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When we think about school principals, most of us imagine a figure of vague, yet intimidating authority—for an elementary school student, being sent to the principal’s office is roughly on par with a trip to Orwell’s Room 101. But with School Principal, Dan C. Lortie aims to change that. Much as he did for teachers with his groundbreaking book Schoolteacher, Lortie offers here an intensive and detailed look at principals, painting a compelling portrait of what they do, how they do it, and why.

Lortie begins with a brief history of the job before turning to the daily work of a principal. These men and women, he finds, stand at the center of a constellation of competing interests around and within the school. School district officials, teachers, parents, and students all have needs and demands that frequently clash, and it is the principal’s job to manage these conflicting expectations to best serve the public. Unsurprisingly then, Lortie records his subjects’ professional dissatisfactions, but he also vividly depicts the pleasures of their work and the pride they take in their accomplishments. Finally, School Principal offers a glimpse of the future with an analysis of current issues and trends in education, including the increasing presence of women in the role and the effects of widespread testing mandated by the government.

Lortie’s scope is both broad and deep, offering an eminently useful range of perspectives on his subject. From the day-to-day toil to the long-term course of an entire career, from finding out just what goes on inside that office to mapping out the larger social and organizational context of the job, School Principal is a truly comprehensive account of a little-understood profession.

The problems commonly associated with inner-city schools were not nearly as pervasive a century ago, when black children in most northern cities attended school alongside white children. In Schools Betrayed, her innovative history of race and urban education, Kathryn M. Neckerman tells the story of how and why these schools came to serve black children so much worse than their white counterparts.

Focusing on Chicago public schools between 1900 and 1960, Neckerman compares the circumstances of blacks and white immigrants, groups that had similarly little wealth and status yet came to gain vastly different benefits from their education. Their divergent educational outcomes, she contends, stemmed from Chicago officials’ decision to deal with rising African American migration by segregating schools and denying black students equal resources. And it deepened, she shows, because of techniques for managing academic failure that only reinforced inequality. Ultimately, these tactics eroded the legitimacy of the schools in Chicago’s black community, leaving educators unable to help their most disadvantaged students.

Schools Betrayed will be required reading for anyone who cares about urban education.

This first political and social history of the American Legion in Illinois from its formation in 1919 to the onset of World War II focuses on the organization’s influence on the two political parties and on public opinion at the state and local levels. Gauging the singular influence of the organization in a particularly turbulent time in Illinois and American history, Thomas B. Littlewood argues that the local orientation of individual posts was probably more important to most Legionnaires than the activities of the organization’s national leaders. At the same time, he shows how the conflicts within the Legion mirrored those in the larger society.

Soldiers Back Home: The American Legion in Illinois, 1919–1939 traces the origins of the organization nationally and in Illinois, showing it to be the biggest and most politically committed of the several organizations of World War I veterans. First and foremost a fraternal association of men whose military service set them apart, it was also a social mechanism through which veterans contained and redirected their anger and alienation. Littlewood details how the organization developed quickly into a vigorous pressure group working to influence public policy on behalf of veterans and their families. Concentrating at first on the welfare of children who had lost their fathers in the war, the Legion later became involved in a variety of community service activities and served as a political training ground.

World War I was the first conflict to be fought by a largely conscripted army. When the soldiers returned from the war, labor unions were pressing hard to organize American workers in rapidly growing concentrations of industry. Business enjoyed generally high esteem, but the ensuing social and economic turbulence led to a shattering of civil order in some parts of Illinois. Prohibition, bootleggers, and organized crime gave way to the crumbling of the economy and the lean, hard years of the Depression. While these events were unfolding in Illinois, rural citizens resisted the rebalancing of power caused by massive migrations of citizens from farm to city by refusing to reapportion legislative districts. 

Organized thematically, Soldiers Back Home traces the Legion’s impact on politics, community life, labor relations, race relations, and the struggle for veterans’ benefits in Illinois. Littlewood maintains that the Legion experienced significant divisions along regional lines, especially over the issues of the Ku Klux Klan and labor. Likewise, brutal sectional tensions grew between rural and urban populations. Littlewood looks at the role of the veteran in American politics and society, discussing the careers of famed Illinois leaders such as Scott Lucas, William Dawson, and Everett Dirksen and their involvement with the Legion. He also addresses issues of diversity and division within the organization.

Resisting the polemics of some contemporary interpretations of the American Legion and avoiding the tone of the sanitized official histories of the organization, Soldiers Back Home is a major contribution to the history of the interwar years—in Illinois and nationally—that will interest general readers and historians alike. The volume is augmented by thirteen illustrations.

Designed to help bird watchers in the field and at home discover the significance of their observations, Southern Illinois Birds documents current knowledge of the birds of southern Illinois by surveying both the published literature on the subject and the unpublished field notes of active observers summarizing many important observations that are not readily available elsewhere.

Bordered on three sides by major rivers, with both upland and lowland forests and dramatic topographic relief in the unglaciated Shawnee Hills, southern Illinois offers a wide variety of habitats and birds unusual to Illinois and the Midwest in general. Compared with studies in central and northern Illinois, there have been few active field observers in the south; yet the contributions of those who worked in southern Illinois have been considerable. Robinson displays their efforts convincingly in this book.

Southern Illinois Birds includes information on early arrival and late departure dates of migrants, the highest reported single-day counts in each season, and records of all vagrants. In addition, Robinson includes maps and guides to some of the best birding areas in the region to encourage birders and others to explore the many birding and scenic attractions in southern Illinois.

Robinson has produced a definitive reference for ornithologists and amateur bird watchers, conservation and government agencies, college students in biology, and future researchers who wish to determine the status and abundance of southern Illinois birds.

The coal mining photographs of C. William Horrell, taken across the southern Illinois Coal Belt over a twenty-year period from 1966 to 1986, are extraordinary examples of documentary photography—so stark and striking that captions often seem superfluous.

Horrell’s photographs capture the varied phenomena of twentieth-century coal mining technology: the awesome scale of surface mining machines and their impact on the land; massive machines forced into narrow passageways with inches to spare as they carry coal from the face to conveyer belts; and, more significant, the advent of continuous miners, machines that can handle four previously separate processes and which have been a fixture in underground or “deep” mines since the mid-1960s.

Horrell was also intrigued by the related activities of mining, including coal’s processing, cleaning, and transportation, as well as the daily, behind-the-scenes operations that keep mines and miners working. His photographs reflect the beauty of the commonplace—the clothes of the miners, their dinner pails, and their tools—and reveal the picturesque remnants of closed mines: the weathered boards of company houses, the imposing iron beauty of an ancient tipple, and an abandoned building against the lowering sky of an approaching storm. Finally, his portraits of coal minersshow the strength, dignity, and enduring spirit of the men and women who work the southern Illinois coal mines.