookshelves, and meager supplies, her segregated school was vastly inferior to the county's white elementary schools, and the message it sent her students was clear: "dream not of other worlds."
     In her often lyrical memoir, Diehl reveals how, in the intimacy of the classroom, her students reached out to her, a young white northerner, and shared their fears, anxieties, and personal beliefs.  Repeatedly surprised and challenged by her students, Diehl questions her long-standing middle-class assumptions and confronts her own prejudices. In doing so, she eloquently reflects on what the students taught her about the hurt of bigotry and the humiliation of poverty as well as dignity, courage, and resiliency.
      Set in the waning days of the Jim Crow South, Dream Not of Other Worlds chronicles an important moment in American history. Diehl examines the history of black education in the South and narrates the dramatic struggle to integrate Virginia's public schools. Meeting with some of her former students and colleagues and visiting the school where she once taught, she considers what has--and has not--changed after more than thirty years of integrated schooling. This provocative book raises many issues that are of urgent concern today: the continuing social consequences of segregated schools, the role of public education in American society, and the challenges of educating minority and poor children.  
[more]

Ears, Eyes, and Hands
Reflections on Language, Literacy, and Linguistics
Deborah L. Wolter
Gallaudet University Press, 2018
Ears, Eyes, and Hands presents the author’s reflections on language, literacy, and linguistics that have been shaped by her deafness and by her work as an educator. In short, engaging narratives, Deborah L. Wolter exposes deeply entrenched attitudes and stereotypes regarding language, bringing to bear her own experiences as a deaf person as well as her interactions with children from varying backgrounds.
​​      Wolter reveals and rectifies the impact of deficit mindsets in the educational system regarding race, ethnicity, economic status, gender, and disability. As a literacy specialist, she works with students who fall through the cracks in a system that strives to embrace the diverse backgrounds and abilities found in the classroom. Her passion for engaging students and cultivating literacy shines in the stories she tells, which serve as parables that allow readers to evaluate their own attitudes and assumptions. Educators, parents, and community members will benefit from Wolter’s examination of sociolinguistics and language privilege as she identifies how ethnocentrism and ableism are contributing to negative educational outcomes for some students. With humor and warmth, she offers a path toward approaching language and listening as a gateway to connection and understanding, both inside the classroom and beyond.
[more]

Education and Democracy
The Meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn, 1872–1964
Adam R. Nelson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001

This definitive biography of the charismatic Alexander Meiklejohn tracks his turbulent career as an educational innovator at Brown University, Amherst College, and Wisconsin’s “Experimental College” in the early twentieth century and his later work as a civil libertarian in the Joe McCarthy era. The central question Meiklejohn asked throughout his life’s work remains essential today: How can education teach citizens to be free?

[more]

The Education of a WASP
Lois M. Stalvey
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989

Brimming with honestly and passion, The Education of a WASP chronicles one white woman's discovery of racism in 1960s America. First published in 1970 and highly acclaimed by reviewers, Lois Stalvey's account is as timely now as it was then. Nearly twenty years later, with ugly racial incidents occurring on college campuses, in neighborhoods, and in workplaces everywhere, her account of personal encounters with racism remains deeply disturbing. Educators and general readers interested in the subtleties of racism will find the story poignant, revealing, and profoundly moving.

“Delightful and horrible, a singular book.” —Choice

“An extraordinarily honest and revealing book that poses the issue: loyalty to one’s ethnic group or loyalty to conscience.” —Publishers Weekly

[more]

The Electric Edge of Academe
The Saga of Lucien L. Nunn and Deep Springs College
L. Jackson Newell
University of Utah Press, 2015

Here is a look at the life and legacy of an irrepressible innovator. Pushing against both social convention and technological boundaries, L.L. Nunn left enduring marks on economic and social history, labor development, and, educational reform. The Electric Edge of Academe is a bold portrayal of this progressive-era hydroelectric power magnate who, driven by a dynamic conscience, also became a force for social change and educational experimentation.

In 1891, Nunn, working with Tesla and Westinghouse, pioneered the world’s first commercial production of high-tension alternating current (AC) for long-distance transmission—something Thomas Edison deemed dangerous and irresponsible. After creating the Telluride Power Company, Nunn constructed the state-of-the-art Olmsted Power Plant in Provo Canyon and the Ontario Power Works at Niagara Falls. To support this new technology, he developed an imaginative model of industrial training that became so compelling that he ultimately abandoned his entrepreneurial career to devote his wealth and talents to experimenting with a new model of liberal education. In 1917, Nunn founded Deep Springs College in eastern California. The school remains one of the most daring, progressive, and selective institutions of higher learning in America. Newell examines how Nunn’s radical educational ideas have survived internal and external challenges for nearly a century and explores their relevance today. 


[more]

Enhancing Diversity
Educators with Disabilities
Ronald J. Anderson
Gallaudet University Press, 1998
The 43 million people with disabilities form this country’s largest minority group, yet they are markedly under-employed as educators. Enhancing Diversity: Educators with Disabilities paves the way for correcting this costly omission. Editors Anderson, Karp, and Keller have called upon the knowledge of 19 other renowned contributors to address the important issues raised in Enhancing Diversity, including the place of disability in discussions of diversity in education, research on educators with disabilities that validates their capabilities, and information on the qualifications desired in and the demands made of education professionals. Legal precedents are cited and explained, and examples of efforts to place disabled educators are presented, along with recommendations on how disabled individuals and school administrators can work toward increased opportunities. Interviews with 25 disabled educators discussing how they satisfactorily fulfill their professional requirements completes this thoughtful-provoking book.
[more]

Every Day A Holiday
A storyteller's memoir
Elizabeth Ellis
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2014
“Elizabeth Ellis’s words jump off the page and into the secret part of your heart where you keep treasured memories and sacred feelings. She sings to you of her life and the lives of others with whom she intersects. Compassionate and thought provoking, an Appalachian/Texan with a whole-world point of view with a little rabble rousing thrown in, Elizabeth Ellis is a true master of the written and spoken word.”
 
                --Robin Bady, Storyteller, Arts Educator, Brooklyn, New York
[more]

Everybody In, Nobody Out
Inspiring Community at Michigan's University Musical Society
Ken Fischer with Robin Lea Pyle
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Housed on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the University Musical Society is one of the oldest performing arts presenters in the country. A past recipient of the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest public artistic honor, UMS connects audiences with wide-ranging performances in music, dance, and theater each season.Between 1987 and 2017, UMS was led by Ken Fischer, who over three decades pursued an ambitious campaign to expand and diversify the organization’s programming and audiences—initiatives inspired by Fischer’s overarching philosophy toward promoting the arts, “Everybody In, Nobody Out.”

The approach not only deepened UMS’s engagement with the university and southeast Michigan communities, it led to exemplary partnerships with distinguished artists across the world. Under Fischer’s leadership, UMS hosted numerous breakthrough performances, including the Vienna Philharmonic’s final tour with Leonard Bernstein, appearances by then relatively unknown opera singer Cecilia Bartoli, a multiyear partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and artists as diverse as Yo-Yo Ma, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Elizabeth Streb, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Though peppered with colorful anecdotes of how these successes came to be, this book is neither a history of UMS nor a memoir of Fischer’s significant accomplishments with the organization. Rather it is a reflection on the power of the performing arts to engage and enrich communities—not by handing down cultural enrichment from on high, but by meeting communities where they live and helping them preserve cultural heritage, incubate talent, and find ways to make community voices heard.
[more]

Expanding historical counsciousness
the development of the Holocaust Educational Foundation
Anita. Weiner
Northwestern University Press, 2003

The Family Silver
A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance
Sharon O'Brien
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Finding herself struggling with depression ("like a rude houseguest, coming and going of its own accord"), Sharon O'Brien set out to understand its origins beyond the biochemical explanations and emotional narratives prevailing in contemporary American culture. Her quest for her inheritance took her straight into the pressures and possibilities of American culture, and then to the heart of her family—the generations who shaped and were shaped by one another and their moment in history. In The Family Silver, as O'Brien travels into her family's past, she goes beyond depression to discover courage, poetry, and grace.

A compassionate and engaging writer, O'Brien uses the biographer's methods to understand her family history, weaving the scattered pieces of the past—her mother's memo books, her father's reading journal, family photographs, tombstones, dance cards, hospital records, the family silver—into a compelling narrative. In the lives of her Irish-American relatives she finds that the American values of upward mobility, progress, and the pressure to achieve sparked both desire and depression, following her family through generations, across the sea, from the Irish famine of the 1840s to Harvard Yard in the late 1960s.

"Many people who write stories of depression or other chronic illnesses tell tales of recovery in the upward-mobility sense, the 'once I was ill, but now I am well' formula that we may find appealing, but doesn't match the messiness of our lives," she writes. "Mine is not such a tale. But it is a recovery tale in another sense—a story of salvage, of rescuing stories from silence." Told with humor and honesty, O'Brien's story will captivate all readers who want to know how they, and their families, have been shaped by the past.
[more]

A Feminist Legacy
The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck
Suzanne Bordelon
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

The first book-length investigation of a pioneering English professor and theorist at Vassar College, A Feminist Legacy:  The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck explores Buck’s contribution to the fields of education and rhetoric during the Progressive Era. By contextualizing Buck’s academic and theoretical work within the rise of women’s educational institutions like Vassar College, the social and political movement toward suffrage, and Buck’s own egalitarian political and social ideals, Suzanne Bordelon offers a scholarly and well-informed treatment of Buck’s achievements that elucidates the historical and contemporary impact of her work and life.

Bordelon argues that while Buck did not call herself a feminist, she embodied feminist ideals by demanding the full participation of her female students and by challenging power imbalances at every academic, social, and political level.

A Feminist Legacy reveals that Vassar College is an undervalued but significant site in the history of women’s argumentation and pedagogy. Drawing on a rich variety of archival sources, including previously unexamined primary material, A Feminist Legacy traces the beginnings of feminist theories of argumentation and pedagogy and their lasting legacy within the fields of education and rhetoric.

