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A pioneering educator's firsthand account of building opportunity and hope in Alabama's Black Belt.

Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt is one of the most important firsthand accounts of African American educational leadership and community development in the post-Reconstruction South. Originally published in 1918, this memoir by educator and institution-builder William J. Edwards documents his extraordinary efforts to create educational opportunities for Black citizens in Alabama's Black Belt during a period marked by segregation, economic hardship, and limited access to public resources.

Born in Snow Hill, Alabama, in 1869, Edwards rose from humble beginnings to attend the Tuskegee Institute under the leadership of Booker T. Washington. Inspired by Tuskegee's philosophy of education, self-reliance, and community advancement, he returned to rural Alabama determined to establish an institution that could provide both academic and practical instruction to African American students. His efforts led to the founding of the Snow Hill Institute in 1893, a school that became a vital center of learning and leadership for generations of Black Alabamians.

The memoir also offers valuable insight into the educational philosophies that shaped African American advancement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Edwards reflects on the influence of Booker T. Washington, the role of industrial and vocational education, fundraising efforts in the North, the Jeanes Fund, public-school reform, and the broader movement for racial uplift through education. His account illuminates the networks of educators, supporters, and community leaders who worked to expand opportunities for African Americans throughout the South.

At once inspirational and historically significant, Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt remains an essential source for understanding African American education, Southern race relations, and the determination of Black communities to create institutions that fostered dignity, opportunity, and progress. It stands as both a personal testament and a crucial historical document chronicling a transformative era in American history.

This is a splendid collection of stories about Texas by Texans—stories that appeared in leading magazines in the first half of the twentieth century.

Authors in this volume:

• Dillon Anderson
• Barry Benefield
• Charles Carver
• Margaret Cousins
• Chester T. Crowell
• Eugene Cunningham
• J. Frank Dobie
• Fred Gipson
• William Goyen
• O. Henry
• Sylvan Karchmer
• Harry Kidd, Jr.
• Mary King O’Donnell
• George Pattullo
• George Sessions Perry
• Katherine Anne Porter
• Winifred Sanford
• John W. Thomason, Jr.
• Thomas Thompson
• John Watson
• John W. Wilson

Finalist: 2024 Order of the Coif Book Award | March 3, 2025

The sudden emergence of the Trump nation surprised nearly everyone, including journalists, pundits, political consultants, and academics. When Trump won in 2016, his ascendancy was widely viewed as a fluke. Yet time showed it was instead the rise of a movement—angry, militant, revanchist, and unabashedly authoritarian.

How did this happen? Twilight of the American State offers a sweeping exploration of how law and legal institutions helped prepare the grounds for this rebellious movement. The controversial argument is that, viewed as a legal matter, the American state is not just a liberal democracy, as most Americans believe. Rather, the American state is composed of an uneasy and unstable combination of different versions of the state—liberal democratic, administered, neoliberal, and dissociative. Each of these versions arose through its own law and legal institutions. Each emerged at different times historically. Each was prompted by deficits in the prior versions. Each has survived displacement by succeeding versions. All remain active in the contemporary moment—creating the political-legal dysfunction America confronts today.

Pierre Schlag maps out a big picture view of the tribulations of the American state. The book abjures conventional academic frameworks, sets aside prescriptions for quick fixes, dispenses with lamentations about polarization, and bypasses historical celebrations of the American Spirit.

A cultural and policy history that explains why two neighboring states developed divergent attitudes toward government and culture

At first glance, New Hampshire and Vermont seem like mirror images. Separated only by the Connecticut River, the oft-termed “Twin States” share a common history, relatively small populations, and heavily mountainous and forested landscapes dotted with small towns. Yet despite their similarities, they have evolved strikingly different political cultures, with Vermont prizing cooperation and community and New Hampshire celebrating independence and freedom from government. Perhaps nowhere is this divergence in political visions more pronounced than in their respective state mottos: Vermont’s communal "Freedom and Unity" and New Hampshire’s libertarian “Live Free or Die.”

