Mission Statement: The book series, entitled Research in Curriculum and Instruction, will focus on a) considerations of curriculum practices at school, district, state, and federal levels, b) relationship of curriculum practices to curriculum theories and societal issues, c) concerns derived from curriculum policy analyses and from analyses of various curriculum advocacies, and d) insights derived from investigations into curriculum history. Although the series will emphasize the American curriculum scene, aspects of curriculum practice and theory embedded in non-US countries will not be overlooked. Furthermore, this series will not restrict its concern to general curriculum matters, but it will draw explicit attention to curriculum issues relating to the several curriculum subjects. The series' primary concern will be to illuminate practice and issues toward informed and improved curriculum practice. This volume will contain selected papers presented at meetings of the Society for the Study of curriculum History across the past decade plus several specially commissioned papers from senior scholars in the field. Professor Field was the Society's President for some time during that period. Papers will treat dimensions of the development of the American school curriculum, both elementary and secondary.

This is a profoundly moving story of Black colleges in Mississippi during a watershed moment in their history. It is also the story of young Americans trying to balance their pursuit of higher education with the parallel struggle for civil rights. Radicalizing the Ebony Tower examines colleges against the backdrop of the black freedom struggle of the middle twentieth century, a highly contentious conflict between state agents determined to protect the racial hierarchy and activists equally determined to cripple white supremacy. Activists demanded that colleges play a central role in the Civil Rights Movement (a distinct challenge to the notion of the ivory tower) while state agents demanded that colleges distance themselves from the black freedom struggle and promised to mete out harsh penalties if they did not. Through the words and deeds of actual participants, this path-breaking study documents how activists ultimately transformed non-political institutions into libratory agents.

Development Arrested is a major reinterpretation of the two-centuries-old conflict between African American workers and the planters of the Mississippi Delta. Ranging across disciplines as diverse as rural studies, musicology, development studies and anthropology, it provides a unique assessment of the impact of the plantation system on those who suffered its depredations at first hand.

This is the story of how rural Black people struggled against the oppressive sharecropping system of the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. Here, white planters forged a world of terror and poverty for Black workers, one that resembled the horrific deprivations of the African Congo under Belgium’s King Leopold II. Delta planters did not cut off the heads and hands of their African American workers but, aided by local law enforcement, they engaged in peonage, murder, theft, and disfranchisement. As individuals and through collective struggle, in conjunction with national organizations like the NAACP and local groups like the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, Black men and women fought back, demanding a just return for their crops and laying claim to a democratic vision of citizenship. Their efforts were amplified by the two world wars and the depression, which expanded the mobility and economic opportunities of Black people and provoked federal involvement in the region. Nan Woodruff shows how the freedom fighters of the 1960s would draw on this half-century tradition of protest, thus expanding our standard notions of the civil rights movement and illuminating a neglected but significant slice of the American Black experience.