In Blaming Teachers, Diana D'Amico Pawlewicz reveals that historical professionalization reforms subverted public school teachers' professional legitimacy. Policymakers and school leaders understood teacher professionalization initiatives as efficient ways to bolster the bureaucratic order of the schools rather than as means to amplify teachers' authority and credibility.
"The author argues that school reformers around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States won support by highlighting the link between educational development and national success. These efforts transformed both the content of classroom lessons and perceptions of what schools could do, leaving a mixed legacy for educators and future generations of reformers"--
As both a preeminent scholar of Balck Angelican and Episcopalians and devout parishoner, the late James Hewitt writes an illuminus hsitory of one of the most famous black congregrations in America. From its humble beginnings, St. Philip's originated from classes conducted by Elais Neau and other Angelic clerks for the society for the propagations of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. From these cateisem classes emerged a higly educated, African-American group comprised of free and enslaved blacks. W.E.B Dubuois hailed it as the foundation for the Talented Tenth in his classic book Souls of Balck Folk After the American Revolution, St. Philip's has since becoem the church of middle-class blacks across New York City. Hewlitt's careful and percise scholarship chronicles over two centuries of of the church's history, which fills a significant lagun in African-American Religious history.
Kidnapping was a lucrative crime in antebellum America, and many American citizens—especially free blacks—were abducted for profit. This book reveals the untold stories of the captured. The story of Solomon Northup, subject of the Academy Award-winning best picture 12 Years a Slave, is representative of the deplorable treatment many African Americans experienced in the period leading up to the Civil War. This book examines antebellum kidnapping, delving into why and how it occurred, and illustrating the active role the U.S. government played in allowing it to continue. It presents case studies of dozens of victims' experiences that illustrate a grim and little-remembered chapter in American history. David Fiske's Solomon Northup's Kindred reveals the abhorrent conditions and greed that resulted in the kidnapping of American citizens. Factors like early fugitive slave laws, the invention of the cotton gin, the 1808 ban on importing slaves into the United States, and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision made these crimes highly profitable. Fiske sheds much-needed light on the practice of kidnapping, explaining how it was carried out, identifying conditions that allowed kidnappers to operate, and describing methods for combating the crime. He offers dozens of case studies along with documentation from across historical newspaper reports, anti-slavery literature, local history books, and academic publications to provide an accurate account of kidnapping crimes of the time.