[more]

Fireweed
A Political Autobiography
Gerda Lerner
Temple University Press, 2003
In Fireweed, Gerda Lerner, a pioneer and leading scholar in women's history, tells her story of moral courage and commitment to social change with a novelist's skill and a historian's command of context. Lerner's memoir focuses on the formative experiences that made her an activist for social justice before her academic career began. The child of a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family, she was still a teenager when a fascist regime came to power in 1934, and she became involved in the underground resistance movement. The Nazi takeover of Austria cast her into prison, then forced her and her family into exile; she alone was able to leave Europe. Once in the United States, she experienced the harshness of the Depression and despair over the fate of her family. Still, she persisted in adapting to the new culture and to becoming a writer. Here she met and married her life-long partner, Carl Lerner, a film editor and director. Together they become deeply involved in left-wing activities, from struggling to unionize the film industry and resisting the blacklist in Hollywood to community organizing for peace, for an interracial civil rights movement, and for better schools in New York City. Lerner insists that her decades of grassroots organizing largely account for the theoretical insights she was later able to bring to the development of women's history. In Fireweed, Lerner presents her life in the context of the major historical events of the twentieth century and the repression of dissent. Hers is a gripping story about surviving hardship and summoning the courage to live according to one's convictions.
[more]

For Duty and Destiny
The Life and Civil War Diary of William Taylor Stott, Hoosier Soldier and Educator
Lloyd A. Hunter
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2011
William Taylor Stott was a native Hoosier and an 1861 graduate of Franklin College, who later became the president who took the college from virtual bankruptcy in 1872 to its place as a leading liberal arts institution in Indiana. The story of Franklin College is the story of W. T. Stott, yet his influence was not confined to the school’s parameters. Stott was an inspirational and intellectual force in the Indiana Baptist community, and a foremost champion of small denominational colleges and of higher education in general. He also fought in the Eighteenth Indiana Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War, rising from private to captain by 1863. Stott’s diary reveals a soldier who was also a scholar.
[more]

Free Spirit
A Biography of Mason Welch Gross
Thomas W. Gross
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Mason Welch Gross, philosopher, educator, athlete, and musician, was inaugurated as president of Rutgers in 1959, when American universities were seen as the key to America's future success. Within ten years, during the turbulent sixties, with its struggles over civil rights and the Vietnam War that played out on college campuses, these same universities were viewed as seeds of discord and communism by a conservative populace that had grown tired of riots, inflation, and general unrest.

Mason Gross was instrumental in building Rutgers from a sleepy private college to a major state university, but he is best known for taking a stand on controversial public issues, including improving the educational opportunities for minorities and defending the civil rights of a professor who chose to speak his mind about Vietnam. This biography builds the story of how he came to believe so strongly about these issues, and why he was willing to stand up for what is right, eventually, and tragically, at the cost of his own health.

For his support of academic freedom and civil rights, in 1966 he received the prestigious Alexander Meiklejohn Award from the American Association of University Professors.

 
[more]

French Lessons
A Memoir
Alice Kaplan
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.

The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.

When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.

French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.
[more]

From Vienna to Chicago and Back
Essays on Intellectual History and Political Thought in Europe and America
Gerald Stourzh
University of Chicago Press, 2007

Spanning both the history of the modern West and his own five-decade journey as a historian, Gerald Stourzh’s sweeping new essay collection covers the same breadth of topics that has characterized his career—from Benjamin Franklin to Gustav Mahler, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Charles Beard, from the notion of constitution in seventeenth-century England to the concept of neutrality in twentieth-century Austria.

This storied career brought him in the 1950s from the University of Vienna to the University of Chicago—of which he draws a brilliant picture—and later took him to Berlin and eventually back to Austria. One of the few prominent scholars equally at home with U.S. history and the history of central Europe, Stourzh has informed these geographically diverse experiences and subjects with the overarching themes of his scholarly achievement: the comparative study of liberal constitutionalism and the struggle for equal rights at the core of Western notions of free government. Composed between 1953 and 2005 and including a new autobiographical essay written especially for this volume, From Vienna to Chicago and Back will delight Stourzh fans, attract new admirers, and make an important contribution to transatlantic history.

[more]

Get Your Elbow Off the Horn
Stories through the Years
Jack R. Gannon
Gallaudet University Press, 2020
Get Your Elbow Off the Horn is a collection of interactions and observations written by Jack R. Gannon, a lifelong advocate for the Deaf community. Warm and amusing, Gannon’s stories begin with his rural childhood in the Ozarks and continue through his experiences as a student, educator, coach, husband, parent, and community leader. These vignettes reveal a down-to-earth family man who believed in making a difference one person at a time.

       Many of his recollections are brief sketches that reveal much about being Deaf—and about being human. From reflecting on the difficult choices parents must make for their children, to recounting awkward communication exchanges, Gannon marries good humor with a poignant advocacy for sign language rights. His stories preserve and share Deaf American life and culture as he experienced it.
[more]

Going Away to Think
Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility
Scott Slovic
University of Nevada Press, 2008
Scott Slovic has spent his life as a teacher, writer, environmental activist, and leader in the field of ecocritical literary studies. In Going Away to Think, he reflects on the twin motivations of his life—the commitment to do some good in the world and the impulse to enjoy life and participate fully in its most intense moments—and he examines the tension created by his efforts to balance these two poles of his responsibility. These essays reveal the complex inner life of one of this generation’s most important environmental critics and literary activists. They range from profound discussions of the role and responsibilities of scholarship to deeply personal ruminations on the impact of family crises and the influence of his wide-ranging travels.
[more]

The Guardian Poplar
A Memoir of Deep Roots, Journey, and Rediscovery
Chase Nebeker Peterson
University of Utah Press, 2012

When Barney Clark received the Jarvik-7 artificial heart in 1983 and Cold Fusion came under fire in 1989, Chase Peterson, as the University of Utah president, was inevitably pulled into these campus events. While these episodes may be the best known in Peterson’s professional history, they are certainly not the only stories that make his autobiography worth reading.

The Guardian Poplar tells of a man who grew up in small-town Utah and carried his pioneer and Mormon heritage to a New England prep school and later to Harvard. He then returned to Utah as a doctor, but unexpectedly found himself back at Harvard as its dean of admissions, handling issues such as the Vietnam War and racial and gender reform. The book explains how Peterson’s home state recruited him back to become an administrator at the University of Utah and how he would eventually become the university president, taking on new issues and challenges. Peterson recounts these years by drawing on anecdotes that recall the people he served and the moments that brought his life meaning.

This autobiography is a compelling account of how Peterson has managed to balance family and career, handle the tensions that have arisen between his faith and his scientific training, and remain solid in the face of his newest challenge—cancer. The book’s engaging prose and honest reflections are sure to intrigue and inspire readers who know the man well, as well as those readers who simply want to know a man who can be described as dedicated, faithful, hardworking, and hopeful about the future.

“When I first met Chase Peterson as a Harvard freshman—along with our joint friend and brother David Evans—something deeply touched me. It was not only his sincere smile and open embrace but also a sense that here was a kind and courageous man comfortable in his own skin, secure in who he was yet eager to encounter new persons, new experiences, and new challenges. . . . He was from Utah but in New England, a Mormon in old Harvard, and a medical doctor in the deanship of admissions. Little did I know that his journey would enhance and enrich my own—owing to his critical allegiance to his family, his faith, his friends, and to his citizenship of country and world. His prophetic witness at Harvard in the turbulent ‘60s and ‘70s, his promotion of black priesthood in the Mormon church, his support of antiapartheid protests in the ‘80s, and his steadfast defense of academic freedom in the Cold Fusion controversy in the early ‘90s all express his quiet and humble effort to be true to himself—a self grounded in, but
not limited by, a rich Mormon tradition.”—from the foreword by Cornel West

[more]

Hermon Carey Bumpus, Yankee Naturalist
Hermon C. Bumpus, Jr.
University of Minnesota Press, 1947

Hermon Carey Bumpus, Yankee Naturalist was first published in 1947. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In this small volume, Dr. Bumpus' son has outlined the personal history and professional career of his distinguished father, who will be known to countless associates through his work with American museums, and his outstanding career as educator and administrator: as director of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts; as professor of biology at Brown University; as the first director of the American Museum of Natural History; as business manager of the University of Wisconsin; as president of Tufts College; and as chairman of the advisory board of the National Park Service.

The trailside museums and natural history shrines that have taught thousands of Americans the story behind the scenic and natural wonders of our national parks are an enduring memorial to this man of enthusiasm and unceasing energy.

The habitat exhibits in our museums of natural history bear further witness to the imagination and practical originality of this distinguished American naturalist, who was the first president of the American Association of Museums and who contributed so much to the change of attitude and policy at a time when museums of every type were just thawing out of their ice age.

[more]

Incidents in an Educational Life
A Memoir (of Sorts)
John M. Swales
University of Michigan Press, 2009
Incidents in an Educational Life chronicles the educational journey of John M. Swales. A leading scholar in the field of Applied Linguistics and its subfield of English for Specific Purposes, Swales has taught across the globe in places such as Italy, Sweden, Libya, the United Kingdom, and the University of Michigan. His memoir offers a rare glimpse into the professional journey of a prominent scholar and educator.
 
Incidents in an Educational Life explores the lessons Swales learned by teaching and by being taught.  The story follows his gradual transformation from an English as a Second Language teacher to one of the leading international figures in his field, stopping along the way to tell the sometimes amusing, sometimes painful anecdotes that have made him the recognized educator he is today. His entertaining prose make this volume a must-read for anyone considering the field, or the many ways in which we all become teachers.
 
