Yankee Missionaries in the South; The Penn School Experiment by Jacoway, Elizabeth - 1980

Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xvi, [2], 301, [5] pages. Footnotes. DJ has some wear, soiling, edge tears and chips. Includes Preface, Appendices on Penn School Trustees, Calendar of the All-Year School, Contributors to the Penn Normal, Industrial, and Agricultural School. Also Includes Bibliography and Index, 10 black and white Illustrations following page 100, and 10 black and white Illustrations following page 180. Also includes Chapters on The Industrial Education Myth; The Rebirth of Penn School; Transitions; Community Building; Crises and Opportunities; Things of the Spirit and Service; New Challenges, New Beginnings; The More Abundant Life; Old Problems, New Appeals; Spreading the Gospel; The Outside Presses In; Years of Struggle; Years of Decline; and the Penn School Experiment. The author's account of Penn School reflects her belief that the story of the experiment in education there reveals important dimensions of the spirit and mentality of Progressive America. For forty years after 1900, the school's admirers and supporters proclaimed it to be a near-perfect embodiment of Booker T. Washington's program (sometimes called the Hampton-Tuskegee program) of industrial education. The northern missionaries who were responsible for the school's longevity left a treasure of source material that Jacoway has used in this account of the school's day-to-day operation--its endorsement of better agricultural practices, efficient homemaking, health and child care, and trades basic to self-sufficiency in a rural environment. Elizabeth Jacoway is a historian, educator, writer, and editor. She has served on the Executive Council of the Southern Historical Association, the Board of Editors of the Journal of Southern History, and the Boards of Directors of the Arkansas Historical Association, the Southern Association for Women Historians, and the Arkansas Women's History Institute; has also served on planning committees for the Little Rock Central High School Museum Visitor's Center and the Penn School Museum. This is the story two northern missionaries who ran the Penn School on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia from the 1900s to the 1940s. The school was the center of the Port Royal Experiment, a northern abolitionist scheme which sought to prove that even the coarsest of field hands could be taught to be responsible, productive citizens. They implemented the Hampton-Tuckegee program of industrial education which they felt had a core of moral uplift and and development.