Folk School Research Articles

Obituary: Tatu Vanhanen 1929-2015

The political scientist Tatu Vanhanen, who died on 22nd August 2015 aged 86, was Finland's most notorious academic. This was principally on account of his work carried out with Richard Lynn on national IQs, first published in IQ and the Wealth of Nations (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2002). This book, combining Lynn's calculations of national IQs and Vanhanen's mastery of political science and economics, argued that there were national differences in (strongly heritable) IQ and that these predicted differences in national wealth.In August 2004, Vanhanen gave an interview about the book to the monthly magazine attached to Finland's biggest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. He told the journalist 'Whereas the average IQ of Finns is 97, in Africa it is between 60 and 70. Differences in intelligence are the most significant factor in explaining poverty.' This 'thought crime' resulted in Finland's Ombudsman for Minorities, Mikko Puumalainen, demanding that Vanhanen be prosecuted for 'inciting hatred against an ethnic group'. The Finnish National Bureau of Investigation (the Finnish FBI) then announced that they were investigating whether there were grounds for prosecution. The incident generated huge media coverage because Vanhanen's son, Matti, had become Prime Minister the previous year. Matti Vanhanen distanced himself from his father's remarks but refused to become embroiled in the affair. However, it was announced that there was insufficient evidence to proceed against the 75 year-old Emeritus Professor and the case was dropped. As a result, Tatu Vanhanen became a household name in Finland and his death, after a long illness, was reported in every national and significant local newspaper in the country. Even some of my own research on Finland has been of interest to the Finnish press partly because it was co-authored with Richard Lynn and he had worked with Tatu Vanhanen.Tatu Vanhanen was born on 17th April 1929 in the village of Sintola in the municipality of Vuoksenranta in the eastern Finnish province of Karelia. His father was a farmer, Taavi Vanhanen (1905-1968). In November 1939, the Soviet Union demanded that Finland give up eastern Karelia (often simply referred to as 'Karelia' in this context). Eastern Karelia included Vuoksenranta and the country's second city, Vyborg. Together with the areas of Lapland the Soviets wanted, the Finns would have to give up 12% of their territory and 20% of their industrial capacity. When Finland refused to concede to the Soviet Union, the Soviets invaded. Despite a surprisingly successful resistance campaign during the Winter War, Finland lost the territory, and most of Karelia's 410,000 residents (12% of the Finnish population) fled to the new Finland, including Vanhanen's family. Then, in the so-called Continuation War, Finland took Karelia back again in 1941 and about half the residents returned, the Vanhanens among them. But the Finns were forced to surrender Karelia to the Soviets in 1944, with the Karelian Finns given just 10 days to get out before the border would be closed. Vanhanen's family were part of the huge re-exodus of Karelian refugees to the new Finland. The Vanhanen family were evacuated to Kauraketo near Somero in southwestern Finland where Vanhanen's father later became chairman of the local forestry and fishing society. Farmers were compensated in proportion to their previous landholdings but received about a third of their original farm size.In the chaos of war, Vanhanen had to leave school at 12 and begin working on a farm. He gained his secondary school education via a part-time correspondence course organized by the Finnish Lifelong Learning Society. Vanhanen joined the Agrarian League (later known as the Centre Party), a traditionalist party with strong rural support which was, and remains, one of Finland's largest political parties. The party was involved in running the Alkio Folk School - an adult education college - in Jyvaskyla, in the center of the country. …

ON SOME JOURNALS WRITTEN DURING THE LATIN PRESS BAN

<p>The work of gathering information about writers and rewriters started soon after the abolition of Latin press ban in 1904, especially actively participating in the process on the 40th and the 50th anniversary. During the 80s of the 20th century a bibliographer and specialist in literature Aleksejs Apīnis named the writers of Press ban time the farmers’ Prometheus.</p><p>From about 20 currently known rewriters the life and creative work of Andrivs Jūrdžs have been revealed most exhaustively. Many Prometheus are known only by their name, but not the text, that they had recorded. The problematic issue is also the question of how not to mistake the author (a text writer) with the text owner.</p><p>The aim of the article is to have a closer look at some of the manuscripts, which have been so far kept in private collections and seen as an integral part of family history. The authors of these works are known, so the list of the writers of Latin print ban time will be complemented.</p><p>In some 20-page notebook a former soldier Jezups Veituls (1845–?) in 1878 recorded two fasting period and two Christmas time songs. The song of 74 verses “Dzismie ap muku kunga Jezu Chrysta” seems as a summary of several Fasting songs, united by a refrain “Atey Jesu, Atey Jesu, Atej Jesu O! prica./ Miłoju tiewi sirds wysa”. The song tells about Saviour’s pathway of pain. The second song – “Pazamud cyłwaks” – calls for a return to God. Both songs have failed to find originals. Scientists have managed to find the origin of Christmas songs – “Pasokat miłi Ganini” and “Pestitoys dzyma”. The first one is the translation of some variant of the Polish song “Powiedzcie, pasterze mili” (from the book “Symfonie anielskie” (“Symphony of Angels”), 1631), the other one is the translation from Polish “Mesjasz przyszedł na świat prawdziwy” (“W Kanie Galilejskiej”), which was read the first time in Latgalian in the book “Eysas łyugszonas un dzismies” (1824). It is one of the few spiritual songs, that were sung at Latgalian weddings.</p><p>The author of the article finds it essential to search for originals of spiritual songs, because their absence would allow writers to think about the poet’s talent and would enable to see some creative sparkle. Texts are compared with Andrivs Jūrdžs’ recorded works. We would like to believe, that there was an edition of spiritual songs translated under the guidance of some clergyman or organist. References can be found in the Polish Catholic press in the 80s of the 19th century. But it should be inspected separately.</p><p>Veitulu Jezups, who was 33 years old, when he was recording songs, was a farmer and a skilled carpenter. He graduated from folk school, where it was not taught to read and write in Latvian (Latgalian). What made him write? Was it salary for the recorded text, the lack of songs, or maybe it was still wish for self-actualization? The writer’s great-grandson Ivars Vītols has carried out a valuable research on his family, which will be replenished with a proud of great-grandfather’s belonging to the unique recorder’s circuit of Latin Press Ban time.</p><p>One of the first known women transcribers during the Latin Press Ban was Anna Laizāne (1873–1958), who acquired the literacy at home. She was a colorful personality, in Taunagas Manor bill book next to a variety of medical prescriptions and incantations suitable for healing, she transcribed so-called heavenly book – with the registration of unfortunate 42 days and divine instructions.</p><p>The witness of people’s faith in living with superstition is the book written on canvas by the farmer Benedikts Višņevskis (1871–1943), who lived in Atašiene. Heavenly letter transcribed in 1903 (shortly before the abolition of the press ban) revealing many promises and also threats shows the time, when faith is suppressed and books are banned, but superstition replaces enlightenment. But the recorders daring to get into the unknown world through print signs and incomprehensible expressions of rewritable sources must be accordingly evaluated. A small cloth book has been used as an amulet, so it is a value for another Višņevskis family. The work transcribed by B. Višņevskis is the evidence of the existence of hitherto unmentioned heavenly books or genre of letters in Latgalian spiritual literature.</p><p>The works of Press Ban time can also be found today – 110 years after the abolition of the ban, but still there are many, including still unknown and undiscovered written evidences of the life of people at the end of the 19th century – at the beginning of the 20th century.</p>

