Synopses & Reviews
Conventional wisdom holds that freedmen's education was largely the work of privileged, single white northern women motivated by evangelical beliefs and abolitionism. Backed by pathbreaking research, Ronald E. Butchart's Schooling the Freed People shatters this notion. The most comprehensive quantitative study of the origins of black education in freedom ever undertaken, this definitive book on freedmen's teachers in the South is an outstanding contribution to social history and our understanding of African American education.
Review
"Rich in detail and strongly documented, Schooling the Freed People argues persuasively for a more complex portrait of the first generation of teachers who actually taught in black schools. This new portrait will undoubtedly become the new consensus, the point of departure for future analyses of teachers in the Reconstruction era. Butchart radically reshapes our understanding of Reconstruction educators with this pathbreaking book."--James D. Anderson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Review
"While historians' understanding of the period following the Civil War and of the plight of former slaves has undergone remarkable revisions in the past generation, our understanding of the education of freed children has remained in many ways unchanged, at least until this remarkable and groundbreaking study by Ronald Butchart. It would not be going too far to call this a masterpiece, bringing an entirely new perspective to the subject and culminating decades of research and writing."--Loren Schweninger, Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Review
"Offers a number of important contributions to the field."
-Annals of Iowa
About the Author
Ronald E. Butchart is professor of history and education and affiliate faculty in the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia. He is a leading authority on the history of African American education.