BiblioVault - Books about Educators

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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