Rebellious Women in the Black Freedom Struggle

Rebellious Women in the Black Freedom Struggle Monica Maria Tetzlaff (bio) Jeanne Theoharis. The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013. xvi + 320pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $27.95. Barbara Ransby. Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. xiii + 373pp. Photographs, chronology, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. From Montgomery, Alabama, to the United Nations, women activists promoted the black freedom struggle in the mid-twentieth century, and scholarly biographies of their impact have been emerging since around 2000.1 Two recent biographies of Rosa Parks and Eslanda Robeson break new ground in deepening our understanding of gender and the “long history” and international scope of the Civil Rights Movement. While it will come as no shock that Eslanda Robeson, activist journalist and anthropologist, was a radical like her husband, Paul Robeson, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks may surprise some readers. Both women had associations with the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., black nationalism, the peace movement, and the left wing of the union movement. Their biographers, Barbara Ransby and Jeanne Theoharis, are both noted civil rights historians who have argued for the “long civil rights movement” and have placed women at the center, rather than the margins of their analysis. The result is a rich, gendered view of the long civil rights movement and an examination of the way we view black women activists in our culture. Some of the most important analysis in Theoharis’ The Rebellious Life, is her examination of Rosa Parks as a symbol and her critique of that symbolism. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., who often remains frozen in time giving the “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, Rosa Parks has been frozen standing on a bus in Montgomery in 1955, refusing to give up her seat. As Theoharis points out, Parks has often been portrayed as a quiet seamstress who was tired that day: an “accidental heroine” who acted as an individual and showed the world the flaw of racism in American democracy, so it could be corrected. Her own rebelliousness in confronting racism through [End Page 332] collective organizing in the NAACP, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Highlander Folk School is usually left out. Omitted also is her suffering from this stand and the intense white reprisals—both economic and physically threatening—that drove her out of Montgomery. The many decades of her political life after moving to Detroit, her participation in the Black Power movements in Detroit and nationally, her opposition to the Vietnam War, and her support for nuclear disarmament and the anti-apartheid movement have been virtually invisible. Yet there she stood, as Theoharis writes, “hidden in plain sight” (p. xi). Class and gender analysis are important in both these biographies. Theoharis’ subject preferred to be called Mrs. Parks, and that is how the author refers to her throughout much of the book and (with the addition of her first name) in the title. Rosa Parks was a working-class woman, with all the disadvantages (and advantages of insight) that that position entails in American life. Perhaps the most painful part of being a working-class woman for Parks was that she was not considered qualified enough to have a position with the Montgomery Improvement Association, which received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations during and after the bus boycott. She herself lost her job at the department store where she had been an assistant tailor (not the more feminized title “seamstress”). As a result, she fell into destitution. As a married woman without children, many assumed that her husband was supporting her, but due to his ill health and the economic retaliation, he too suffered from the actions of segregationist whites. Theoharis is careful to be fair to Raymond Parks and stresses that Rosa Parks loved him deeply and valued his support and companionship as a fellow radical. She points out that Rosa McCauley thought of him as “the first real activist” whom she had ever met (p. 13). Raymond Parks was organizing support for the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930s when...

Education for social change: Highlander education in the Appalachian Mountains and study circles in Sweden

The article explores how education promotes social change. Using the philosophical foundations of adult education outlined by Elias and Merriam (2001, Philosophical foundations of adult education (3rd ed.), Krieger) as an analytical framework, the article compares the similarities and differences between popular education forms in two countries: Highlander education in the Appalachian Mountains in the United States and study circles in Sweden. The findings of the article indicate that, influenced by the folk schools’ education connecting to the social, political and economic problems of life, Highlander education and Swedish study circles dealt with the problems of life in education, but took different directions due to their different social and political contexts. Influenced by the radical philosophy of adult education, Highlander education attempted to achieve social and economic justice through social liberation in local communities; based on humanistic education philosophy, Swedish study circles pursued social democracy mainly through individual development. These different approaches to social change are reflected in three dimensions: participants, financial support from the government and the organizational systems. The differences are shaped by their different social and political backgrounds, and reflect their different philosophical foundations and different approaches to social change.

