My book on Connecticut's first-ever select academy for Black Women, the Canterbury Academy run by Prudence Crandall, is (finally) available! Entitled Schooling the Nation: The Success of the Canterbury Academy for Black Women, the book charts how this famed school was conceived in real-life connections between Black and white women, and how its brief life from 1833 to 1834 relied on a consistent commitment from the free Black community, as well as genuine alliances between white and Black, women and men. The school, the students who attended it, and its continued reverberations in Black and women's history together provide an early example of the prismatic possibilities of American freedom if it genuinely contained all people.

Schooling the Nation endorses education as a human right that grants access to powerful dialogues and resources across time and space. The Black students at the Academy hoped that their thirst for knowledge and their noble persistence through struggle to keep the school operational would prove a lesson to the world. This book represents another opportunity to amplify their story. We in the present-day can learn from them, and steel ourselves for the struggles ahead by understanding how the "arc of the moral universe" will only "bend toward justice" if we assert pressure on it to be more human and humane.
I am available to speak about this history, and my book, to groups at universities, high schools, local history societies, libraries, book stores, museums, archives, civic groups, and more. Just ask, and we will work something out.
Schooling the Nation is available through June of 2026 at 30% off, direct from the publisher, University of Illinois Press. Print the flyer below to order directly. I also will bring copies to sell at all live appearances.

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