Leaders of Their Race
Cloth: 08/30/2017
About the Book
Secondary-level female education played a foundational role in reshaping women's identity in the New South. Sarah H. Case examines the transformative processes involved at two Georgia schools--one in Atlanta for African American girls and young women, the other in Athens and attended by young white women with elite backgrounds.Focusing on the period between 1880 and 1925, Case's analysis shows how race, gender, sexuality, and region worked within these institutions to shape education. Her comparative approach shines a particular light on how female education embodied the complex ways racial and gender identity functioned at the time. As she shows, the schools cultivated modesty and self-restraint to protect the students. Indeed, concerns about female sexuality and respectability united the schools despite their different student populations. Case also follows the lives of the women as adult teachers, alumnae, and activists who drew on their education to negotiate the New South's economic and social upheavals.
About the Author
Sarah H. Case is a lecturer in the Department of History at University of California, Santa Barbara, and is managing editor of The Public Historian.Reviews
"The 125-page work, complemented by fifteen rare archival photos, is filled with insightful commentary on gender, class, and race in secondary education in Georgia around the turn of the twentieth century."--Atlanta Studies"This work is a worthwhile addition to any undergraduate classroom and graduate seminar on the history of race, gender, and education in the New South."--H-Net Reviews
"This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of US education and it should be a required text for courses in the history of education, African American education, women's education, African American studies, and gender studies, among others." --History of Education Quarterly
"Leaders of Their Race is a jewel. Case has produced an interesting, well-written, and thoroughly researched study. . . . This is also an important contribution to the study of women's history, African American history, the history of education, and New South history." --American Historical Review
"Sarah Case provides a compelling examination of how these two women's schools, though founded on different visions and skewed by race and class, were remarkably similar in the values they espoused. Grooming their students to be well-educated, modest and respectable, they hoped to prepare their young graduates to contribute to a new society in the South and epitomize the highest womanly virtues." --Southeastern Librarian
"This book is well-written and thoroughly researched. . . . The extensiveness of the documentation contributes to the appropriateness to the subject matter." --Journal of African American History
Blurbs
"Making an Antislavery Nation is an elegant and important reinterpretation of the political battles between slavery and freedom from the nation’s founding to the secession crisis. In focusing on Illinois, Graham Peck brilliantly highlights the significance of the state in national politics and of Stephen Douglas as the pivotal figure in the rise of antislavery politics and disunion. His portrait of Douglas is unequaled in a story that is structurally and stylistically a work of immense sophistication."--John Stauffer, Harvard University, and author of Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
"Graham Peck offers a sophisticated analysis of the forces that led to the Civil War, emphasizing how Abraham Lincoln disguised the wolf of radical antislavery nationalism with conservative sheep’s clothing, and how Stephen A. Douglas was gradually crushed between the upper millstone of Southern intransigence and the nether millstone of Northern disaffection for his toleration of slavery."--Michael Burlingame, author of Abraham Lincoln: A Life
"The victory of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party was the most significant political revolution in American history. Graham A. Peck’s penetrating account of the politics of slavery in Illinois—at once a key battleground state and a microcosm of the nation as a whole—offers a powerful new interpretation of this critical moment in antebellum politics. By fusing antislavery radicalism with American nationalism, Lincoln and the Republicans overcame an increasingly proslavery northern Democratic Party. Thoroughly researched and judiciously argued, Making an Antislavery Nation changes the way we understand the triumph of the Republicans and the origins of the Civil War."--Matthew Karp, Princeton University, and author of This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy
"Absolutely tremendous!"--Adam I. P. Smith, Senior Lecturer, University College London
"Superb…Substantive and compelling argument…in marvelously clear and lucid prose."--Daniel Feller, Director of the Papers of Andrew Jackson, University of Tennessee
Awards
• Runner-up, LINCOLN (GILDER LEHRMAN) PRIZE, 2018• Winner, Russell P. Strange Book of the Year Award - ISHS, 2018
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