Blue Ridge Music Trails of North Carolina: A Guide to Music Sites, Artists, and Traditions of the Mountains and Foothills by Fred C. Fussell with Steve Kruger (review)

Reviewed by: Blue Ridge Music Trails of North Carolina: A Guide to Music Sites, Artists, and Traditions of the Mountains and Foothills by Fred C. Fussell with Steve Kruger Jinny Turman Blue Ridge Music Trails of North Carolina: A Guide to Music Sites, Artists, and Traditions of the Mountains and Foothills. By Fred C. Fussell with Steve Kruger. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. xiii, 281.) Roots music enthusiasts take note: if rumors of old-timey sounds have lured you into the North Carolina mountains, yet you remain at a loss for where to find them, consult the newest edition of the Blue Ridge Music Trails of North Carolina. This guidebook provides a fresh look at one of America's most celebrated regions for traditional music. Full of maps, performer profiles, and colorful images by photographer Cedric N. Chatterly, it educates readers even as it promotes economic development through tourism. Folklorists Fred C. Fussell and Steve Kruger, with an additional contribution from North Carolina Arts Council Director Wayne Martin, offer up [End Page 127] a sampling of the various types of traditional music one can expect to find in the mountains as well as brief vignettes profiling the evolution of specific musicians, instruments, musical styles, and media. Readers will encounter the region's more famous names and events, such as Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, and the Union Grove Fiddler's Convention. But importantly, they will also be introduced to lesser-known, although no less significant, figures such as legendary Cherokee fiddler Manco Sneed and the Krüger Brothers, Germanic immigrants from Switzerland who learned to speak English by playing American folk songs. The inclusion of diverse ages, ethnicities, races, and religious backgrounds challenges conventional assumptions that Appalachian music descended primarily from the Scotch-Irish, although that influence is examined as well. The chapters are organized geographically, each including brief introductions to the place and in-depth profiles of local performers, events, and traditions. Region One includes the northern foothill counties and Yadkin River Valley. This area became known for its legendary string band music, Mount Airy Fiddler's Convention, and one of the region's longest running radio programs devoted to traditional music, WPAQ's Merry-Go-Round. Region Two, home to Doc Watson, includes the state's northwestern counties. This area witnessed the birth of ballads dedicated to miscreants Tom Dooley and Otto Wood, a bandit locally celebrated as a generous "Robin Hood character . . . who robbed only the rich" (86). Another colorful figure immortalized in song, Frankie Silver, who murdered her husband in 1831 with an axe, came from what is now Mitchell County, part of Region Three that includes the Black Mountains. This chapter features Bobby McMillon, who has spent his life preserving and performing folk songs like "The Ballad of Frankie Silver." Region Four, composed of Madison, Buncombe, Henderson, and Transylvania Counties, boasts a century-old shape note music gathering and a multigenerational ballad tradition. Region Five includes Cleveland County, the home place of Earl Scruggs, and neighboring Polk, Rutherford, and Burke Counties. Highlights include both musical and food-oriented festivals and a feature on famed blues woman Etta Baker. The book concludes with Region Six in the far southwestern tip of the state. This sub-region is home to the John C. Campbell Folk School and Fading Voices Festival, an annual Cherokee gathering meant to "teach the young people in the Snowbird community about their Native American heritage" (217). The book includes several multimedia elements to add to the traveler's experience, including a CD with twenty-five songs by regional artists and information about an accompanying website, BlueRidgeMusicNC.com. The only issue with the website is that some of the links take visitors to an older [End Page 128] site for the multistate Blue Ridge Music Trails, which includes Virginia, and its subregions are organized differently than the book's. This might be somewhat confusing to visitors. Otherwise, the book combined with the website is a useful guide sure to enhance the traveler's experience as well as benefit North Carolina communities seeking to attract tourist dollars and increase visibility of their local musical and dance performances. [End Page 129] Jinny Turman...

Book Notes

Book Notes Robert Murray The Civil War and American Art. By Eleanor Jones Harvey. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. 316. $65.00 cloth). The American Civil War dramatically changed American art. In this beautifully illustrated work, Eleanor Harvey surveys American art immediately before, during, and after the war to trace and highlight these evolutions. The introduction of photography and the grim toll of the battlefield led American artists to shift their emphasis away from grandiose exultations of heroes to focus on the daily lives of the people—soldiers, slaves, families—most affected by this devastating conflict. Harvey’s text is enriched by the voices of the era as she demonstrates how the premier American artists of the period struggled to make sense and portray the effects of war. Wet Britches and Muddy Boots: A History of Travel in Victorian America. By John H. White Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Pp. 512. $55.00 cloth; $45.99 e-book) The author of thirteen books, John H. White Jr. was a curator of transportation at the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution for over thirty years. Needless to say, he is in his element in this history of travel in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century. White seems determined to address the entirety of mobile experience in Victorian America, and his approach is sweeping rather than precise. There are chapters dedicated to the omnibus, streetcars, ferryboats, and canals; the various types of steamships—river, lake, and coastal—are divided into three separate chapters along with differentiations for first-class and coach-class train travel. In acknowledging these differences in class or [End Page 285] the tribulations of immigrant travel as compared to domestic, White audaciously attempts to provide at least a snapshot of the complete experience of the road or rail or water for Victorian-era travelers. Appalachian Travels: The Diary of Olive Dame Campbell. Edited by Elizabeth McCutchen Williams. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. Pp. 294. $40.00 cloth; $40.00 e-book) Researchers and scholars of the southern highlands region of Appalachia are probably familiar with John and Olive Campbell for founding the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina, and their significant contributions to the study of the region, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917) and The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921). Olive Campbell’s diary from their 1908–9 journey through Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, currently housed at the University of North Carolina, is in a fragile condition and only accessible to researchers through a microfilmed transcription by an unknown author. Utilizing digital copies of the original diary, Elizabeth Williams has improved upon this translation and annotated Campbell’s diary along with an introduction that further explains the couple’s pioneering work. Written by a folklorist with a keen eye and ear, Campbell’s diary is filled with observations, interviews, and insights into Appalachian life at the dawn of the twentieth century. This is a critical source for anyone interested in Appalachian history and society. “Star-Spangled Hearts”: American Women Veterans of World War II. Edited by Jeffrey S. Suchanek with Jeanne Ontko Suchanek. (Frankfort, Ky.: Broadstone Books, 2011. Pp. 457. $49.95 cloth; $29.95 paper) Over a quarter of a million women volunteered for military service during World War II. Oral historian Jeffrey Suchanek has compiled interviews from twenty of these women—many of whom [End Page 286] were Kentuckians who served in the Army Nurse Corps, Women’s Army Corps, WAVES, Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, and the Coast Guard SPARs—into narrative-style memoirs. The result is a fascinating account that balances comical adjustments to military life with social issues like sexual harassment and homosexuality that will resonate in modern ears. Bluegrass Bluesman: A Memoir. By Josh Graves. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Pp. 133. $21.95 paper) Joining the iconic Bluegrass band Flat and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys in 1955, Josh Graves pioneered the introduction of the resonator guitar (the “Dobro”) into Bluegrass music. Compiled from a series of interviews Graves provided in 1994, Bluegrass Bluesman details Graves’s childhood, life on the...