John M. Swales is one of the leading international scholars in the field of English for Specific Purposes. He retired in the summer of 2006 from the University of Michigan after teaching at multiple universities overseas. He is the co-author of the international bestseller Academic Writing for Graduate Students (3rd ed.).
[more]

The Indomitable Mary Easton Sibley
Pioneer of Women's Education in Missouri
Kristie C. Wolferman
University of Missouri Press, 2008
Acknowledged as a significant figure in the history of women on the early western frontier, Mary Easton Sibley may be little known to many modern readers. Yet she was involved in most of the important events in nineteenth-century Missouri, pursued and practiced educational innovations, and founded a school that continues to thrive today. This first biography of Sibley sheds new light on this important pioneer.
            Kristie Wolferman retraces the course of an exciting life, beginning with four-year-old Mary’s arrival in St. Louis in 1804 when her father was appointed attorney general for the District of Louisiana—and the Eastons became one of the first American families to settle in this bustling French town. At fifteen, Mary married George Champlin Sibley, the factor of Fort Osage in Western Missouri, where the young bride lived among the Indians on the edge of the frontier and took up her teaching vocation. She then went on to found Linden Wood in St. Charles, the first college for women west of the Mississippi, and she also taught classes for African American and immigrant children. Throughout the story, Wolferman shows us a life intimately entwined with the history of the state, as Mary witnessed St. Louis in its primitive years and frontier life at Fort Osage, as well as changes in Indian policy and citizenship for former slaves.
Although Sibley’s life has been told in older accounts, Wolferman’s is the first to draw fully on Mary and George Sibley’s journals and letters, with Mary’s journal especially shedding light on her views regarding women’s social and political roles, slavery, temperance, religion, and other topics. By reconstructing Sibley’s inner life as well as her career, Wolferman depicts not merely a frontier heroine and educational pioneer but an assertive woman who did not hesitate to express unconventional views.
            Today, Lindenwood University is a major coeducational institution that continues to honor Mary Sibley’s philosophy and dedication. This biography not only brings to life one of Missouri’s most remarkable women educators but also demonstrates how her story reflects educational, religious, and social developments in both the state and the nation. The Indomitable Mary Easton Sibley recognizes her as a key player on the frontier and as a major part of Missouri’s heritage.
[more]

Inside Academia
Professors, Politics, and Policies
Cahn, Steven M
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Drawing on decades of experience as a renowned teacher, advisor, administrator, and philosopher, Steven M. Cahn diagnoses problems plaguing America’s universities and offers his prescriptions for improvement. He explores numerous aspects of academic life, including the education of graduate students, the quality of teaching, the design of liberal arts curricula, and the procedures for appointing faculty and considering them for tenure.
 
Inside Academia uses real cases to illustrate how faculty members, deans, and provosts often do not serve the best interests of schools or students. Yet the book also highlights efforts of those who have committed themselves and their institutions to the pursuit of academic excellence.
[more]

An Invitation to Laughter
A Lebanese Anthropologist in the Arab World
Fuad I. Khuri
University of Chicago Press, 2007

For the late Fuad I. Khuri, a distinguished career as an anthropologist began not because of typical concerns like accessibility, money, or status, but because the very idea of an occupation that baffled his countrymen made them—and him—laugh. “When I tell them that ‘anthropology’ is my profession . . . they think I am either speaking a strange language or referring to a new medicine.” This profound appreciation for humor, especially in the contradictions inherent in the study of cultures, is a distinctive theme of An Invitation to Laughter, Khuri’s astute memoir of life as an anthropologist in the Middle East.

A Christian Lebanese, Khuri offers up in this unusual autobiography both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective on life in Lebanon, elsewhere in the Middle East, and in West Africa. Khuri entertains and informs with clever insights into such issues as the mentality of Arabs toward women, eating habits of the Arab world, the impact of Islam on West Africa, and the extravagant lifestyles of wealthy Arabs, and even offers a vision for a type of democracy that could succeed in the Middle East. In his life and work, as these astonishing essays make evident, Khuri demonstrated how the discipline of anthropology continues to make a difference in bridging dangerous divides.

[more]

It All Began in Nuremberg
Between History and Memory
Rita Thalmann
University of Michigan Press, 2015
It All Began in Nuremberg is a translation of Rita Thalmann’s moving memoir, Tout Commença à Nuremberg, originally published in France in 2004. Thalmann’s memoir represents one of the last voices to witness personally the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. The author, a scholar of significance in France, died on August 18, 2013.

Rita Thalmann was born in Nuremberg in 1926 and lived there until 1933, when anti-Semitic events made life intolerable.  Her father abandoned his successful business and moved the family to Switzerland, where they were unwelcome, and then to France.  After settling in Dijon, Rita attended public school until Jews were no longer allowed to pursue an education.  At age fourteen, she took private lessons in English at the home of her teacher, Henriette Connes, who saved Rita from deportation and death by providing her with false identification papers and passing her to the Free Zone with a group of students going on a field trip. Although Rita and her brother managed to escape to Switzerland during the war, most of her family died in the Holocaust.

After the war, Rita Thalmann was determined to continue her education and participate in the struggle against anti-Semitism and discrimination of all types. She achieved the highest level of university teaching in France while publishing seven books. This memoir relates her personal experience of the historical events she spent most of her adult life researching.
[more]

John Bascom and the Origins of the Wisconsin Idea
J. David Hoeveler Jr.
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
In the Progressive Era of American history, the state of Wisconsin gained national attention for its innovative economic and political reforms. Amidst this ferment, the "Wisconsin Idea" was popularized—the idea that a public university should improve the lives of people beyond the borders of its campus.

During his term as governor (1901–1906), Robert La Follette routinely consulted with University of Wisconsin researchers to devise groundbreaking programs and legislation. Although the Wisconsin Idea is often attributed to a 1904 speech by Charles Van Hise, then president of the University of Wisconsin, David Hoeveler argues that it originated decades earlier, in the creative and fertile mind of John Bascom.

A philosopher, theologian, and sociologist, Bascom (1827–1922) deeply influenced a generation of students at the University of Wisconsin, including La Follette and Van Hise. Hoeveler documents how Bascom drew concepts from German idealism, liberal Protestantism, and evolutionary theory, transforming them into advocacy for social and political reform. He was a champion of temperance, women's rights, and labor, all of which brought him controversy as president of the university from 1874 to 1887. In a way unmatched by any of his peers at other institutions, Bascom outlined a social gospel that called for an expanded role for state governments and universities as agencies of moral improvement.

Hoeveler traces the intellectual history of the Wisconsin Idea from the nineteenth century to such influential Progressive Era thinkers as Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons, who believed university researchers should be a vital source of expertise for government and citizens.
[more]

John Dewey, America's Peace-Minded Educator
Charles F. Howlett and Audrey Cohan
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
One of America’s preeminent educational philosophers and public intellectuals, John Dewey is perhaps best known for his interest in the study of pragmatic philosophy and his application of progressive ideas to the field of education. Carrying his ideas and actions beyond the academy, he tied his philosophy to pacifist ideology in America after World War I in order to achieve a democratic world order. Although his work and life have been well documented, his role in the postwar peace movement has been generally overlooked.
 
In John Dewey, America’s Peace-Minded Educator, authors Charles F. Howlett and Audrey Cohan take a close look at John Dewey’s many undertakings on behalf of world peace. This volume covers Dewey’s support of, and subsequent disillusionment with, the First World War as well as his postwar involvement in trying to prevent another world war. Other topics include his interest in peace movements in education, his condemnation of American military intervention in Latin America and of armaments and munitions makers during the Great Depression, his defense of civil liberties during World War II, and his cautions at the start of the atomic age. The concluding epilogue discusses how Dewey fell out of favor with some academics and social critics in the 1950s and explores how Dewey’s ideas can still be useful to peace education today.
 
Exploring Dewey’s use of pragmatic philosophy to build a consensus for world peace, Howlett and Cohan illuminate a previously neglected aspect of his contributions to American political and social thought and remind us of the importance of creating a culture of peace through educational awareness.
 
[more]

John Dewey's Essays in Experimental Logic
John Dewey. Edited by D. Micah Hester, and Robert B. Talisse. Introduction by
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

Offering a new edition of Dewey’s 1916 collection of essays

This critical edition of John Dewey’s 1916 collection of writings on logic, Essays in Experimental Logic—in which Dewey presents his concept of logic as the theory of inquiry and his unique and innovative development of the relationship of inquiry to experience—is the first scholarly reprint of the work in one volume since 1954. Essays in Experimental Logic, edited by D. Micah Hester and Robert B. Talisse, uses the authoritative texts from the Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 (published by Southern Illinois University Press) and includes as well articles from leading journals representing various contemporary schools of philosophy that criticized Dewey’s experimentalism.

Culling materials from six volumes of the chronologically arranged Collected Works, this single-volume edition of Essays marks a crucial point in Dewey’s intellectual development: one in which Dewey critically engages idealistic and intuitionist theorists and lays the groundwork for his mature theory of inquiry. The text includes a new introduction by renowned Dewey scholar Tom Burke that places Essays in philosophical and historical context. In addition to the original essays, Essays in Experimental Logic also features five critical essays by Dewey’s contemporaries, including Bertrand Russell, Wendell T. Bush, R. F. Alfred Hoernlé, H. T. Costello, and C. S. Peirce. 

[more]

Joseph Carter Corbin
Educator Extraordinaire and Founder of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff
Gladys Turner Finney
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2017

Having operated now for more than 140 years, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB) was founded in 1875 as Branch Normal College by Joseph Carter Corbin, a native of Ohio and the son of former slaves. Corbin, who had a classical education, was the first African American superintendent of public education in Arkansas and literally built the school from the ground up. There was a desperate need for teachers in Arkansas, as there was a great desire for education by former slaves who had been prohibited from learning to read and write.

Corbin himself cleared the land that would soon house the college and then set about to create a school that would produce the first African American teachers following the Reconstruction years. For almost three decades, he worked tirelessly on behalf of Arkansas’s black community to meet the need for educators.

In the early days, Corbin worked both as the president and the janitor so that he could control costs and keep the school going. He often waived matriculation fees and other expenses to allow impoverished students the opportunity to graduate and become qualified to teach throughout Arkansas.

Although he might not have realized it at the time, Corbin was a member of the so-called aristocrats of color, the African American elite of national prominence and a group that included such luminaries as Booker T. Washington. Corbin was a true giant in the history of education in Arkansas. His story, told by a former UAPB student, is monumental for the scope of what one man was able to accomplish.

[more]

Journal of Rehearsals
A Memoir by Wallace Fowlie
Wallace Fowlie
Duke University Press
Renowned writer, critic, and teacher, Wallace Fowlie has devoted his life to the study and teaching of the French language and literature. Author and translator of thirty books, Fowlie’s contributions include translations of Rimbaud (the complete works), Molieré, Claudel, Baudelaire, and Cocteau, and literary studies of, among others, Rimbaud, Stendhal, Gide, and Mallarmé. His widely acclaimed Journal of Rehearsals, originally published in 1977, is the first in his series of memoirs. In this passionate book, Fowlie explores his "love affair" with the literature and culture of France, and offers insights into his own intellectual and social life, his early love for the French language, and his encounters and relationships with an impressive cast of characters: Kenneth Burke, Jean Cocteau, Martha Graham, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, and others.
[more]

Kane from Canada
Mary Kane
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016

Learning on the Left
Political Profiles of Brandeis University
Stephen J. Whitfield
Brandeis University Press, 2020
Brandeis University is the United States’ only Jewish-sponsored nonsectarian university, and while only being established after World War II, it has risen to become one of the most respected universities in the nation. The faculty and alumni of the university have made exceptional contributions to myriad disciplines, but they have played a surprising formidable role in American politics.

