T. Marshall Hahn, Jr., became president of Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1962. By the time he left twelve years later, the school had become auniversity. No longer a small military school that emphasized agriculture and engineering for white male undergraduates, Virginia Technical Institute and State University had become a multiracial, coeducational research university with a thriving college of arts and sciences as well as burgeoning graduate programs.Bringing together the biography of a man and the history of an institution through a dozen years of transformation, Strother and Wellenstein discuss the school's tremendous growth in sheer numbers of faculty and students, the increased enrollment of female and non-white students, and the increased emphasis on intercollegiate athletics. From VPI to State University is the story of the transformation of public higher education in the United States -- especially in the South -- in the 1960s. Much of the book relies on the recollections of the people who -- as faculty, administrators, or other leaders -- experienced, even brought about, the changes chronicled in these pages.Warren H. Strother worked with Marshall Hahn for ten years while Hahn transformed VPI into a university. A South Carolina native, Strother grew up in Virginia and earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in Journalism from Northwest University. After twelve years as a journalist he worked at Virginia Tech from 1964 to 1990.

The Educational Lockout of African Americans in Prince Edward County, Virginia (1959-1964): Personal Accounts and Reflections provides ground-breaking research on the historical events surrounding the Prince Edward County's school closings. For five years (1959-1964), the families of 1,700 African American students were forced to cope with the absence of public schooling in the county. Their efforts led to the case Davis v. the County School Board of Prince Edward County, which was one of the cases that were consolidated with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The book offers the reader two exciting sections. In the first section, the contributing authors provide interesting findings on Grassroots schools, the Kennedy administration, and an African American movement during the Prince Edward County school closings. In the second section, the authors provide the reader with personal reflections and a lecture from four professors whose parents were affected by the Prince Edward County lockout. Three of the four professors were graduates of the Prince Edward County school system.

Scholars of southern Appalachia have largely focused their research on men, particularly white men. While there have been a few important studies of Appalachian women, no one book has offered a broad overview across time and place. With this collection, editors Connie Park Rice and Marie Tedesco redress this imbalance, telling the stories of these women and calling attention to the varied backgrounds of those who call the mountains home. The essays of Women of the Mountain South debunk the entrenched stereotype of Appalachian women as poor and white, and shine a long-overdue spotlight on women too often neglected in the history of the region. Each author focuses on a particular individual or group, but together they illustrate the diversity of women who live in the region and the depth of their life experiences. The Mountain South has been home to Native American, African American, Latina, and white women, both rich and poor. Civil rights and gay rights advocates, environmental and labor activists, prostitutes, and coal miners—all have lived in the place called the Mountain South and enriched its history and culture.