PROBLEMS OF GUIDANCE AND SUPERVISION OF THE FOLK SCHOOL IN THE BASIC DOCUMENTS OF THE ESTONIAN SOCIAL MOVEMENT AND IN THE PEDAGOGICAL WRITTEN WORD (FROM THE NATIONAL AWAKENING ERA UNTIL THE FIRST WORLD WAR)

The present article examines differentiation and specialization of the national educational ideology on the ground of one of its most politicized component that until now has not been the object of a special study. The author tries to give an overview of the development in standpoints of the Estonian national leaders in the realm of rule and direction of the folk (in the first place peasant) school, tracing the relation between the negative and constructive side of this matter. From the 1830s the Estonian peasant school had been administrated by the Consistories of the Lutheran Church and the Baltic Knightages with the help of their provincial school institutions. The struggle to provide the Estonian communities and educated persons with access to supervision of the folk school began from the beginning of the Estonian national movement (in the 1860s). We can see the development from indistinct, unrealistic proposals and naive hope on benevolence of the Russian government (tsar) to more self-confidence and significant demands. The memorandum of Estonian village communities (1864) declared that the Estonian peasant schools should be administrated by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Empire. Actually this request stood for the elimination of the unequal and estate provincial school administration. However, no constructive proposal had been added. In the next essential memorandum to the Russian government in 1881, which reflected the views of the radical and somewhat Russophile wing of the national movement led by Carl Robert Jakobson, a newspaper editor, the central political proposal was for the reform of the provincial self-government with an equal representation for the Estonians with the Baltic Germans and the unification of the areas populated by Estonians into one administrative unit (national province). As to peasant education, the Estonian leaders demanded there only the abolition of the Baltic German control and inspection, the Ministry of Education was not even mentioned. This memorandum reflects hesitation with regard to Russian educational institutions. Hypothetically we can suppose that the radical national leaders had connected the problems of school administration with the prospective Estonian national self-government. The Russificatory reforms in the 1880s and the introduction of Russian as the language of instruction in all types of schools were a serious disappointment to the Estonian public opinion. Estonians did not receive the slightest opportunity to participate in school administration. The Revolution of 1905 stimulated the rise of political activity and pluralism. The Estonian liberal and socialist parties and movements disclosed their programmes, which included democratic, at times ultra-democratic requirements also in the sphere of school administration. The author attempts to discuss the problems from the point of view of the level of maturity of Estonian society for the national territorial and administrative autonomy within the Russian Empire and draws a conclusion that although speaking about autonomy and independence in the sphere of education the Estonian leaders nevertheless frequently laid too much hope on the financial support from the Russian government and gave up too much of authority to the state administration. In 1911 Peeter Pold, who was to become the first Minister of Education for the Republic of Estonia (1918) and the first professor of education at Tartu University (1920.1930), published the first comprehensive project of subordination, guidance and control of local schools in Estonia, in which he attached great importance to the lower levels of guidance and control (village communities and parishes). In that way Pold hoped to more successfully protect the national school keeping in view the continuing pressure of forcible Russification.

Social Justice and Adult Education

It should be understood that the importance of adult education is to illuminate the current context in which the adult functions. This adult frames directly linked with the construct of social justice. Adult education is examined under two frames: (a) Merriam and Brockett (1997) who define adult education as “…activities intentionally designed for the purpose of bringing about learning among those whose age, social roles, or self-perception define them as adults” and, (b) Horton’s philosophy developed under the Highlander Folk School. Understanding this correlation of adult education within a social-political phenomena, the nature of adult education may belong to a wide-ranging spectrum of teaching and learning in terms of: (a) media messaging and the rhetoric that may be inculcating adults, ultimately swaying public opinion; (b) adult messaging and totalitarian implications; (c) adult education and the state; (d) knowledge of history; (e) the history of adult education and how it has been instrumental in social justice; and (f) what adult education, inclusive of adult educators, must do to mitigate class hegemony.

The Influence of Nature on Learning: The Case of Fosen Folk School in Norway

This institutional ethnography provides an intensive, holistic description and compelling story of a different way of learning. It creates insight and understanding about learning that is not possible in the confines of school systems driven and governed by global economics. How do the instructors, headmaster, and students at Fosen Folk School in Norway teach/learn in a non-academic residential school? Their way of learning helps explain the complex territory between the instincts and tendencies that govern our learning when it is unfettered by institution/government standards, and the norms/values which characterize what is thought, within the formal learning system, to constitute effective teaching/learning. The relationship of self to people, nature, and the environment becomes discernible, understandable.

Educación Democrática de Personas Adultas en Estados Unidos

La democracia en la educación de personas adultas promueve una destacada práctica organizativa para los centros de educación de personas adultas. Regularmente, las personas analfabetas, de clase trabajadora y las personas negras estaban excluidas de las decisiones políticas y de las oportunidades de aprendizaje de las organizaciones a las que asistían. Este artículo se centra en la participación de estudiantes adultos en una escuela de adultos del sur de los Estados Unidos, Highlander Folk School. Participantes y educadores se entregan a las decisiones del centro para superar las desigualdades sociales. La participación de las personas que aprenden en los equipos de toma de decisiones es esencial para el éxito de una gestión compartida y de unas estructuras participativas, y es uno de los aspectos que explican los altos niveles de participación en el centro. Este artículo se centra en las estrategias utilizadas en la organización comunitaria para llevar a cabo educación democrática de personas adultas y como estas exitosas experiencias ayudan a superar la exclusión social.

