This ground-breaking book uncovers a hidden history of the professional develop¬ment of serving teachers. Drawing on hitherto unpublished archive material, Wendy Robinson reveals an op¬timistic and liberal age of high class conferences in the 1920s and 1930s, in Lon¬don hotels and Oxford colleges, free from government control, where teachers from across the country and abroad, gathered for professional, intellectual and cultural ‘refreshment’. The status attached to these occasions was signified by the celebrities who graced them, including royalty, public intellectuals, educational practitioners and politicians. Professor Robinson then shows how post-war training became more instrumental, taken over by the Ministry of Education with its centrally-prescribed advanced courses, and, from 1970, by Local Education Authorities’ invention of ap¬parently democratic Teachers’ Centres. This analysis is complemented by face-to-face interviews with teachers and other practitioners once active in professional development. Fascinating, detailed inter¬views brilliantly capture teachers’ lived experience of professional development and its influence on their teaching, career development and professional identity. Fresh and original, lucidly written by one of the leading historians of education in Britain, A Learning Profession? is essential and engaging reading for those inter¬ested in the development of a teaching profession.

In Fields of Authority, Jack Lucas provides the first systematic exploration of local special purpose bodies in Ontario. Lucas uses a policy fields approach to explain how these local bodies in Ontario have developed from the nineteenth century to the present. "

In an in-depth community study of women in the civil rights movement, Christina Greene examines how several generations of black and white women, low-income as well as more affluent, shaped the struggle for black freedom in Durham, North Carolina. In the city long known as "the capital of the black middle class," Greene finds that, in fact, low-income African American women were the sustaining force for change. Greene demonstrates that women activists frequently were more organized, more militant, and more numerous than their male counterparts. They brought new approaches and strategies to protest, leadership, and racial politics. Arguing that race was not automatically a unifying force, Greene sheds new light on the class and gender fault lines within Durham's black community. While middle-class black leaders cautiously negotiated with whites in the boardroom, low-income black women were coordinating direct action in hair salons and neighborhood meetings. Greene's analysis challenges scholars and activists to rethink the contours of grassroots activism in the struggle for racial and economic justice in postwar America. She provides fresh insight into the changing nature of southern white liberalism and interracial alliances, the desegregation of schools and public accommodations, and the battle to end employment discrimination and urban poverty.

In April 1969, one of America's premier universities was celebrating parents' weekend-and the student union was an armed camp, occupied by over eighty defiant members of the campus's Afro-American Society. Marching out Sunday night, the protesters brandished rifles, their maxim: "If we die, you are going to die." Cornell '69 is an electrifying account of that weekend which probes the origins of the drama and describes how it was played out not only at Cornell but on campuses across the nation during the heyday of American liberalism.Donald Alexander Downs tells the story of how Cornell University became the battleground for the clashing forces of racial justice, intellectual freedom, and the rule of law. Eyewitness accounts and retrospective interviews depict the explosive events of the day and bring the key participants into sharp focus: the Afro-American Society, outraged at a cross-burning incident on campus and demanding amnesty for its members implicated in other protests; University President James A. Perkins, long committed to addressing the legacies of racism, seeing his policies backfire and his career collapse; the faculty, indignant at the university's surrender, rejecting the administration's concessions, then reversing itself as the crisis wore on. The weekend's traumatic turn of events is shown by Downs to be a harbinger of the debates raging today over the meaning of the university in American society. He explores the fundamental questions it posed, questions Americans on and off campus are still struggling to answer: What is the relationship between racial justice and intellectual freedom? What are the limits in teaching identity politics? And what is the proper meaning of the university in a democratic polity?