Stephen J. Whitfield makes the case for the pertinence of Brandeis University in understanding the vicissitudes of American liberalism since the mid-twentieth century. Founded to serve as a refuge for qualified professors and students haunted by academic antisemitism, Brandeis University attracted those who generally envisioned the republic as worthy of betterment.  Whether as liberals or as radicals, figures associated with the university typically adopted a critical stance toward American society and sometimes acted upon their reformist or militant beliefs. This volume is not an institutional history, but instead shows how one university, over the course of seven decades, employed and taught remarkable men and women who belong in our accounts of the evolution of American politics, especially on the left. In vivid prose, Whitfield invites readers to appreciate a singular case of the linkage of political influence with the fate of a particular university in modern America.
[more]

Let’s Go In
My Journey to a University Presidency
T. Alan Hurwitz
Gallaudet University Press, 2020
Alan Hurwitz ascended the ranks of academia to become the president of not one, but two, universities—National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology and Gallaudet University. In Let’s Go In: My Journey to a University Presidency, Hurwitz discusses the unique challenges he encountered as a Deaf person, and the events, people, and experiences that shaped his personal and professional life. He demonstrates the importance of building a strong foundation for progressive leadership roles in higher education, and provides insights into the decision-making and outreach required of a university president, covering topics such as community collaboration, budget management, and networking with public policy leaders. He also stresses that assessing students’ needs should be a top priority. As he reflects on a life committed to service in higher education, Hurwitz offers up important lessons on the issues, challenges, and opportunities faced by deaf and hard of hearing people, and in doing so, inspires future generations of deaf people to aim for their highest goals.

Additional images, videos, and supplemental readings are available at the Gallaudet University Press/Manifold online platform. Visit the GU Press website to access this multimedia resource.
[more]

The Life and Legacy of Fred Newton Scott
Donald C. Stewart
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997
By the end of the nineteenth century, rhetoric had not yet been established as a legitimate discipline. Fred Newton Scott (1860-1931) spent his life broadening the scope of rhetoric studies through his imaginative, interdisciplinary research. Scott was both a pragmatic reformer and a visionary scholar who used empirical methods and cognitive psychology to expand this field. In this study, Donald Stewart and his wife Patricia examine Scott's essays, speeches, and books to write the first comprehensive biography of the man who became one of the most influential figures in language studies during the early twentieth century.
[more]

A Life on the Middle West's Never-Ending Frontier
Willard L. Boyd
University of Iowa Press, 2019
University of Iowa legend Willard L. “Sandy” Boyd is a proud middle westerner. His decades of service to the university began in 1954, when he arrived as a law professor. He later became president of the University of Iowa from 1969 to 1981, and led the school through times that were fraught not just for the university but for the country. During the intense polarization of the late sixties and early seventies, Sandy’s compassion and steady leadership ensured that dissent on campus would be honored and would not stop the university’s educational mission. He quickly became admired, not simply for his professional achievements but also for his personal integrity.

His memoir, interspersed with personal wisdom gleaned over more than six decades of service and leadership, encapsulates Sandy’s shrewd yet optimistic view of the public university as an institution. At every stage in his life—in the U.S. Navy during World War II, while practicing law or teaching, and in leadership positions at Chicago’s Field Museum and the University of Iowa— Sandy relied on his principles of open disclosure, inclusiveness, and respect for differences to guide him on issues that matter.

This chronicle of Sandy’s experiences throughout his life shows us the evolution both of the University of Iowa and of the nation writ large. More importantly, this book gives us a lens through which to examine our present situation, whether debating free speech on campus, the role of the arts and humanities in civil society, or the importance of funding for educational and cultural institutions.
[more]

Man of Vision
Arkansas Education and the Legacy of Arch Ford
Cindy Burnett Beckman
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2016

As commissioner of the Arkansas Department of Education from 1953 to 1978, Arch Ford served under five governors. His vision was to expand educational opportunities because he believed education was the foundation for improving people’s lives. Throughout his career, he campaigned for increased educational funding, better-qualified teachers, and higher teachers’ salaries. Ford helped lead the state in peacefully integrating its schools and established twenty-three vocational-technical schools across the state. During Ford’s tenure, the Arkansas Children’s Colony was established to provide educational services to the developmentally disabled, and the Arkansas Educational Television Network was set up to provide instructional programming across the state.

The state also expanded educational opportunities to include kindergarten, special education, community colleges, and adult education. His leadership left Arkansas with a strong educational system that continued to advance. This was his legacy.
[more]

Metamorphoses
Memoirs of a Life in Medicine
William G. Anlyan, M. D.
Duke University Press, 2004
William G. Anlyan, a dedicated doctor and gifted administrator, was a leader in the transformation of Duke University Hospital from a regional medical center into one of America’s foremost biomedical research and educational institutions. Anlyan’s fifty-five-year career at Duke University spanned a period of extraordinary change in the practice of medicine. He chronicles those transformations—and his role in them—in this forthright memoir.

Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1925, and schooled in the British tradition, Anlyan attended Yale University as an undergraduate and medical student before coming to the relatively unknown medical school at Duke University in 1949 for an internship in general and thoracic surgery. He stayed on, first as a resident, then as a staff surgeon. By 1961, he was a full professor of surgery. In 1964, Anlyan was named dean of the medical school, the first in a series of administrative posts at the medical school and hospital. Anlyan’s role in the transformation of the Duke University Medical Center into an internationally renowned health system is manifest: he restructured the medical school and hospital and supervised the addition of almost four million square feet of new or renovated space. He hired outstanding administrators and directed a staff that instituted innovative programs and groundbreaking research centers, such as the Cancer Center and the Physician’s Assistant Program.

Anlyan describes a series of metamorphoses in his own life, in the world of medicine, in Durham, and at Duke. At the time of his prep school upbringing in Egypt, medicine was a matter of controlling infectious diseases like tuberculosis and polio. As he became an immigrant medical student and then a young surgeon, he observed vast advances in medical practice and changes in the financing of medical care. During his tenure at Duke, Durham was transformed from a sleepy mill and tobacco town into the “City of Medicine,” a place where patients routinely travel for open-heart surgery and cutting-edge treatments for cancer and other diseases.

Anyone interested in health care, medical education, and the history of Duke University will find Anlyan’s memoir of interest.

[more]

Module 10
Teaching with Archives: A Guide for Archivists, Librarians, and Educators
Sammie Morris
Society of American Archivists, 2016
Provides practical guidance to archivists, librarians,and educators on teaching with archival materials,offering tips for beginners as well as seasoned instructors.
[more]

My Iowa Journey
The Life Story of the University of Iowa's First African American Professor
Philip G. Hubbard
University of Iowa Press, 1999

Philip Hubbard's life story begins in 1921 in Macon, a county seat in the Bible Belt of north central Missouri, whose history as a former slave state permeated the culture of his childhood. When he was four his mother moved her family 140 miles north to Des Moines in search of the greater educational opportunity that Iowa offered African American students. In this recounting of the effects of that journey on the rest of his life, Phil Hubbard merges his private and public life and career into an affectionate, powerful, and important story.

Hubbard graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in electrical engineering in 1946; by 1954 he had received his Ph.D. in hydraulics. The College of Engineering extended a warm academic welcome, but nonacademic matters were totally different: Hubbard was ineligible for the housing and other amenities offered to white students. Intelligent, patient, keenly aware of discrimination yet willing to work from within the university system, he advanced from student to teacher to administrator, retiring in 1991 after decades of leadership in the classroom and the conference room.

Hubbard's major accomplishments included policies that focused on human rights; these policies transformed the makeup of students, faculty, and staff by seeking to eliminate discrimination based on race, religion, or other nonacademic factors and by substituting affirmative action for the traditional old-boy methods of selecting faculty and administrators. At the same time that he was advancing the cause of human rights and cultural diversity in education, his family was growing and thriving, and his descriptions of home life reveal one source of his strength and inspiration.

The decades that Hubbard covers were vital in the evolution of the nation and its educational institutions. His dedication to the agenda of public higher education has always been matched by his sensitivity to the negative effects of discrimination and his gentle perseverance toward his goals of inclusion, acceptance, and fairness. His vivid personal and institutional story will prove valuable at this critical juncture in America's racial history.

[more]

My Life of Language
A Memoir
ogden
Gallaudet University Press, 2017
Paul W. Ogden has dedicated his life to educating young deaf and hard of hearing people and raising awareness of what it means to be deaf in a hearing world. He has taught and mentored a generation of teachers, and his classic volume, The Silent Garden, has served as a guide for parents and educators for over thirty years. Now he tells his personal story of challenges faced and lessons learned, revealing that the critical, guiding factors for him have always been language and successful communication.
               Born in a time when many deaf children had no access to language, Paul learned spoken and written language skills at a young age through the painstaking efforts of his mother. His tight-knit family, which included one deaf and two hearing older brothers, facilitated open and constant communication using a variety of methods. His father was a pastor who was involved in the civil rights movement. Despite the family’s closeness, his father struggled with depression, an illness that would take the life of one of Paul’s brothers. As a student at a residential deaf school where the use of American Sign Language (ASL) was suppressed, Paul continued to build on the speech and lipreading skills he had learned at home. He returned home for high school and graduated as co-valedictorian—unaware of the standing ovation he received as he walked to the podium.
               Following a rewarding experience as an undergraduate at Antioch College, Paul went on to earn a PhD from the University of Illinois, a rare accomplishment for a deaf person at that time. During his graduate studies, he finally had the opportunity to learn ASL. As an award-winning professor of Deaf Studies at California State University, Fresno, he successfully petitioned for the university to recognize ASL as a language, and he established the Silent Garden program, which has grown into a flourishing provider of training and resources to support the Deaf community. In My Life of Language, Paul offers eloquent reflections on both the joyful and difficult periods of his life as he navigated relationships, faced discrimination, questioned his faith, and found great happiness in his marriage.
[more]

My Many Selves
The Quest for a Plausible Harmony
Wayne C. Booth
Utah State University Press, 2006

In his autobiography, My Many Selves, Wayne C. Booth is less concerned with his professional achievements---though the book by no means ignores his distinguished career---than with the personal vision that emerges from a long life lived thoughtfully. For Booth, even the autobiographical process becomes part of a quest to harmonize the diverse, often conflicting aspects of who he was. To see himself clearly and whole, he broke the self down, personified the fragments, uncovered their roots in his experience and background, and engaged those selves and experiences in dialogue. Basic to his story and to its lifelong concern with ethics and rhetoric was his Mormon youth in rural Utah. In adulthood he struggled with that background, abandoning most Mormon doctrines, but he retained the identity, ethical questions, and concern with communication that this upbringing gave him.

