Tracing the first two decades of state-funded African American schools, Educational Reconstruction addresses the ways in which black Richmonders, black Mobilians, and their white allies created, developed, and sustained a system of African American schools following the Civil War. Hilary Green proposes a new chronology in understanding postwar African American education, examining how urban African Americans demanded quality public schools from their new city and state partners. Revealing the significant gains made after the departure of the Freedmen’s Bureau, this study reevaluates African American higher education in terms of developing a cadre of public school educator-activists and highlights the centrality of urban African American protest in shaping educational decisions and policies in their respective cities and states.

Foundations of Education: Essential Texts and New Directions helps aspiring teachers interpret the craft of teaching within the historical, philosophical, cultural, and social contexts of education, inside and outside of schools. As a traditional social foundations reader, it focuses on the origins of the social foundations’ disciplines, but it also includes contemporary pieces that directly impact students' lives today. Through these carefully curated readings, students will grasp the complexity and connection between contemporary issues in education. Part I contains "essential texts," selections from works widely regarded as central to the development of the field, which lay the basis of further study for any serious student of education. Part II looks at multidisciplinary directions of current foundations of education scholarship. An introductory essay by the editors and discussion questions at the conclusion of the text further highlight the selections’ continued importance and application to today’s most pressing educational issues. By addressing the past, present, and future of social foundations, this volume contends skillfully with ever-shifting education policies and school demographics.