Schooling the Freed People - by Ronald E Butchart (Paperback)

About the Book

Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876

Book Synopsis

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 Quotes

Schooling the Freed People is both comprehensive and engaging, offering a definitive social history within a narrative that never loses the voices of educators and learners." --The North Carolina Historical Review

[Butchart] poignantly portrays both the freedmen's enthusiasm for learning and the intensity of white resistance to black education. . . . A meticulously researched piece of scholarship of importance to specialists. Recommended.--Choice

[Butchart] skillfully blends quantitative research with anecdotal analysis to produce a nuanced and sweeping account, rich with compassion, insight and precision.--Journal of Interdisciplinary History

A meticulously researched book that has made a major intervention in the scholarship on African-American education after the Civil War.---Journal of NC Association of Historians

An invaluable addition to the historiography of African American education during and after the Civil War. To date, this text offers the most in-depth analysis of the teachers of freed people.--American Historical Review

Butchart has written an important study. . . . It will deepen our understanding of these transformative events for years to come.--Journal of American History

In this concise, cogently argued book, Ronald E. Butchart presents a convincing new portrait of the women and men who served as teachers of freedpeople across the American South during Reconstruction.--Journal of Southern History

Path-breaking research. . . . The crowning achievement of a veteran scholar, this is the definitive book on freedmen's teachers in the South as well as an outstanding contribution to social history and our understanding of African American education. . . . Will be the benchmark by which all other work in this area of history will be judged in the future.--Lone Star Book Review

This is a significant book . . . . Butchart's revelations fundamentally reshape our understanding of freed people's education.--The Historian

This work promises to long be a touchstone for scholars and students of post-Civil War black education, of Reconstruction broadly, and of blacks' transition to actual freedom.--Library Journal