On December 14, 1819, Alabama was admitted to the Union. Between then and February 1854 when the General Assembly of Alabama passed a law establishing a statewide public schooling system, the state's educational enactments were exceedingly modest and largely restricted to the chartering of private academies. Such action was barely sufficient to give substance to the constitutional piety that "Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged in this State." This should not, however, be taken as a sign of any particular indolence. Before the Civil War (1861-1865) the socialization of children was regarded in most parts of the United States as a parental and community matter. In Alabama, community schools were organized and survived - or did not survive - according to the wishes and wherewithal of the people they served. Educational policy was the province of elected trustees who were also responsible for building schoolhouses, employing teachers, prescribing texts, and generally operating the schools within a local area termed a township. In 1929, when modernization was still a work in progress, Edgar W. Knight, professor of education at the University of North Carolina, claimed this early model of schooling inspired a "persistent devotion to and confidence in localism in education." He saw this as a continuing blight and tut-tutted that localism "still commends itself to wide popular approval because of the deep democratic colour it is believed to wear." Geography goes some way toward explaining the localism that was Alabama's prevailing cultural condition during the nineteenth century. The state contains an area of 52,423 square miles, which, for comparative purposes, is about the same size as England. Within its borders are a number of fairly distinct regions, which are themselves composed of varying landscapes.

In August 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey of Cornell University and offered him the chairmanship of the Commission on Country Life. This special commission was charged with investigating the deficiencies of contemporary rural living, as well as potential remedies for such deficiencies. Roosevelt believed that upon the farmer rested the heavy responsibility for "feeding a world which is never more than a year away from starvation," while also preserving the fertility of the soil, preventing erosion, and properly using irrigation water. After an inquiry lasting five months and involving a prodigious effort to gather data through questionnaires, public meetings, and solicited correspondence, the Report of the Country Life Commission ("the report") was submitted to the president on January 23, 1909. The burden on the farmer, the commission found, was not being met with commensurate earnings or adequate "desirability, comfort and standing of the farmer's life." While the report may be flawed in some ways, its vision of an ecologically based agriculture and a country life that could be both remunerative and richly fulfilling is regarded by present-day historians as "deeply democratic and forward looking, even prophetic." In fact, as 21st-century communities seek to foster democratic participation, to heighten understanding of the relation of people to their environment, and to build on practices that make communities more sustainable places to live, the commission's recommendations have a fresh cogency and relevance.

In March 1718, as a response to what it perceived to be rising rates in lawlessness and criminal activity, the British Parliament passed legislation which established transportation to the colonies as a punishment for a vast range of formerly capital offences. This measure, together with pre-existing arrangements for capital reprieves upon condition of transportation meant that, by the time of the Declaration of Independence, some fifty thousand convicts had been forcibly banished to North America. At least 3,420 of these were women who can be identified as having served (or been destined to serve) their sentences in Maryland (though the actual number was almost certainly much greater). The entire historiography of British convicts in colo nial America is quite small overall. In the last 120 years or so there have been three or four books on transportation, a limited number of journal articles, and a few paragraphs or pages in general histories or in those concerned with a relevant subject such as tobacco production. None of this writing has addressed the subject of women directly. Instead women have been included as a subset of principally male accounts and interpretations. This has tended to marginalize (and thus trivialize) the women's experiences. Being a particular type of indentured servant (their shippers were granted a saleable property in their labor), the convict women have also been enveloped in this larger categorization.

The Commission on Country Life established by Theodore Roosevelt submitted its report in January 1909. Its vision of a country life that could be as economically viable and genuinely fulfilling as an urban alternative is still relevant. In fact, as twenty-first-century rural communities seek to foster democratic participation while dealing with issues of agricultural sustainability and ecological realities, the commission's recommendations have an almost prophetic cogency. Yet the continuing value of the report does not mean its limitations should go unexamined. This paper reviews the commission's findings and recommendations to argue that its gender assumptions had specific outcomes for rural women. On the one hand, they influenced the gendered structure of the nationalized farm extension program established in 1914. On the other, they provoked a reaction that was a catalyst for rural women to enter directly into an ongoing debate about their roles and circumstances.

