Conventional wisdom holds that freedmen's education was largely the work of privileged, single white northern women motivated by evangelical beliefs and aboliti

In the years immediately following the Civil War--the formative years for an emerging society of freed African Americans in Mississippi--there was much debate o

In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to lite

This book examines the many ways in which African Americans made the Civil War about ending slavery. Abraham Lincoln's primary goal was to save the Union rather