White Collar Radicals: TVA's Knoxville Fifteen, The New Deal, and the McCarthy Era (review)

Reviewed by: White Collar Radicals: TVA's Knoxville Fifteen, The New Deal, and the McCarthy Era Jason Scott Smith (bio) White Collar Radicals: TVA's Knoxville Fifteen, The New Deal, and the McCarthy Era. By Aaron D. Purcell. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Pp. xviii, 258. $39.95 cloth) This elegant study tells the story of the second Red Scare from the bottom up. Relying on rarely used sources, including diaries, Federal Bureau of Investigation files, and a wide range of archival and manuscript collections, Aaron Purcell uses the lives of fifteen entry-level Tennessee Valley Authority employees to open a broader discussion of the fate of domestic radicalism during the Cold War. [End Page 134] "This small group of largely harmless 'New Dealers,'" Purcell argues, "attracted the attention of anti-Communist investigators even before World War II, and the relentless campaign to connect Reds in the TVA's mailroom with Reds in the TVA's boardroom continued into the mid 1950s" (p. xxv). With this work, Purcell captures the national security state at its creation, tracing the impact that government-run loyalty investigations had on the lives of his subjects through the 1940s and 1950s. In part one of his study, "Visions," Purcell provides brief portraits of his cast of characters. Drawn by the promise of economic and social transformation that the TVA held for the Tennessee Valley region, Purcell's fifteen employees shared a desire "to organize workers into unions, end segregation, and expand educational opportunities for all laborers" (p. 11). Purcell overreaches somewhat when he states that "Young idealistic Americans found the promises of the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and the New Deal irresistible," but he is correct in observing that the TVA (along with other New Deal agencies) "attracted fresh talent with similar minds, hoping to create a better economic and social system" (pp. 36-37). Purcell's cohort, which he terms the "Knoxville Fifteen," had backgrounds in union-organizing (several of them had training at the Highlander Folk School), but before joining the TVA only one had formally become a member of the Communist Party. Although the Knoxville Fifteen held only "minor positions of short duration" in the TVA, their sympathy for Communist Party positions on labor and civil rights issues became the justification for federal investigations of their loyalties (p. 73). In part two, "Realities," Purcell explores these investigations, carried out by the FBI, House Un-American Activities Committee, and other federal bodies during World War II and the early Cold War. Conservative anticommunists in Congress, such as Senator Kenneth McKellar, unsuccessfully sought to use the issue of communists in the TVA to thwart the appointment of former TVA head David Lilienthal to run the Atomic Energy Commission. The federal government loyalty program initiated by President Harry Truman proved [End Page 135] particularly problematic for some members of the Knoxville Fifteen. In 1953, economist William Remington was convicted of perjury for lying about membership in the Communist Party and found guilty of lying about transmitting secret documents. Sentenced to three years in federal prison, Remington was murdered by three other inmates. Throughout his study, Purcell carefully balances the larger political stakes that the Cold War raised for radical Americans with attention to the lived experience of the fifteen TVA employees. Scholars interested in the domestic politics of anticommunism and the history of American radicals will profit from reading this serious and engaged monograph. Jason Scott Smith Jason Scott Smith is associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the author of Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956 (2006), and is presently finishing a brief narrative history of the New Deal and Great Depression. Copyright © 2011 Kentucky Historical Society

Tennessee's New Abolitionists: The Fight to End the Death Penalty in the Volunteer State (review)

Reviewed by: Tennessee's New Abolitionists: The Fight to End the Death Penalty in the Volunteer State Patricia Brake Rutenberg (bio) Tennessee's New Abolitionists: The Fight to End the Death Penalty in the Volunteer State. Edited by Amy L. Sayward and Margaret Vandiver. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010. Pp. 300. $24.95 paper) David Garland's important new study, Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (2010), argues that the persistent legacy of slavery, lynching, and racism accounts for America's unique reluctance to fully relinquish the death penalty. Like Garland, Amy L. Sayward and Margaret Vandiver, in their engaging Tennessee's New Abolitionists: The Fight to End the Death Penalty in the Volunteer State, place Tennessee's circuitous effort to abolish the death penalty in the context of the political, economic, and social history of the state, all of which were influenced in varying degrees by racial issues. Sayward states in the introduction that the "history of the abolition movement in Tennessee provides a valuable window on America's history with capital punishment" (p. 13). Tennessee's New Abolitionists, although placed within the context of the modernization [End Page 136] of the New South period and religious movements that support both sides of the issue, falls short in effectively positioning Tennessee in the larger context of the American death-penalty abolition movement. This task would have entailed a detailed examination of the reform and religious movements that led to successful abolition efforts in other parts of the country. Instead, Sayward, a history professor at Middle Tennessee State University, and Vandiver, a professor of criminology at the University of Memphis and author of Lethal Punishment: Lynching and Legal Executions in the South (2005), offer a collection of essays that constitute a highly sympathetic account of death-penalty abolitionist work in the state. The dedication of the book to the memory of death-penalty abolitionist Harmon Wray aptly conveys the tone. The two essays written by the editors remain the most substantive in this collection. The essays trace the "ambivalence" of the abolitionist past of Tennessee, from Governor John Sevier's request of the state legislature to eliminate the death penalty through the short-lived Progressive-era abolition of the death penalty for murder—but not for rape. The essays further note that abolitionist efforts in Tennessee subsided until the 1950s. Citing the influence of the Highlander Folk School and the efforts of Governor Frank Clement to eradicate the death penalty, the essays also trace the impact in Tennessee of U.S. Supreme Court decisions Furman v. Georgia (1972), which ruled that the death penalty in this and two other cases under consideration constituted cruel and unusual punishment and therefore violated the U.S. Constitution, and Gregg v. Georgia (1976), which in effect upheld the death penalty and led to the reinstatement of Tennessee's death penalty in 1977. Although the current death row population of Tennessee is over ninety, it has carried out only six executions since 1976, placing it last in number of executions among the former states of the Confederacy. These chapters, which are a significant portion of Part I: "The History of the Abolition Movement in Tennessee," are clearly the outstanding contributions in the collection of essays; in fact, the book would have been more convincing if the focus had remained historical. [End Page 137] Part II: "Confronting Capital Punishment in the Volunteer State" is instead largely anecdotal, with the exception of Bill Redick's essay, which describes in detail death-penalty defense representation. Part II includes former Tennessee Supreme Court associate justice Penny White's essay on "Judicial Independence and Capital Punishment in Tennessee," which offers a brief overview on judicial selection in Tennessee and the impact of politics on the judiciary, but concludes with an extensive "Case in Point" in which she describes herself as "the target of a successful 'just say no' campaign" (p. 174). Dixie Gamble's painful firsthand experience with the mental illness of her own son clearly influences her essay on mental illness and the American judicial system. Part III concludes the essay collection with contributions from "Rarely Heard Voices," including reflections of death-row...

