John Marin was a major figure among the cutting-edge circle of American modernist artists who showed his work in Alfred Stieglitz’s New York galleries from 1909 until 1950. A new collection of the artist’s work at the Arkansas Arts Center, given by Marin’s daughter-in-law, forms the basis of this first book of essays and images to concentrate on Marin’s drawings in the context of Marin’s life, his watercolors, and his etchings.
We follow Marin to his most famous subject matter: New York City and the coast of Maine. Foundational drawings and an unfinished watercolor of the towering Woolworth Building, still under construction when they were made in 1912, begin the story of a renowned group of watercolors first exhibited in 1913 at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery and then at the ground-breaking 1913 Armory Show. Other images take us to lesser-known locales, such as the Ramapo Mountains in New York and New Jersey where Marin often painted when he couldn’t get to Maine. More obscure aspects of the artist’s career explored in this collection include portraits of friends and family, charming drawings of animals, and circus scenes.
Becoming John Marin invites readers to look over this important artist’s shoulder as he created and honed the sketches he would interpret into completed watercolors and etchings, illustrating the evolution of his style and methods as he transformed from intuitive draftsman to innovative modernist watercolorist and etcher.
The Little Rock Central High School integration crisis did not end in1957 when President Eisenhower sent a portion of the first Airborne Division to protect nine black students. The turmoil was entering its second year in 1958 when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus invoked a hastily passed state law to close the high schools rather than obey the federal court orders that would integrate them.
A group of respectable, middle-class white women, faced with the prospect of no schools as well as the further loss of their city’s good name, turned militant. Led by Adolphine Fletcher Terry, a prominent, “old family” civic leader in her seventies, the wome n quickly put together the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC), a highly effective organization that bombarded the city with ads, fliers, and statements challenging Faubus’s action. At peak membership, the WEC mustered two thousand to their cause. Largely inexperienced in politics when they joined the WEC, these women became articulate, confident promoters of public schools and helped others to understand that those schools must be fully integrated.
Forty years later, Sara Murphy, a key member of the WEC, recounts the rarely told sto1y of these courageous women who formed a resistance movement. With passion and sensitivity, she reconstructs the challenges and triumphs of that battle, which issued from the mutual link Southern white women shared with disfranchised African Americans in their common goal for full citizenship.
New York Times Book Review Notable Book for 1997
1998 Certificate of Commendation, American Association for State and Local History
Much has been written about the Little Rock School Crisis of 1957, but very little has been devoted to the following year—the Lost Year, 1958–59—when Little Rock schools were closed to all students, both black and white. Finding the Lost Year is the first book to look at the unresolved elements of the school desegregation crisis and how it turned into a community crisis, when policymakers thwarted desegregation and challenged the creation of a racially integrated community and when competing groups staked out agendas that set Arkansas’s capital on a path that has played out for the past fifty years.
In Little Rock in 1958, 3,665 students were locked out of a free public education. Teachers’ lives were disrupted, but students’ lives were even more confused. Some were able to attend schools outside the city, some left the state, some joined the military, some took correspondence courses, but fully 50 percent of the black students went without any schooling. Drawing on personal interviews with over sixty former teachers and students, black and white, Gordy details the long-term consequences for students affected by events and circumstances over which they had little control.
“Fifty years ago segregationists trying to keep black students out of Little Rock Central High inadvertently broke up one of the country’s greatest football dynasties. . . . Wait a minute. . . . Who said you can’t have a high school football team just because you don’t have a high school? Canceling football, Faubus decreed, would be ‘a cruel and unnecessary blow to the children.’ O.K. then, everyone agreed. Play ball!”
—“Blinded by History,” Sports Illustrated
“It was one of those periods that you got through, as opposed to enjoyed. It wasn’t an environment that . . . was nurturing, so you shut it out. You just got through it. You just took it a day at a time. You excelled if you could. You did your best. You felt as though the eyes of the community were on you.”—Glenda Wilson, East Side Junior High
Much has been written about the historical desegregation of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American students in 1957. History has been silent, however, about the students who desegregated Little Rock’s five public junior high schools—East Side, Forest Heights, Pulaski Heights, Southwest, and West Side—in 1961 and 1962.
The First Twenty-Five gathers the personal stories of these students some fifty years later. They recall what it was like to break down long-standing racial barriers while in their early teens—a developmental stage that often brings emotional vulnerability. In their own words, these individuals share what they saw, heard, and felt as children on the front lines of the civil rights movement, providing insight about this important time in Little Rock, and how these often painful events from their childhoods affected the rest of their lives.
During the 2017 session, the Arkansas Legislative Assembly expanded the state’s complement of official state symbols. The second edition of this statewide bestseller includes an additional chapter on Arkansas’s newest symbol: the state dinosaur, Arkansaurus fridayi.
In It’s Official!, David Ware makes a case for considering the symbols as useful keys to understanding both the Arkansas that has been and the one it hopes to be.
HE MADE HISTORY. HE TELLS THE TRUTHS HE KNOWS.
LEAD TITLE/Our National Conversation Series
“This is a mesmerizing and brave book, a story with complicated layers and meaning for all Americans, a heroic saga of progress and its consequences.”
—Ken Burns, director of Jazz and The War
In September 1957 nine black children tried to integrate Arkansas’s Little Rock Central High School in accordance with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Claiming he was acting to keep the peace, Gov. Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to keep them out of the school. After a lengthy standoff, President Eisenhower called in the 101st Airborne and reluctantly, slowly, but forcibly began to integrate the school. The standoff became a rallying cry for Southern segregationists and a marker of the country’s shame.
The accounts that have been so mythologized over the years leave people embarrassed and angry, yet the myth is a cardboard cutout of the full story. Turn Away Thy Son, told from the point of view of sixteen key participants, brings the nine students, their tormentors, the school administration, the governor, and the press to vivid life. It shows the truth about Little Rock, beyond the caricatures to the fundamental driving forces that made school desegregation the hottest of hot-button issues in the Jim Crow South.
Turn Away Thy Son was originally published by Free Press in 2007.
Winner of the 2008 Booker Worthen Literary Prize.
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