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Finalist for the Society of Midland Authors Richard Frisbie Award for Adult Nonfiction 

In A Blacklist Education, a mysterious file of family papers triggers a journey through the dark days of political purges in the 1950s. Jane S. Smith tells the story of the anticommunist witch hunt that sent shockwaves through New York City’s public schools as more than a thousand teachers were targeted by Board of Education investigators. Her father was one of them—a fact she learned only long after his death.
 
Beginning in 1949, amid widespread panic about supposed communist subversion, investigators questioned teachers in their homes, accosted them in their classrooms, and ordered them to report to individual hearings. The interrogations were not published, filmed, open to the public, or reported in the news. By 1956, hundreds of New York City teachers had been fired, often because of uncorroborated reports from paid informers or anonymous accusers. 
 
Most of the targeted teachers resigned or retired without any public process, their names recorded only in municipal files and their futures never known. Their absence became the invisible outline of an educational void, a narrowing of thought that pervaded classrooms for decades. In this highly personal story, family lore and childhood memory lead to restricted archives, forgotten inquisitions, and an eerily contemporary campaign to control who could teach and what was acceptable for students to learn.
 

Teachers’ unions are the organizations responsible for safeguarding the conditions of teachers’ employment. Union supporters claim strong synergies between teachers’ interests and students’ interests, but critics of unions insist that the stance of teachers in collective bargaining may disadvantage students as unions reduce the power of administrators to manage, remove, reward or retain excellent teachers.

In A Collective Pursuit, Lesley Laveryunpacks how teachers’ unions today are fighting for contracts that allow them to earn a decent living and build “schools all students deserve.” She explains the form and function of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions. Lavery then explores unionization campaigns in the Twin Cities charter schools. A Collective Pursuit also examines teacher strikes and contract negotiations, school finance and finance reform, and district and union attempts to address racial achievement gaps, to provide a context for understanding the economic, political, and demographic forces that inspire teachers to improve conditions for students.

A Collective Pursuit emphasizes that while teachers’ unions serve a traditional, economic role, they also provide a vast array of valuable services to students, educators, parents, and community members.

Explores Mississippi’s school desegregation from the viewpoint of a white teacher

A New Day in the Delta is a fresh and appealing memoir of the experience of a young white college graduate in need of a job as the Vietnam War reached its zenith. David Beckwith applied and was accepted for a teaching position in the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1969. Although it seemed to him a bit strange that he was accepted so quickly for this job while his other applications went nowhere, he was grateful for the opportunity. Beckwith reported for work to learn that he was to be assigned to an all-black school as the first step in Mississippi’s long-deferred school desegregation.

The nation and Mississippi alike were being transformed by war and evolving racial relations, and Beckwith found himself on the cutting edge of the transformation of American education and society in one of the most resistant (and poor) corners of the country. Beckwith’s revealing and often amusing story of the year of mutual incomprehension between an inexperienced white teacher and a classroom full of black children who had had minimal contact with any whites. This is history as it was experienced by those who were thrust into another sort of “front line.”
 

A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History is a guide for college and high school educators who are teaching Indian Ocean histories for the first time or who want to reinvigorate their courses. It can also serve those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi, as well as those who want to incorporate Indian Ocean histories into their world history courses. Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow offer course design principles that will help students navigate topics ranging from empire, geography, slavery, and trade to mobility, disease, and the environment. In addition to exploring non-European sources and diverse historical methodologies, they discuss classroom pedagogy and provide curriculum possibilities that will help instructors at any level enrich and deepen standard approaches to world history. Alpers and McDow draw readers into strategically designing courses that will challenge students to think critically about a vast area with which many of them are almost entirely unfamiliar.