Southern Folk Singers

Southern Folk Singers Charles Joyner (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Guy Carawan (here, in 2007), came to Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School in the 1950s and soon became its music director. He helped spread two freedom songs from the South Carolina Sea Islands—“We Shall Overcome” and “Eyes on the Prize”—to Civil Rights workers across the South. Photography by Heather Carawan, courtesy of a Creative Commons License 2.5. [End Page 73] Folk singers is an ambiguous term. To folklorists it means those whose repertoires have been passed down orally from generation to generation within the family and community. To others it often means professional singers, regardless of background, who learned most of their songs from recordings and offered them to the general public as folk songs. I shall call the former traditional singers and the latter singers of folk songs. Traditional Singers The Wallin Family of Madison County, North Carolina, is tenth. British folklorists Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles recorded members of the family in 1916, and John Cohen (filmmaker and member of the New Lost City Ramblers) recorded and filmed the family extensively in the 1960s. They sang, in the traditional unaccompanied style, the old English and Scottish ballads of love, betrayal, and revenge. Perhaps the most memorable of their songs is Berzilla Wallin’s heart-stopping “Conversation with Death.” Horton Barker, the blind ballad singer from Chilhowie, Virginia, is ninth. The clarity of his unaccompanied tenor, his sly wit, and his extraordinary repertoire of songs, hymns, and such rare ballads as “Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender,” “Bow and Balance,” and “The Turkish Rebilee” were unforgettable to those who heard him from Virginia’s White Top Folk Festival in the thirties to the Chicago Folk Festival in the sixties. Eighth is Vera Hall of Livingston, Alabama. Her rich contralto, recorded for the Library of Congress by John Lomax and Ruby Pickens Tartt, was nationally recognized from the late 1930s to the 1960s for such songs as “Trouble So Hard,” and “Boll Weevil Holler.” Emma Dusenberry of Mena, Arkansas, is seventh. Born in 1862, and blind since her early twenties, she is the earliest singer on this list. According to John Lomax, who recorded her for the Library of Congress in the 1930s, her repertoire of traditional ballads was the largest ever recorded from a single person. Janey Hunter and the Moving Star Hall Singers of Johns Island, South Carolina, are tied with Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers of St. Simons Island, Georgia, for fifth and sixth. Their virtuoso voices, accompanied only by hand-clapping and foot-stomping, evoke an incredibly spiritual response as close to its African roots as any in America. Jean Ritchie of Viper, Kentucky, is number four. From the 1940s to the present she has sung the songs, ballads, and hymns from her family’s repertoire in her authentically Appalachian voice, sometimes a capella, sometimes accompanying herself on the Appalachian dulcimer. Almeda Riddle of Heber Springs, Arkansas, is third. She learned ballads and [End Page 74] other traditional songs from her parents and her mother’s brother growing up in the Ozarks. Known by her friends and fans as “Granny Riddle,” she preferred to sing rare old ballads in the traditional a capella style, always keeping the haunting ambience of her voice behind the song, but embellishing it with unique vocal decorations punctuated by leaps into the falsetto at the end of lines. Click for larger view View full resolution South Carolinian Josh White (here, in 1945) became a protégé of Eleanor Roosevelt and a frequent guest in the White House. His “One Meatball” was the first million-selling record by an African American male singer. Photograph courtesy of The Estate of Josh White (Sr.) and the Josh White Archives. Tying for first place are North Carolina’s Frank Proffitt and Louisiana’s Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. Ledbetter is remembered as much for his powerful accompaniment on the twelve-string guitar as for his high sweet voice and unabridged repertoire of work songs, love songs, ballads, and blues, such as “Rock Island Line,” “Midnight Special,” “Take this Hammer,” and “Goodnight Irene.” Frank Proffitt learned most of his...

"I train the people to do their own talking": Septima Clark and Women in the Civil Rights Movement