The uncommon wisdom and careful attention that empower Wayne Booth's many other books cause My Many Selves to transcend its genre, as the best memoirs always do. The book becomes a window through which we who read it will see our own conflicts, our own ongoing struggle to live honestly and ethically in the world.

Wayne Booth died in October 2005, soon after completing work on this autobiography.

[more]

A New Day in the Delta
Inventing School Desegregation As You Go
David W. Beckwith
University of Alabama Press, 2008
A New Day in the Delta is a fresh and appealing memoir of the experience of a young white college graduate in need of a job as the Vietnam War reached its zenith. David Beckwith applied and was accepted for a teaching position in the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1969. Although it seemed to him a bit strange that he was accepted so quickly for this job while his other applications went nowhere, he was grateful for the opportunity. Beckwith reported for work to learn that he was to be assigned to an all-black school as the first step in Mississippi’s long-deferred school desegregation.
 
The nation and Mississippi alike were being transformed by war and evolving racial relations, and Beckwith found himself on the cutting edge of the transformation of American education and society in one of the most resistant (and poor) corners of the country. Beckwith’s revealing and often amusing story of the year of mutual incomprehension between an inexperienced white teacher and a classroom full of black children who had had minimal contact with any whites. This is history as it was experienced by those who were thrust into another sort of "front line."
[more]

Not Even Past
A History of the Department of English, The Ohio State University, 1870–2000
Morris Beja and Christian K. Zacher
Impromptu Press, 2019
Not Even Past: A History of the Department of English, The Ohio State University, 1870–2000 provides a thorough and fascinating institutional history of a program central to the mission of the university and a history of an entire complex discipline. OSU’s Department of English is one of the largest and most prominent in the US and, in fact, the world. Inevitably, then, a study of that department entails an account of the role of English and American literature in higher education from the nineteenth century to modern and contemporary times; an exploration of the expanding role of the modern “English” department and discipline; the role—or, at times, the lack of a significant role—of women and minorities within the department; and the careers and accomplishments of numerous prominent critics, scholars, and creative writers—including, for example, James Thurber and his work with a number of OSU faculty.  Due attention is paid to the controversies and troubles of the late 1960s and the shutdown of the university in 1970. In addition to the two major authors, ten experts provide extended sections on the history of their own fields. The result is both comprehensive and deeply felt.
[more]

Obsessed
The Cultural Critic’s Life in the Kitchen
Elisabeth Bronfen
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Winner of the 2020 Gourmand Awards, Translation Section, USA

Even the most brilliant minds have to eat. And for some scholars, food preparation is more than just a chore; it’s a passion. In this unique culinary memoir and cookbook, renowned cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen tells of her lifelong love affair with cooking and demonstrates what she has learned about creating delicious home meals. She recounts her cherished food memories, from meals eaten at the family table in postwar Germany to dinner parties with friends. Yet, in a thoughtful reflection on the pleasures of cooking for one, she also reveals that some of her favorite meals have been consumed alone.
 
Though it contains more than 250 mouth-watering recipes, Obsessed is anything but a conventional cookbook. As she shares a lifetime of knowledge acquired in the kitchen, Bronfen hopes to empower both novice and experienced home chefs to improvise, giving them hints on how to tweak her recipes to their own tastes. And unlike cookbooks that assume readers have access to an unlimited pantry, this book is grounded in reality, offering practical advice about food storage and reusing leftovers. As Bronfen serves up her personal stories and her culinary wisdom, reading Obsessed is like sitting down to a home-cooked meal with a clever friend.
[more]

Of Farming and Classics
A Memoir
David Grene
University of Chicago Press, 2006

A fiercely independent thinker, colorful storyteller, and spirited teacher, David Grene devoted his life to two things: farming, which he began as a boy in Ireland and continued into old age; and classics, which he taught for several decades that culminated in his translating and editing, with Richmond Lattimore, of The Complete Greek Tragedies.

In this charming memoir, which he wrote during the years leading up to his death in 2002 at the age of eighty-nine, Grene weaves together these interests to tell a quirky and absorbing story of the sometimes turbulent and always interesting life he split between the University of Chicago—where he helped found the Committee on Social Thought—and the farm he kept back in Ireland.

Charting the path that took him from Europe to Chicago in 1937, and encompassing his sixty-five-year career at the university, Grene’s book draws readers into the heady and invigorating climate of his time there. And it is elegantly balanced with reflections stemming from his work on the farm where he hunted, plowed and regularly traveled on horseback to bring his cows home for milking. Grene’s form and humor are quite his own, and his brilliant storytelling will enthrall anyone interested in the classics, rural Ireland, or twentieth-century intellectual history, especially as it pertains to the University of Chicago.

[more]

Once a Professor
A Memoir of Teaching in Turbulent Times
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
Farm boy professor shares a life of lessons.  

“I never wanted to be a professor,” writes Jerry Apps in the introduction to Once a Professor. Yet a series of unexpected events and unplanned experiences put him on an unlikely path—and led to a thirty-eight-year career at the University of Wisconsin. 

In this continuation of the Apps life story begun in his childhood memoir Limping through Life, Wisconsin’s celebrated rural storyteller shares stories from his years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1957 to 1995, when he left the university to lecture and write fulltime. During those years Apps experienced the turmoil of protests and riots at the UW in the 1960s, the struggles of the tenure process and faculty governance, and the ever-present pressure to secure funding for academic research and programs. 

Through it all, the award-winning writer honed a personal philosophy of education—one that values critical thinking, nontraditional teaching approaches, and hands-on experiences outside of the classroom. Colorful characters, personal photos, and journal entries from the era enrich this account of an unexpected campus career.
 
[more]

One Version of the Facts
My Life in the Ivory Tower
Henry E. Duckworth
University of Manitoba Press, 2000
In his engaging memoirs, One Version of the Facts: My Life in the Ivory Tower, Dr. Henry Duckworth takes readers from his student days in Winnipeg and Chicago in the 1930s to his time as president of the University of Winnipeg (1971-1981) and chancellor of the University of Manitoba. An accomplished physicist, he wrote the first definitive text in English on mass spectroscopy, discovered the last stable isotope (platinum), and helped create important programs at universities and at the National Research Council. He also served on numerous councils for scientific and university organizations, and rubbed shoulders with Nobel Prize winners at international conferences.With humour and modesty, Henry Duckworth recalls trends, changes, and crises he witnessed throughout his long university career. He offers his observations, his opinions, his "version of the facts," providing a special insight into critical years in Canada's university education history, as well as his own specialty, atomic research.
[more]

Open Your Hand
Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American
Blumberg, Ilana
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Fifteen years into a successful career as a college professor, Ilana Blumberg encounters a crisis in the classroom that sends her back to the most basic questions about education and prompts a life-changing journey that ultimately takes her from East Lansing to Tel Aviv.  As she explores how civic and religious commitments shape the culture of her humanities classrooms, Blumberg argues that there is no education without ethics. When we know what sort of society we seek to build, our teaching practices follow.
 
In vivid classroom scenes from kindergarten through middle school to the university level, Blumberg conveys the drama of intellectual discovery as she offers novice and experienced teachers a pedagogy of writing, speaking, reading, and thinking that she links clearly to the moral and personal development of her students.
 
Writing as an observant Jew and as an American, Blumberg does not shy away from the difficult challenge of balancing identities in the twenty-first century: how to remain true to a community of origin while being a national and global citizen. As she negotiates questions of faith and citizenship in the wide range of classrooms she traverses, Blumberg reminds us that teaching - and learning - are nothing short of a moral art, and that the future of our society depends on it.
[more]

Out of the Red
My Life of Gangs, Prison, and Redemption
Christian L. Bolden
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Frank Tannenbaum Outstanding Book Award from the American Society of Criminology​

Out of the Red is one man’s pathbreaking story of how social forces and personal choices combined to deliver an unfortunate fate. After a childhood of poverty, institutional discrimination, violence, and being thrown away by the public education system, Bolden's life took him through the treacherous landscape of street gangs at the age of fourteen. The Bloods offered a sense of family, protection, excitement, and power. Incarcerated during the Texas prison boom, the teenage former gangster was thrust into a fight for survival as he navigated the perils of adult prison. As mass incarceration and prison gangs swallowed up youth like him, survival meant finding hope in a hopeless situation and carving a path to his own rehabilitation. Despite all odds, he forged a new path through education, ultimately achieving the seemingly impossible for a formerly incarcerated ex-gangbanger.
 
[more]

Privilege and Prejudice
The Life of a Black Pioneer
Clifton R. Wharton
Michigan State University Press, 2015
Privilege and Prejudice is a stereotype-defying autobiography. It reveals a Black man whose good fortune in birth and heritage and opportunity of time and place helped him to forge breakthroughs in four separate careers. Clifton R. Wharton Jr. entered Harvard at age 16. The first Black student accepted to the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, he went on to receive a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago—another first. For twenty-two years he promoted agricultural development in Latin America and Southeast Asia, earning a post as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation. He again pioneered higher education firsts as president of Michigan State University and chancellor of the sixty-four-campus State University of New York system. As chairman and CEO of TIAA-CREF, he was the first Black CEO of a Fortune 500 company. His commitment to excellence culminated in his appointment as deputy secretary of state during the Clinton administration. A remarkable story of persistence and courage, Privilege and Prejudice also documents the challenges of competing in a society where obstacles, negative expectations, and stereotypical thinking remained stubbornly in place. An absorbing and candid narrative, it describes a most unusual childhood, a remarkable family, and a historic career.
[more]

The Professor and the Profession
Robert Bechtold Heilman
University of Missouri Press, 1999

Robert Bechtold Heilman is one of the last survivors of a remarkable generation of American critics that included such literary giants as Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson, men to whom literary criticism was not a profession or an academic necessity but a calling. In a distinguished career that has spanned nearly six decades, Heilman has influenced generations of scholars and critics through his exquisitely written commentaries on subjects ranging from William Shakespeare to Thomas Hardy.