Twin States, Different Paths explores these contrasting political cultures. Brian Porto traces these differences back to the land itself: to the geology and geography that shaped early settlement, patterns of land use, and the distinct ways people built their communities. From these origins emerged two enduring civic philosophies—New Hampshire’s devotion to low taxes and limited government, and Vermont’s emphasis on equality and shared responsibility. Bringing historical and cultural analysis together with contemporary case studies, Porto examines how these traditions influence each state’s approach to today’s policy challenges, including affordable housing and public-school funding. The result is a clear, balanced portrait of how deeply rooted attitudes toward freedom, unity, and governance continue to shape public life in both states.

Written with scholarly rigor yet in an engaging and accessible style, Twin States, Different Paths fills a notable gap in the study of New England politics. It offers insights not only for scholars and students of political culture, history, and public policy, but also for general readers, policymakers, and residents who wish to understand how two neighbors—so similar in geography and spirit—continue to follow such different paths in defining the role of government and community.

Two Vermonts establishes a little-known fact about Vermont: that the state's fascination with tourism as a savior for a suffering economy is more than a century old, and that this interest in tourism has always been dogged by controversy. Through this lens, the book is poised to take its place as the standard work on Vermont in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Searls examines the origins of Vermont's contemporary identity and some reasons why that identity ("Who is a Vermonter?") is to this day so hotly contested.

Searls divides nineteenth-century Vermonters into conceptually “uphill,” or rural/parochial, and “downhill,” or urban/cosmopolitan, elements. These two groups, he says, negotiated modernity in distinct and contrary ways. The dissonance between their opposing tactical approaches to progress and change belied the pastoral ideal that contemporary urban Americans had come to associate with the romantic notion of “Vermont.” Downhill Vermonters, espousing a vision of a mutually reinforcing relationship between tradition and progress, unilaterally endeavored to foster the pastoral ideal as a means of stimulating economic development. The hostile uphill resistance to this strategy engendered intense social conflict over issues including education, religion, and prohibition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The story of Vermont's vigorous nineteenth-century quest for a unified identity bears witness to the stirring and convoluted forging of today's “Vermont.” 

Searls's engaging exploration of this period of Vermont's history advances our understanding of the political, economic, and cultural transformation of all of rural America as industrial capitalism and modernity revolutionized the United States between 1865 and 1910. By the late Progressive Era, Vermont's reputation was rooted in the national yearning to keep society civil, personal, and meaningful in a world growing more informal, bureaucratic, and difficult to navigate. The fundamental ideological differences among Vermont communities are indicative of how elusive and frustrating efforts to balance progress and tradition were in the context of effectively negotiating capitalist transformation in contemporary America.

Unveiling the avant-garde fusion of photography and modern graphic design
 

The concept Typophoto, the synthesis of photography and typography, was coined by renowned Bauhaus artist and theorist László Moholy-Nagy and played a foundational role in the modernist graphic design movement known as the New Typography. Jessica D. Brier examines how Typophoto was embraced by early graphic designers—a group who ultimately reinvented photography as a tool of modern consumerism.

Typophoto embodied designers’ belief in photography as an efficient form of visual communication, merging the material and the visual by abstracting both typographic and photographic form and transmuting photography into graphic material through the halftone process. Uniquely situating 1920s advertising discourse alongside avant-garde theory and significant interwar photographic concepts, Brier positions Typophoto as an analytical framework for considering how photography—as process, image, material, and metaphor—was effectively reconceived through the professionalization of graphic design in Europe and the United States. This was particularly true in Germany, where the capitalist ethos driving the country’s economic recovery bolstered the belief that graphics could create ideal reader-consumers.

Tracing Typophoto from its inception through New Typography’s experiments with the medium, Brier demonstrates how photography was used as a tool for manipulating perception as it became a visual language of modern life.