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Septima Poinsette Clark is a name that should be as familiar to us as Rosa Parks. Both women contributed significantly to the African American freedom struggle, and striking similarities exist in their stories. Each had a long record of participation in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); each challenged segregation and was arrested as a result; and each worked with Martin Luther King. In fact, four months before Rosa Parks's infamous arrest, she attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School, an interracial adult education center in Monteagle, Tennessee, where activists gathered to devise solutions for problems in their communities and where Clark served as Director of Education. Yet, unlike Parks, Clark never captured the national media's attention for her Civil Rights activism. This certainly offers one explanation for her relative obscurity. Another lies in Clark's age. Born on May 3, 1898, in Charleston, South Carolina, she was nearly sixty years old when the classic phase of the Civil Rights Movement began, which has eclipsed her role in narratives that focus on youth, such as those in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (NAACP). Finally, there is the nature of Clark's work in the Movement: using education to empower grassroots people, particularly African American women, so they might become leading citizens in their communities. Septima Clark spent forty years as a public school teacher and civic organizer in the Jim Crow South, teaching citizenship by helping people to help themselves. In the mid-1950s, she drew on her experiences to develop a citizenship education program that directly linked self-help to politics by teaching African Americans to read and write so they could pass the literacy tests required by southern states to register to vote. Beyond adding their names to the voting roils, however, students also discovered how to transform their relationship to the wider society. Teachers relied on charts, for example, to explain the structure of local and state government as they led discussions of what citizens do; they taught people how to create a household budget, balance a check book, and apply for Social Security benefits. As students learned of citizenship responsibilities that included establishing local voting leagues, paying taxes, and lobbying for improved municipal services, they came to understand citizenship as more than an individual legal right they possessed. Indeed, African American adults who passed through the classes acquired both the knowledge and the skills to apply their citizenship on behalf of the broader community. In editing these oral history interviews, we have chosen excerpts that highlight telling moments in Septima Clark's personal development and that underscore her activist approaches. Foremost, conditions in the rural and urban segregated schools in which Clark taught sensitized her to the need to advocate on behalf of African American children and to expand professional options for African American women. In both the World War I and World War II eras, she enlisted in NAACP campaigns that pursued these goals. The personal tragedies that followed her earliest political involvement yielded setbacks, but relocating to Columbia, South Carolina, in the interwar years helped Clark to overcome them as she learned how to function within a larger network of African American women. The necessity of her seeking employment in the summertime reminds us of teachers' precarious financial situations as well as her motivation for supporting salary equalization. In South Carolina, federal judge J. Waties Waring ruled in favor of African American teachers in these suits; he also opened the Democratic Primary to African American Carolinian voters in 1948. Waring's decisions on behalf of African American plaintiffs, and the circumstances of his divorce and then second marriage, made him an iconoclast in Charleston. …

Basic provisions of the methods of formation of professionally significant physical qualities of students of the folk arts higher school college

59В 50-70 гг. прошлого века вместе с приглашением гимнастки на площадку на-зывался композитор и музыка, под которую она выступала. Это несло в себе колос-сальную образовательную и воспитательную функцию и для спортсменок, и для тре-неров, и для зрителей. На зарубежных соревнованиях по ЭГ представление команд и тренеров не принято, в связи с чем название музыкальных произведений не озвучива-ется. На отечественных соревнованиях лишь около 50% команд знают и называют имя композитора и музыку, под которую выступают. Таким образом, «возвращение к утра-ченным ценностям» в этом аспекте, к сожалению, не произошло. Что же касается му-зыкально репертуара, то здесь выявлена следующая тенденция (по убывающей): пе-сенный репертуар (детский и взрослый), музыка из кинофильмов, мультфильмов, спектаклей, эстрадные мелодии, классическая музыка. Однако отметим, что команда «Роксет» из Тулы победила на Чемпионате мира 2005 г. с музыкой Игоря Стравинского «Весна священная». Команда «Оскар» из Рос-това-на-Дону завоевала Кубок мира с композицией на музыку Ара Гаваркян «Арцах», посвящённую памяти о геноциде армянского народа. Призёр многих международных соревнований эстонская команда «Пируэт» выступала с самой потрясающей компози-цией на музыку П.И. Чайковского I Концерт для фортепиано с оркестром. На юниор-ском уровне одно время остро соперничали команда «Роксет-джуниор» с композицией на музыку М.П. Мусоргского «Ночь на лысой горе» и команда «Юнона» с композици-ей на музыку А.И. Хачатуряна Адажио из балета «Спартак». Таким образом, есть надежда, что на соревнованиях и по художественной, и по эстетической гимнастике всё чаще будет звучать музыка, представляющая собой вели-кое культурное наследие. ЗАКЛЮЧЕНИЕ Подводя итог всему сказанному, отметим, что эстетическая гимнастика сегодня – это реально существующий и развивающийся вид спорта. В нём немало проблем ор-ганизационного, информационного, политического, научного характера и др. Но в то же время этот гимнастический вид спорта, безусловно, имеет очень привлекательную соревновательную сущность, выход на мировую арену, отлаженную систему соревно-ваний и судейства. Контактная информация

GENERAL DIDACTIC FUNDAMENTALS OF TEACHING WOMEN'S HANDMADE WORKS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF WESTERN UKRAINE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE XX CENTURY

In the article the general didactic principles of teaching of womas handworks at folk school of Western Ukraine at the beginning of XX age are analysed. Attention is concentrated on general didactic principles of teaching and their realization on lessons of woman handworks.

The Pride and Prejudice of Don West

The Pride and Prejudice of Don West Jeff Biggers (bio) I spent several years obsessed with resurrecting the legacy of a largely dismissed Appalachian poet-activist. Not entirely dismissed: In 1946, Don West became a national literary phenomenon, managing to sell untold thousands of copies of a collection of quatrain folk ballads and labor poems, Clods of Southern Earth, which should have forever etched him a place in the literary canons of the region. Truth is, during the years I researched West’s wiles, interviewed associates, and collected his papers from the remote corners of the hills and hollows and urban back warrens—most of West’s personal papers had been lost in a series of mysterious fires—I was more in turmoil about how to deal with his hard times and its relevance today than his forgotten life. In the fall of 1999, seven years after Don had died, his books had gone out of print (and it grieved me that the generation of Appalachian scholars, activists, publishers, editors, and writers that came of age in his shadow had shamefully allowed his work to stay out of print for well over a decade), and his legacy had disappeared into the mountain fog; I embarked on a journey with one question: Does Don West still matter to Appalachia, and the nation? I first met West in the early summer of 1983. I was 19, a dropout from the University of California. I had just gone through a wild nine-month tour of duty in Berkeley’s corridors, spending more time in jail and at leftist political meetings than in classrooms. I failed to finish my last quarter. Returning from a stint in jail for a demonstration in central California, I was involved in a tragic car accident, which resulted in the death of a young woman. I was at the wheel. Still in a daze, I eventually took a Greyhound across the country, and then started hitching and hiking through the South, drifting into the Blue Ridge. I was angry, resentful, and adrift. I had lost faith in the power of education, politics, or even activism. Don West saved my life that summer. Here are his bona fides as I see them. Raised by sharecroppers from North Georgia, influenced as much by the self-reliant wisdom of his [End Page 11] mountaineer grandfather as the off-putting, patronizing education he received at the well-known Berry School, the dirt-poor but resourceful West put himself through Lincoln Memorial and Vanderbilt universities at the same time the Southern Agrarian literary movement took the stage in the late 1920s. But West was no backwards-looking antebellum sycophant; he wrote poetry as a way of giving voice to his own neglected heritage, traveled outside any academic comfort zone to face the violent strikes in coal camps and mill towns, earned a bachelor’s in divinity studies, journeyed around Scandinavia and Europe to examine the cooperative movement and adult folk schools, and returned to the South to launch his own revolution in the mountains. The youthful West was anything but artless, naïve, and malleable. He possessed a tremendous sense of place and self-confidence, at home among urban sophisticates in the United States and Europe, as much as he felt at ease among farmers and backwoods sawyers. Raised by radical Republicans in a part of Appalachia that had supported both the Union and Confederacy, West had rejected the emerging media hillbilly stereotypes for his proper place in the South’s progressive vanguard early in his life. Don West intended to make history, on his own terms, on his native ground. In 1932 he cofounded the Highlander Folk School, which became the training center for the Civil Rights Movement. As one of the lonely activists in the generation before the glorious Montgomery Bus Boycott, he went underground and defended a radical black (Communist) leader in Atlanta in the mid–1930s. Wanted dead or alive by the Atlanta authorities, he fled the state and became a union organizer for millworkers and miners in the Carolinas and Kentucky and was occasionally beaten and jailed, often forced to quietly return to work his farm in Georgia or...

