"In the middle of the night, a chain reaction of noises wakes the residents of an urban apartment building, and then lulls them back to sleep"--

"Beautiful, haunted, evocative and so open to where memory takes you. I kept thinking that this is the book that I have waited for: where objects, and poetry intertwine. Just wonderful and completely sui generis." (Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes) An unforgettable voyage across the reaches of America and the depths of memory, this generational memoir of one incredible family reveals America’s unique craft tradition. In Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, renowned critic Christopher Benfey shares stories—of his mother’s upbringing in rural North Carolina among centuries-old folk potteries; of his father’s escape from Nazi Europe; of his great-aunt and -uncle Josef and Anni Albers, famed Bauhaus artists exiled at Black Mountain College—unearthing an ancestry, and an aesthetic, that is quintessentially American. With the grace of a novelist and the eye of a historian, Benfey threads these stories together into a radiant and mesmerizing harmony.

A lively history of the University of Connecticut from its founding to the present day

The Red Brick Road is the story of Dorothy's journey before she took the Yellow Brick Road.

''Where are we? Kady asked, as they turned to look at the entire room. They saw the kitchen had a wood-burning stove, no sink faucet, and no refrigerator.” ''I don't know, Allie said, “but look out this window, across the yard and the garden. Isn't that the cotton patch where Nanna said she had to cross the narrow dirt road to help pick cotton?” The sisters, Allie, Kady, Lindey, and their cousin, Taylor, have been transported into their great grandmother's world when she is five and then again when she is seven. During their second visit,Taylor's little brother, Lance, shows up, surprising everyone, except Minnie, who has expected him and is so pleased he has come with them. This fictional story is based on contemporary children, who are real, and the historical, real-life happenings of the Tucker family in the 1920's told by Jewel Tucker Phillips.

In the last two centuries Britain has experienced a revolution in higher education, with the number of students rising from a few hundred to several million. Yet the institutions that drove - and still drive - this change have been all but ignored by historians. Drawing on a decade's research, and based on work in dozens of archives, many of them used for the very first time, this is the first full-scale study of the civic universities - new institutions in the nineteenth century reflecting the growth of major Victorian cities in Britain, such as Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, York, and Durham - for more than 50 years. Tracing their story from the 1780s until the 2010s, it is an ambitious attempt to write the Redbrick revolution back into history. William Whyte argues that these institutions created a distinctive and influential conception of the university - something that was embodied in their architecture and expressed in the lives of their students and staff. It was this Redbrick model that would shape their successors founded in the twentieth century: ensuring that the normal university experience in Britain is a Redbrick one. Using a vast range of previously untapped sources, Redbrick is not just a new history, but a new sort of university history: one that seeks to rescue the social and architectural aspects of education from the disregard of previous scholars, and thus provide the richest possible account of university life. It will be of interest to students and scholars of modern British history, to anyone who has ever attended university, and to all those who want to understand how our higher education system has developed - and how it may evolve in the future.