In The Professor and the Profession, Heilman looks back over his life and times from his perspective as both an academic and an American. Differing in theme and subject matter, the essays included in this collection are ultimately unified by the author himself. Whether the topic is football, Robert Penn Warren, or education, Heilman's generous and intelligent voice emerges on every page. Yet this collection is more than one academic's personal reminiscences; it is a reflection upon American literary history itself.

In the first section of essays, "The Self Displayed," Heilman reveals how he developed from a small-town boy into a distinguished critic and teacher, touching upon his participation in baseball and love of football along the way. "Writers Portrayed" and "Literary Types and Problems Inspected," the following sections, offer his opinions on the past and on the current state of American literary criticism, including personal portraits of such renowned friends as Eric Voegelin, Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roethke, and Malcolm Cowley. The final section, "Education Examined," is an enlightening inquiry into the development of American universities in the twentieth century.

A fascinating chronicle of a significant academic life, The Professor and the Profession will appeal to a broad array of scholars, from young academics wanting to know where they came from to those of Heilman's generation who can appreciate this personal reminiscence into the world of letters.

[more]

A Professor at the End of Time
The Work and Future of the Professoriate
Best, John
Rutgers University Press, 2017
A Professor at the End of Time tells one professor’s story in the context of the rapid reconfiguration of higher education going on now, and analyzes what the job included before the supernova of technological innovation, the general influx of less-well-prepared students, and the diminution of state and federal support wrought wholesale changes on the profession.
 
[more]

Raised at Rutgers
A President's Story
McCormick, Richard L
Rutgers University Press, 2014
In Raised at Rutgers, Richard L. McCormick tells what it is like to run a major state university and vividly portrays the often contentious environment in which a university president operates today. He unsparingly recounts his decade of leadership, including his own missteps—those we know about and those we didn’t—as he strove to obtain adequate resources for the university, to overhaul the often confusing organization of the New Brunswick campus, to manage the growth and success of intercollegiate athletics, and to deepen Rutgers’s acceptance of its obligations as the state university of New Jersey.

With understandable pride, McCormick recalls and relates Rutgers’s academic achievements during his presidency, including a renewed focus on undergraduate education and a significant increase in funding for research. Most dramatically, he chronicles the University’s protracted efforts to reclaim Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (and ultimately to acquire most of UMDNJ), a goal that was finally realized with crucial help from Governor Chris Christie and former governor Tom Kean.

Among the most honest accounts ever written of a college presidency, Raised at Rutgers takes the reader inside one of the best, and liveliest, public universities in America and highlights many of the most critical issues facing higher education today.
[more]

Richard Hofstadter
An Intellectual Biography
David S. Brown
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Richard Hofstadter (1916-70) was America’s most distinguished historian of the twentieth century. The author of several groundbreaking books, including The American Political Tradition, he was a vigorous champion of the liberal politics that emerged from the New Deal. During his nearly thirty-year career, Hofstadter fought public campaigns against liberalism’s most dynamic opponents, from McCarthy in the 1950s to Barry Goldwater and the Sun Belt conservatives in the 1960s. His opposition to the extreme politics of postwar America—articulated in his books, essays, and public lectures—marked him as one of the nation’s most important and prolific public intellectuals. 

In this masterful biography, David Brown explores Hofstadter’s life within the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism. A fierce advocate of academic freedom, racial justice, and political pluralism, Hofstadter charted in his works the changing nature of American society from a provincial Protestant foundation to one based on the values of an urban and multiethnic nation. According to Brown, Hofstadter presciently saw in rural America’s hostility to this cosmopolitanism signs of an anti-intellectualism that he believed was dangerously endemic in a mass democracy. 

By the end of a life cut short by leukemia, Hofstadter had won two Pulitzer Prizes, and his books had attracted international attention. Yet the Vietnam years, as Brown shows, culminated in a conservative reaction to his work that is still with us. Whether one agrees with Hofstadter’s critics or with the noted historian John Higham, who insisted that Hofstadter was “the finest and also the most humane intelligence of our generation,” the importance of this seminal thinker cannot be denied. As this fascinating biography ultimately shows, Hofstadter’s observations on the struggle between conservative and liberal America are relevant to our own times, and his legacy challenges us to this day.
[more]

The Rise of Roosevelt University
Presidential Reflections
Theodore L. Gross
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005
Underscoring professional and educational issues pertinent to higher learning at universities across the country, Theodore L. Gross’ s memoir of his years in academia chronicles his successful fourteen-year presidency at Chicago’ s Roosevelt University, a period of leadership that resulted in an upsurge of fund-raising, sharp increases in enrollment and endowment, and the transformation of an urban campus into a metropolitan university.

 

Beginning with a description of his childhood and adolescent education and experiences, Gross recalls his years as a faculty member and academic administrator at the City College of New York from 1958 to 1978, when the college was moving from selective admissions to open enrollment. He also served in administrative positions at Penn State University and SUNY Purchase before accepting the Roosevelt presidency in 1988. Focusing on the tension between the promise of open admissions and aspirations of academic excellence, The Rise of Roosevelt University: Presidential Reflections relates Gross’ s perceptions of the failure of open admissions at CCNY and his resolution to learn from those mistakes while at Roosevelt.

           

Drawing on private correspondence and conversations, essays, university documents, and other archival materials and research, Gross re-creates the highs and lows of his quest to make Roosevelt distinctive. His strategic plan included the appointment of senior executives and deans, the creation of a performing arts conservatory, the development of an educational alliance with other universities, online instruction, an honors program, a Chicago School of Real Estate, an MBA for Chinese students, the Partners in Corporate Education program, and the implementation of a second comprehensive campus. He describes the creation of the Albert A. Robin campus in Schaumburg and the realization of Roosevelt as a metropolitan university, creating a vivid portrait of the suburban culture, the educational context of large community colleges throughout the northwest suburbs, the development of a community advisory board that helped secure funds, and the improved morale of faculty and administration.

 

Gross’ s fund-raising efforts increased the endowment from $3 million to $33 million, and a capital campaign surpassed the goal of $45 million. In this volume, he describes meetings with major donors, the successes and failures of contributions, and the development of greater alumni support in the context of fund-raising throughout Chicago. He also analyzes the highly publicized legal dispute between the Auditorium Theatre Council and Roosevelt University over ownership of the world renowned theatre, pointing out how the case epitomizes issues that all universities confront: the university’ s need to control its entities, detrimental publicity, sectional and regional conflicts, and a split in the arts community. Throughout this narrative, Gross juxtaposes his personal life and professional career, dramatizing how the two are related.

 

More than a retelling of anecdotes and statistics, the volume provides a rare perspective on the intersection of higher education and politics in Chicago. Gross analyzes the different public and private universities in the city and in surrounding Cook County to describe their relationships with ethnicity, religion, class, and with city hall. He also covers the Daley political machine’ s influence on higher education, the politics of university governance, the spectacular growth of the western suburbs, and city versus suburban identities.

 

A personal road map of the development of higher education through the post– World War II decades, The Rise of Roosevelt University: Presidential Reflections mirrors the social climate that affected the country’ s universities at large, from the open admissions policies and student rebellions of the ’ 60s and ’ 70s, to the urban blight and suburban sprawl of the ’ 80s, to the strategic planning and expansion of the ’ 90s and the new century. The result is a captivating account of the issues involved in presidential transition and leadership, the strategic development of metropolitan universities, and the future role of Roosevelt and similar institutions.  

[more]

The Sage in the Cathedral of Books
The Distinguished Chinese American Library Professional Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee
Yang, Yang
Ohio University Press, 2016
The biography of Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee, who was awarded the highly prestigious Melvil Dewey Medal by the American Library Association in 2015, will be welcomed by readers interested in knowing not only more about Lee’s personal achievements and contributions in librarianship but also about the rapid changes in the library profession in general. The biography, written by Ms. Yang Yang of China Central Television in Beijing, was first published in Chinese in China in 2011. It was republished in Taiwan with added information in 2014. This English edition, translated by Dr. Ying Zhang of the University of California in Irvine, was updated by Lee.

Throughout his childhood and youth, Lee experienced tremendous hardship during the brutal Sino-Japanese War and then the Chinese civil war, described in the first three chapters. After arriving in the United States as a graduate student from Taiwan in 1957, he struggled to realize the American dream by studying hard and working diligently in the field of librarianship for nearly half a century.

The biography explores Lee’s career at major academic libraries, beginning at the University of Pittsburgh to his retirement from Ohio University, including his seven years of library directorship at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand, under the sponsorship of the U.S. Agency for International Development. After his first retirement, Lee was invited by OCLC to become a Visiting Distinguished Scholar. From there he was appointed Chief of the Asian Division at the Library of Congress and retired for the second time in 2008.

The biography also highlights Lee’s contributions in international librarianship, especially in the promotion of library cooperation between the United States and China.
[more]

Saving Schools
From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning
Paul E. Peterson
Harvard University Press, 2011
In this book Peterson interprets the history of American schools by placing major educational reformers in the context of their times and relates their thinking to our own era by scrutinizing the often unanticipated consequences of their commitments and ideas. These extraordinary individuals provided the critical ideas and articulated the ideals that motivated many others to search for ways to save the schools from the limitations in which they were embedded: Horace Mann, John Dewey, Martin Luther King, Al Shanker, William Bennett, and James S. Coleman. The drive to centralize was pervasive despite repeatedly expressed reform desire to customize education. Peterson argues that education has become an increasingly labor intensive industry that must reverse direction and become more capital intensive or it will descend in quality. Fortunately, technological change is making it possible radically alter the way in which education services are delivered, providing a new chance to save our schools.
[more]

Schooling Without Labels
Parents, Educators, and Inclusive Education
Douglas Biklen
Temple University Press, 1992

Douglas Biklen closely examines the experiences of six families in which children with disabilities are full participants in family life in order to understand how people who have been labeled disabled might become full participants in the other areas of society as well. He focuses on the contradictions between what some families have achieved, what they want for their children, and what society and its social policies allow. He demonstrates how the principles of inclusion that govern the lives of these families can be extended to education, community life, and other social institutions.

The parents who tell their stories here have actively sought inclusion of their children in regular schools and community settings; several have children with severe or multiple disabilities. In discussing issues such as normalization, acceptance, complete schooling, circles of friends, and community integration, these parents describe the challenge and necessity of their children's "leading regular lives."