Jesse Stuart and Don West

Jesse Stuart and Don West James M. Gifford (bio) and Erin R. Kazee (bio) The relationship between Jesse Stuart and Don West ran both historical and emotional gauntlets. Set against the backdrop of the Depression, World War II, unionization, desegregation, and a growing concern for the underserved and underprivileged, their writings reflected vastly different world views: West politicized his literature; Stuart romanticized his. The result was the dissolution of a strong friendship between two men who, for all their diverging opinions, were more similar than they wanted to admit. In their undergraduate days, they were closer than brothers, until politics, literature, and life split their friendship. As older men, they tried to reclaim—or at least remember—their affection for one another. Both were born in 1906 on hillside farms—Stuart in W-Hollow, Greenup County, Kentucky, and West in Devil’s Hollow, Gilmer County, Georgia. Both were raised in extended, traditional mountain families and received their early education in one-room schools. When they met as freshmen at Lincoln Memorial University in 1926, poor and willing to accept any job they could find, their similar backgrounds and self-confident personalities cemented their camaraderie. They milked cows, hoed corn, dug ditches, and delivered laundry, but they put their hearts into writing and honing the philosophies that would ultimately tear them apart. At the time, Stuart’s letters to his family were filled with praise for West’s character and accomplishments. The “two old Bulls from the woods” hiked, ran track, and commiserated together. Although he had his own financial and personal difficulties, Don loaned Jesse money and offered advice on topics that ranged from dating to religion. When Don secretly eloped with lmu coed Connie Adams, Jesse served as the best man at the ceremony. Later, University officials discovered the marriage and Stuart wrote in a letter, “took Connie’s scholarship away from her. At the same time, [Don] was expelled for participating in a student strike that closed the campus down for a couple of weeks.” Stuart’s letter maintains that with help from Stuart and others, he was reinstated and eventually [End Page 31] graduated. In 1929, Don West hitchhiked to Vanderbilt to enter the Divinity School. Jesse followed a few years later when he decided to pursue an M.A. in English for the 1931–1932 school year. Don was studying religion, and they often discussed his role in the socialist movement. Although Jesse felt that Don did not articulate his ideology very clearly, he still respected him as “a natural born leader” and predicted that “if the socialists ever do get in power, West is liable to be president of the United States.” Jesse “went through hell” at Vanderbilt and “would have starved” without Don West, who purchased a meal ticket for Stuart that provided one meal per day. Furthermore, he often brought Jesse food when they visited. Stuart completed a year of graduate work and returned home after the 1932 spring semester ended. That fall, he became Kentucky’s youngest superintendent. Meanwhile, Don West was making significant progress, too. He taught briefly at the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County and then opened the famous Highlander Folk School at Monteagle, Tennessee, with Myles Horton. Throughout the 1930s, Jesse and Don spent a great deal of time explaining and defending themselves to one another. “Stuart, you still have a great misunderstanding of me and my work and purpose … [but] I make no more personal fights,” West wrote. Nonetheless, he felt that if Jesse “could ever get away from being so damned self-centered [he] could be a power for the cause.” Jesse, in his own way, also tried to acknowledge and look past their differences, saying simply, “I think he is very wrong and of course he thinks I’m wrong.” Still, their political opinions often colored their literary analyses. For example, in January 1933, Don West expressed disappointment that Stuart had “not yet grasped the simplest elementary principle of social consciousness” and hoped that he would “get away from the romantic sentimentalizing about the mountains.” That was a year of financial suffering for both of them. West asked Stuart to loan him one–hundred dollars...

Horton, Highlander, and Leadership Education: Lessons for Preparing Educational Leaders for Social Justice

Influenced by Myles Horton's vision and leadership, the Highlander Folk School became an adult education program centered on social change via the labor and civil rights movements. In this article, I examine the pedagogy and practice of Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School and identify the key themes that guided their educational approach to social justice leadership training. I then explore the ways in which educational leadership preparation may exemplify these key themes in its pedagogy and practice with the aim of moving the field and schooling closer to social justice and democratic ideals.

Exhibits through the “Other Eye”

This essay begins by considering museum studies in relationship to curriculum studies and new museology. The author notes that traditional museum and school learning modes have focused more on measurement than meaning, while curriculum studies and new museology urge a broader exploration of the social purposes of education. Drawing on the work of Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School, popular education is offered as a model for exhibitors and other museum educators. The essay closes with examples from an exhibit project by graduate students. This section shares analyses of traditional exhibit standards, new critical standards, and popular education-influenced exhibit elements.