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Where culture met classroom—how Alabama’s past shaped its public schools.

Schools in the Landscape offers a richly detailed and deeply contextualized history of public education in Alabama during the transformative half-century following the Civil War. In this groundbreaking study, Edith M. Ziegler examines how localism, cultural tradition, and social conservatism shaped the development of Alabama’s public school system between 1865 and 1915—a period marked by Reconstruction, Redemption, and the entrenchment of racial segregation.

Ziegler explores how Alabama’s rural, economically challenged, and culturally conservative communities influenced the structure and function of public education. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, she investigates the roles of teachers, schoolhouses, funding mechanisms, and community rituals in shaping educational experiences. The book also delves into the dual system of Black and white schools, highlighting the systemic inequalities and the resilience of African American communities in the face of institutionalized racism.
Through chapters on Progressive Era reforms, local festivals, and the symbolic role of schools in civic life, Ziegler reveals how education in Alabama was not merely a top-down initiative but a deeply local and contested process. Her analysis underscores the importance of understanding regional identity and cultural values in the broader narrative of American educational history.

Schools in the Landscape is essential reading for scholars of Southern history, education policy, and cultural studies, offering a nuanced portrait of how public schooling evolved in one of the nation’s most complex and tradition-bound regions. 

In February 2018, 35,000 public school educators and staff walked off the job in West Virginia. More than 100,000 teachers in other states—both right-to-work states, like West Virginia, and those with a unionized workforce—followed them over the next year.  From Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma to Colorado and California, teachers announced to state legislators that not only their abysmal wages but the deplorable conditions of their work and the increasingly straitened circumstances of public education were unacceptable.  These recent teacher walkouts affirm public education as a crucial public benefit and understand the rampant disinvestment in public education not simply as a local issue affecting teacher paychecks but also as a danger to communities and to democracy. 

Strike for the Common Good gathers together original essays, written by teachers involved in strikes nationwide, by students and parents who have supported them, by journalists who have covered these strikes in depth, and by outside analysts (academic and otherwise).  Together, the essays consider the place of these strikes in the broader landscape of recent labor organizing and battles over public education, and attend to the largely female workforce and, often, largely non-white student population of America’s schools.