In the series Health, Society, and Policy, edited by Sheryl Ruzek and Irving Kenneth Zola.
[more]

The Secret Lives of Teachers
Anonymous
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Welcome to “East Hudson,” an elite private school in New York where the students are attentive, the colleagues are supportive, and the tuition would make the average person choke on its string of zeroes. You might think a teacher here would have little in common with most other teachers in America, but as this veteran educator—writing anonymously—shows in this refreshingly honest account, all teachers are bound by a common thread. Stripped of most economic obstacles and freed up by anonymity, he is able to tell a deeper story about the universal conditions, anxieties, foibles, generosities, hopes, and complaints that comprise every teacher’s life. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes scandalous, but always recognizable to anyone who has ever walked into a classroom, closed the door, and started their day.
           
This is not a how-to manual. Rather, the author explores the dimensions of teaching that no one else has, those private thoughts few would dare put into a book but that form an important part of the day-to-day experience of a teacher. We see him ponder the clothes that people wear, think frankly about money (and the imbalance of its distribution), get wrangled by parents, provide on-the-fly psychotherapy, drape niceties over conversations that are actually all-out warfare, drop an f-bomb or two, and deal with students who are just plain unlikeable. We also see him envy, admire, fear, and hope; we see him in adulation and uncertainty, and in energy and exhaustion. We see him as teachers really are: human beings with a complex, rewarding, and very important job.

There has been no shortage of commentary on the teaching profession over the decades, but none quite like this. Unflinching, wry, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, it’s written for every teacher out there who has ever scrambled, smirked, or sighed—and toughed it out nonetheless. 
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Seeing Language in Sign
The Work of William C. Stokoe
Jane Maher
Gallaudet University Press, 2010

In 1955 William C. Stokoe arrived at Gallaudet College (later Gallaudet University) to teach English where he was first exposed to deaf people signing. While most of his colleagues dismissed signing as mere mimicry of speech, Stokoe saw in it elements of a distinctive language all its own. Seeing Language in Sign traces the process that Stokoe followed to prove scientifically and unequivocally that American Sign Language (ASL) met the full criteria of linguistics—phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and use of language—to be classified a fully developed language.

     This perceptive account dramatically captures the struggle Stokoe faced in persuading the establishment of the truth of his discovery. Other faculty members ridiculed or reviled him, and many deaf members of the Gallaudet community laughed at his efforts. Seeing Language in Sign rewards the reader with a rich portrayal of an undaunted advocate who, like a latter-day Galileo, pursued his vision doggedly regardless of relentless antagonism. He established the Linguistics Research Laboratory, then founded the journal 
Sign Language Studies to sustain an unpopular dialogue until the tide changed. His ultimate vindication corresponded with the recognition of the glorious culture and community that revolves around Deaf people and their language, ASL.


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Stanley Fish, America's Enfant Terrible
The Authorized Biography
Gary A. Olson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
One of the twentieth century’s most original and influential literary theorists, Stanley Fish is also known as a fascinatingly atypical, polarizing public intellectual; a loud, cigar-smoking contrarian; and a lightning rod for both the political right and left. The truth and the limitations of this reputation are explored in Stanley Fish, America’s Enfant Terrible by Gary A. Olson. At once a literary biography and a traditional life story, this engrossing volume details Fish’s vibrant personal life and his remarkably versatile career.
 
Born into a tumultuous family, Fish survived life with an emotionally absent father and a headstrong mother through street sports and troublemaking as much as through his success at a rigorous prep school. As Olson shows, Fish’s escape from the working-class neighborhoods of 1940s and 1950s Providence, Rhode Island, came with his departure for the university life at the University of Pennsylvania and then Yale. His meteoric rise through the academic ranks at a troubled Vietnam-era UC-Berkeley was complemented by a 1966 romp through Europe that included drag racing through the streets of Seville in his Alfa Romeo. He went on to become an internationally prominent scholar at Johns Hopkins before moving to Duke, where he built a star-studded academic department that became a key site in the culture and theory wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Olson discusses Fish’s tenure as a highly visible dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago who clashed publicly with the state legislature. He also covers Fish’s most remarkable and controversial books, including Fish’s masterpiece, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost," which was a critical sensation and forever changed the craft of literary criticism, as well as Professional Correctness and Save the World on Your Own Time, two books that alienated Fish from most liberal-minded professors in English studies.
 
Olson concludes his biography of Fish with an in-depth analysis of the contradictions between Fish’s public persona and his private personality, examining how impulses and events from Fish’s childhood shaped his lifelong practices and personality traits. Also included are a chronology of the major events of Fish’s life and never-before-published photos.
 
Based on hundreds of hours of recorded interviews with friends, enemies, colleagues, former students, family members, and Fish himself, along with material from the Stanley Fish archive, Stanley Fish, America’s Enfant Terrible is a clearly written narrative of the life of an important and controversial scholar. 
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Straddling Worlds
The Jewish-American Journey of Professor Richard W. Leopold
Steven J. Harper
Northwestern University Press, 2008

Author Steven J. Harper pays tribute to a well-respected teacher with this biography of a distinguished William Smith Mason Professor of History at Northwestern University, Richard W. Leopold. Harper had maintained contact with his former professor, as had hundreds of other alumni, meeting with him in the apartment to which his age and health confined him. When Leopold invited him to review his biographical materials to prepare a New York Times obituary, Harper began to catch glimpses of a deeper history in Leopold’s life: that of Jews in America after the turn of the century.

Across two years of Sundays, Leopold’s life came together and Harper began to notice parallels between the life of his professor and the life of his recently deceased father-in-law. Both grew up in less orthodox households but were still identified as Jewish by others; both attended Ivy League colleges, fighting (and beating) anti-Semitism there; and both served their country with distinction in World War II. The two men persevered through a twentieth century Jewish-American experience that they and many others shared, but rarely discussed. Steven Harper has caught them both on the page just in time to document their lives, their culture, and the nation that grew and changed alongside them.

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Street of Dreams
The Nature and Legacy of the 1960s
Douglas M. Knight
Duke University Press, 1989
The 1960s are well documented but not well understood; the rhetoric of and reaction to the decade continues to trouble American public discourse. This work by Douglas Knight, who served as president of Duke University from 1963 to 1969 during clashes on that campus, is not only an honest account of one institution’s experience, but draws parallels to the situations on other campuses and seeks to comprehend the time and its enduring influence.
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Teaching from the Heart and Soul
The Robert F. Panara Story
Harry G. Lang
Gallaudet University Press, 2007

The Sixth Volume in the Deaf Lives Series

Robert F. Panara lost his hearing from spinal meningitis in 1931 at the age of ten. However, he could read and write, and with his friends’ help, Bob (as he was known), made it through high school. His new solitude created a new passion – reading, reading, and reading. The stage was set for the emergence of one of the great deaf educators in modern time, a life fully captured in Harry G. Lang’s Teaching from the Heart and Soul: The Robert F. Panara Story.

Bob Panara’s many achievements began after his discovery of Gallaudet College in the 1940s. There, he wrote “The Significance of the Reading Problem,” which first expressed his belief that teaching “comes from the heart and soul.” The article secured him his first job at the New York School for the Deaf in White Plains. Bob returned to teach at Gallaudet College from 1948 until 1965, when he left to help found the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) and the National Theatre of the Deaf (NTD) — all in the same year. He continued to expand arts and literature at NTID until his retirement in 1987.

Bob Panara’s genius resides in the people he inspired with his vivacious teaching style. He believed ardently in involving students, that they should “be the book.” Former students tell story after story about his fabulous interpretations of drama and poetry, a legacy confirmed by his own story in Teaching from the Heart and Soul.

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Teaching in the Terrordome
Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach for America
Heather Kirn Lanier
University of Missouri Press, 2012
Only 50 percent of kids growing up in poverty will earn a high school diploma. Just one in ten will graduate college. Compelled by these troubling statistics, Heather Kirn Lanier joined Teach For America (TFA), a program that thrusts eager but inexperienced college graduates into America’s most impoverished areas to teach, asking them to do whatever is necessary to catch their disadvantaged kids up to the rest of the nation.
With little more than a five-week teacher boot camp and the knowledge that David Simon referred to her future school as “The Terrordome,” the altruistic and naïve Lanier devoted herself to attaining the program’s goals but met obstacles on all fronts. The building itself was in such poor condition that tiles fell from the ceiling at random. Kids from the halls barged into classes all day, disrupting even the most carefully planned educational activities. In the middle of one lesson, a wandering student lit her classroom door on fire. Some colleagues, instantly suspicious of TFA’s intentions, withheld their help and supplies. (“They think you’re trying to ‘save’ the children,” one teacher said.) And although high school students can be by definition resistant, in west Baltimore they threw eggs, slashed tires, and threatened teachers’ lives. Within weeks, Lanier realized that the task she was charged with—achieving quantifiable gains in her students’ learning—would require something close to a miracle.
Superbly written and timely, Teaching in the Terrordome casts an unflinching gaze on one of America’s “dropout factory” high schools. Though Teach For America often touts its most successful teacher stories, in this powerful memoir Lanier illuminates a more common experience of “Teaching For America” with thoughtful complexity, a poet’s eye, and an engaging voice. As hard as Lanier worked to become a competent teacher, she found that in “The Terrordome,” idealism wasn’t enough. To persevere, she had to rely on grit, humility, a little comedy, and a willingness to look failure in the face. As she adjusted to a chaotic school administration, crumbling facilities, burned-out colleagues, and students who perceived their school for the failure it was, she gained perspective on the true state of the crisis TFA sets out to solve. Ultimately, she discovered that contrary to her intentions, survival in the so-called Charm City was a high expectation.
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The The Best Weapon for Peace
Maria Montessori, Education, and Children's Rights
Erica Moretti
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
The Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori (1870–1952) is best known for the teaching method that bears her name. She was also a lifelong pacifist, although historians tend to consider her writings on this topic as secondary to her pedagogy. In The Best Weapon for Peace, Erica Moretti reframes Montessori’s pacifism as the foundation for her educational activism, emphasizing her vision of the classroom as a gateway to reshaping society. Montessori education offers a child-centered learning environment that cultivates students’ development as peaceful, curious, and resilient adults opposed to war and invested in societal reform.
 