For much of the twentieth century the names Leslie Walford and Dora Byrne were synonymous with style and glamour. Walford was the flamboyant, go-to interior designer for Sydney society. His mother, Dora Byrne, was a key figure in Sydney and Southern Highlands social circles. Darling Mother, Darling Son is the first major publication to be drawn from an archive of Leslie Walford's papers held by Sydney Living Museums. Revealing a tight bond between mother and son, the letters are alternately lively, opinionated, bossy and poignant as Dora and Leslie discuss their lives, travels and loves - and their fascinating insights into the design and fashion of their times.

This book is about eighteenth-century women - women from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales - who committed crimes or otherwise broke the law. After their indictment, trial, and conviction, these women were punished by being transported to the American colonies, often to Maryland. The fate of these women has been largely overlooked by historians. Although their story forms only a small part of the overall narrative of American immigration, it contributes to the larger picture of unfree labor in the colonial Chesapeake. Moreover, the story of these women provides an alternative narrative to other accounts that explore the behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs of the majority population - the free and the bound - and throws these behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs into sharper relief In recent decades historical inquiries have paid heed to the lives of everyday, nonelite people, and this book is in keeping with that approach. It seeks to increase what is known about the backgrounds and the experiences of the transported convict women who, together with their male colleagues, were referred to in Maryland as "His Majesty's Seven-year Passengers" or by similar epithets indicative of derision and disdain.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the period generally designated as the Progressive Era, when educational officeholders, teacher representatives, civic activists, concerned legislators, philanthropists, and others - collectively "educational modernizers" - considered Alabama's mostly rural public schools, they were dismayed. They believed these schools, which were largely controlled by parents and local communities, did not meet contemporary standards for educational efficiency and were inadequate to the task of preparing students for a diversifying economy of industrial and commercial enterprise and an agricultural sector revolutionized by scientific farming and technology - in other words, an economy encapsulated in the term "New South." At the same time, these Progressive reformers sought to inculcate in students a broad sense of southern identity, believing that it would provide them with the fundamental civic values needed to address the challenges of the new century.

In the period between the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and 1915 - the year when a number of educational reform bills were enacted by its state legislature Alabama developed the structure for a modern educational system. This included graded "elementary" schools, county high schools, a tertiary sector of normal schools, agricultural colleges and polytechnic institutes, and a state university supported with public funds. This was a signal achievement for a great many educationists, elected office-holders, politicians, professional organisations and for other activists committed to modernising reform. Yet the progress was insufficient. The history of public education in Alabama in the period covered by this thesis has usually been written as a narrative of frustratingly slow but progressive development in which some determined men and women maintained their resolve to achieve an effective schooling system and to rid Alabama of its negative educational reputation. Over time these modernising reformers had some success though they had to fight against general legislative disinclination to increase educational funding and constitutional constraints on taxation. But, in this predominantly rural state, there was also a countervailing and valid cultural aspect to the rate and nature of reform which has not been adequately explored. This thesis will show that the cultural traditions of rural localism, including self-reliance, autonomous community decision-making, and a cluster of ideas about the purpose of the school and the content of the curriculum, had a pertinacity and pervasiveness that made them significant factors in the way in which Alabama's public schooling system was shaped. These factors influenced the pace of the development and expansion of the system as well. Those intent on modernising reform (even those armed with the authority of the state) were bound to respect and engage these traditions if they wished to succeed. Where they did so, the reformers had their greatest success. Hence cultural localism, rather than just being an irritating retardant to modernisation, was part of an evolving cultural dialectic and helped to set the terms of discourse within the educational polity and to shape reform agendas. Black localism was a projection of racial pride and the educational experience of Alabama's black citizens offers a counterpoint for the topic. Elementary schools were frequently staffed with poorly trained teachers who gave lessons in schoolhouses of dubious quality lacking adequate equipment. Attendance was not yet compulsory, the state's rate of illiteracy was a matter of shame, and there were huge inequities in the respective provisions for black and white students. In a 1912 national survey of educational efficiency, Alabama's "general rank" was at the very bottom.