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.