Using newly discovered primary sources, Moretti examines Montessori’s lifelong pacifist work, including her ultimately unsuccessful push for the creation of the White Cross, a humanitarian organization for war-affected children. Moretti shows that Montessori’s educational theories and practices would come to define chilren’s rights once adopted by influential international organizations, including the United Nations. She uncovers the significance of Montessori’s evolving philosophy of peace and early childhood education within broader conversations about internationalism and humanitarianism.
 
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Toward a Feminist Rhetoric
The Writing of Gertrude Buck
Joann Campbell
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996

The nature of Gertrude Buck, professor of English at Vassar College from 1897 until her death in 1922, is well-known to anyone interested in the history of composition.  Her writing is less well-known, much of it now out of print.  JoAnn Campbell gathers together for the first time the major work of this innovative thinker and educator, including her most important articles on rhetorical theory; The Social Criticism of Literature, a forerunner of reader-response literary theory; selections from her textbooks on argumentative and expository writing; poetry; fiction; her play Mother-Love, and unpublished reports and correspondence from the English department at Vassar.

In her introduction, Campbell describes the masculine rhetorical tradition within which Buck wrote and taught.  Her theories of language and composition quietly challenged the dominant rhetorics issuing from Harvard and Amherst.  An unusually productive scholar, Buck wrote textbooks for her female students that affirmed women’s intellectual abilities and trained them to participate in political debate.  In the Vassar English Department she found a community of women among whom she could practice and develop her theories regarding rhetoric, pedagogy, and the role of the individual in society.

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Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt
William J. Edwards
University of Alabama Press, 1993
Born in Snow Hill, in 1869, William J. Edwards graduated in 1893 from Tuskegee Institute, then under the direction of Booker T. Washington, and set out to find a way to use in his own life the values he had learned at Tuskeegee. He did not have to look far. Edwards toured Wilcox, Monroe, Butler, and Dallas counties and found a large black population in need of both liberal and practical education. Following the model set by Tuskegee, Edwards founded Snow Hill Institute in 1893 and was its principal and guiding hand for 31 years.

Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt is a memoir written by Edwards in 1918, when the school was 25 years old. It not only provided a fascinating portrait of the conditions of black people and the state of race relations in Alabama at the time, but also tells of one person's determination to uplift his race, particularly through eductation, in the years following Reconstruction.
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Undercurrents
From Oceanographer to University President
John V. Byrne
Oregon State University Press, 2018
Undercurrents recounts the life and career of John Byrne, who started as a geologist at an oil company and retired as president of a major land grant university. He came to Oregon State in 1960 as a faculty member, later becoming department chair, dean, director of the Hatfield Marine Science Center, and vice president for Research and Graduate Studies. Along the way, he took leave from the university to serve the US government, first as a program director for oceanography at the National Science Foundation, and later as the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, before returning to OSU in 1984 as its twelfth president.

As president of OSU, John Byrne used the lessons learned in industry and government to guide the university through a period of turbulence caused by severe state budget restrictions. During this period of economic contraction, OSU continued under Byrne’s leadership to grow in programs, facilities, and external funding. Byrne was one of the first to introduce Total Quality Management techniques to higher education. He emphasized the importance of international education and was a supporter of significant academic reform in higher education.

While focusing on his professional career, Byrne’s memoir also shares personal stories of a childhood and youth shaped by the Great Depression and World War II. Undercurrents demonstrates on every page the curiosity, intellect, and humanity that made John Byrne successful as a scientist, educator, and administrator. Anyone pursuing a career in science or academia, and anyone interested in the history and legacy of land grant universities will welcome this richly detailed and warmly written account of Byrne’s career.
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White Boy
A Memoir
Mark D. Naison
Temple University Press, 2002
How does a Jewish boy who spent the bulk of his childhood on the basketball courts of Brooklyn wind up teaching in one of the city's pioneering black studies departments? Naison's odyssey begins as Brooklyn public schools respond to a new wave of Black migrants and Caribbean immigrants, and established residents flee to virtually all-white parts of the city or suburbs. Already alienated by his parents' stance on race issues and their ambitions for him, he has started on a separate ideological path by the time he enters Columbia College. Once he embarks on a long-term interracial relationship, becomes a member of SDS, focuses his historical work on black activists, and organizes community groups in the Bronx, his immersion in the radical politics of the 1960s has emerged as the center of his life. Determined to keep his ties to the Black community, even when the New Left splits along racial lines, Naison joined the fledgling African American studies program at Fordham, remarkable then as now for its commitment to interracial education.This memoir offers more than a participant's account of the New Left's racial dynamics; it eloquently speaks to the ways in which political commitments emerge from and are infused with the personal choices we all make.
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William J. Spillman and the Birth of Agricultural Economics
Laurie Winn Carlson
University of Missouri Press, 2005
William J. Spillman (1863–1931), considered the founder of agricultural economics, was a scientist and popular agricultural educator for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). As the author of more than three hundred articles and four books, Spillman left a lasting mark on American agriculture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with his pioneering solutions for the problems of overproduction and low prices.
Spillman grew up in Lawrence County, Missouri, and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Missouri in Columbia. In this biography, Laurie Winn Carlson looks at Spillman’s career as he moved from Missouri to Washington, D.C., where his concepts shaped what became the agricultural New Deal and, eventually, the current farm allotment programs. By placing Spillman’s story within the larger context of American agricultural history, Carlson takes readers inside the USDA during the years our nation’s agricultural policy took shape. She studies the development of the field of genetics, the conflicts regarding agricultural education and the creation of the Cooperative Extension Service, the overproduction crisis after World War I and Spillman’s ideas for allotment, and the commercial fertilizer industry and the Law of Diminishing Returns. She also looks at efforts to restrict research, the censorship of publications directed toward farmers, and personal rivalries within the USDA.
This examination of agriculture through Spillman’s eyes reveals that industrialized agriculture was not inevitable but a carefully crafted ideology that farmers were pushed to embrace. Although highly contested by farmers as well as employees within the USDA, industry, government, politics, and technology, industrialized agriculture moved people off the land, replacing them with large-scale mechanized production.
An iconoclast within the USDA bureaucracy, Spillman was a “farm evangelist,” taking his message of diversified farming across the country. He believed that farmers should integrate livestock and rotate crops, rather than continue the monoculture production that was evolving due to the increasing industrialization of farming. Those issues, as well as the Law of Diminishing Returns, sustainability, and popular education, all matters to which Spillman devoted his career, are more important today than ever.
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William Watts Folwell
The Autobiography and Letters of a Pioneer of Culture
William Folwell
University of Minnesota Press, 1933
William Watts Folwell: The Autobiography and Letters of a Pioneer Culture was first published in 1933. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original In a three-room farmhouse in Romulus, New York, where a spinning wheel stood by the fireplace and home-dipped candles lighted the long evenings, William Watts Folwell was born on February 14, 1833. His life of ninety-six years spanned the Century of Progress. It was on February 14, 1933, exactly one hundred years from the day of his birth, that the University of Minnesota Press brought out this volume containing Dr. Folwell’s own story of his long life. He traveled in early Victorian Europe, met Browning in Italy and Jakob Grimm in Germany, corresponded with Matthew Arnold, served as an officer in the Civil War, and in 1869 became the first president of the University of Minnesota. From that time until his death in September 1929, he maintained an unflagging interest in the affairs of the university and the state, finishing the four-volume History of Minnesota only a few months before his death.
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With a Critical Eye
An Intellectual and His Times
Arthur J. Vidich
University of Tennessee Press, 2009
Internationally renowned sociologist, Arthur J. Vidich (1922-2006), was an active researcher and teacher whose career spanned the second half of the twentieth century. With a Critical Eye: An Intellectual and His Times recounts Vidich’s career in the wider cultural context of his life and work. Providing a window into post-World War II intellectual life, the richness of the autobiography lies not only in Vidich’s perspectives on the academic world, but also in his personal and sociological observations about the world around him.

Best known for his book, Small Town in Mass Society (co-authored with Joseph Bensman, 1958), Vidich taught for more than forty years at the New School for Social Research in New York. He published eighteen books, co-edited a book series with Robert Jackall, and was the founding editor of the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society.
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Women and the Society of Biblical Literature
Nicole L. Tilford
SBL Press, 2019

Celebrate 125 years of women's history in the Society of Biblical Literature.

Fourteen years after eight male biblical scholars met in Philip Schaff's study to create the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, the Society admitted its first woman, Anna Ely Rhoads, in 1894. Since Rhoads joined, the careers and lives of women in SBL have changed radically from those earliest members, whose careers were largely tied to the careers of their fathers or spouses and to institutions concerned with the education of young women. Current members now serve on editorial boards and committees; women present papers and publish books; they teach and mentor students. Leading women biblical scholars from around the world reflect on their experiences studying the Bible academically in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This volume is a valuable tool for scholars and students interested in the lives and experiences of women in academic fields, the history of the SBL, and developments in the academic study of the Bible.

Features

  • An essay on the history of women in the SBL, tracing some of the struggles and accomplishments of the Society's earliest members
  • More than twenty-five autobiographical reflections from former SBL presidents, Council members, editors, and active members
  • Reflections from members who specialize in a variety of subdisciplines, representing a range of academic and alternative academic careers
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Writing Home
A Literacy Autobiography
Eli Goldblatt
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012
In this engrossing memoir, poet and literacy scholar Eli Goldblatt shares the intimate ways reading and writing influenced the first thirty years of his life—in the classroom but mostly outside it. Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography traces Goldblatt’s search for home and his growing recognition that only through his writing life can he fully contextualize the world he inhabits.
 
Goldblatt connects his educational journey as a poet and a teacher to his conception of literacy, and assesses his intellectual, emotional, and political development through undergraduate and postgraduate experiences alongside the social imperatives of the era. He explores his decision to leave medical school after he realized that he could not compartmentalize work and creative life or follow in his surgeon father’s footsteps. A brief first marriage rearranged his understanding of gender and sexuality, and a job teaching in an innercity school initiated him into racial politics. Literacy became a dramatic social reality when he witnessed the start of the national literacy campaign in postrevolutionary Nicaragua and spent two months finding his bearings while writing poetry in Mexico City.

Goldblatt presents a thoughtful and exquisitely crafted narrative of his life to illustrate that literacy exists at the intersection of individual and social life and is practiced in relationship to others. While the concept of literacy autobiography is a common assignment in undergraduate and graduate writing courses, few books model the exercise. Writing Home helps fill that void and, with Goldblatt’s emphasis on “out of school” literacy, fosters an understanding of literacy as a social practice.

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