Explores Mississippi’s school desegregation from the viewpoint of a white teacher
 
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.”
 

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.