Karen Hansen

In the 1960s and 1970s—when many communities resisted school integration and schools held low expectations for working-class kids and constricted teachers’ autonomy—educators and students at a multiracial public high school in California collaborated to achieve something remarkable: they created a cohesive community that gave students a powerful sense of belonging. Over its 25-year life, the student leaders of Sunnyvale High School worked with visionary staff to reduce violence, broaden and enrich the curriculum to include US Black history and Mexican American literature, and increase girls’ access to sports. Working together, they fostered a collective sense of pride, persistence, and possibility that fed the success of students and graduates in careers and in communities.

How did adults and youth forge such a powerful ethos of engagement and mutual responsibility, enabling so many to thrive? At a time when issues of racial and gender inequality are arguably as heated as they were half a century ago, what lessons does the school offer? In this book, the story of Sunnyvale High School is told by the students and educators who shaped it and made it meaningful. They attest to the lifelong impact of their shared experience.

Karen Hansen's richly anecdotal narrative explores the textured community lives of New England's working women and men—both white and black—n the half century before the Civil War. Her use of diaries, letters, and autobiographies brings their voices to life, making this study an extraordinary combination of historical research and sociological interpretation.Hansen challenges conventional notions that women were largely relegated to a private realm and men to a public one. A third dimension—the social sphere—also existed and was a critical meeting ground for both genders. In the social worlds of love, livelihood, gossip, friendship, and mutual assistance, working people crossed ideological gender boundaries.The book's rare collection of original writings reinforces Hansen's arguments and also provides an intimate glimpse into antebellum New England life.

In this article the author explores the interconnections between the social and the material-as people move to a space on the land, coexisting with one another. By focusing in on one specific place-the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation (formerly called the Devils Lake Sioux Indian Reservation) in North Dakota-the author analyzes what happened when white immigrants came to homestead and live on land historically reserved for Dakotas. Against the backdrop of Native dispossession, this illustrative case reveals the ways everyday interactions created entanglements through landownership, the gendered division of paid work, neighboring practices, and leasing land. It challenges us to uncover gendered processes, probe denials, and interrogate silences.

In rural societies, equity in land is key to women's position, much as wage labor is in urban, industrial society. Access to productive property is especially important to women in marginalized, subjugated, or newly arrived racial-ethnic groups. The ownership of land shapes the resources that women and men can differentially obtain, control, and utilize. Native American, African American, and immigrant women obtained land in a variety of ways: allotment, purchase, homesteading, and inheritance. Ownership enabled them to cultivate land to support the family, rent it out for income, and exercise the leverage it provided them throughout their lives. Using cases spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we explore landholding from the perspectives of Dakota and Scandinavian immigrant women on the Northern Plains and African American women in the South. Through careful attention to what women made of the land they owned, we can better understand gender and power in a settler colonialist society.

With territorial expansion of the US came dispossession of Native Americans, supported by policies that made white immigrants settler colonists. On Indian reservations, the federal government encouraged land-taking by allotting land to Indians and making land available to homesteaders, many of them recent immigrants. Few scholars have studied relationships between Natives and newcomers. This paper draws on the concept of boundary work to analyse intergroup relations at the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation, where white settlers (principally Scandinavians) lived alongside Dakotas. To survive and coexist, Indians and immigrants marked and interpreted boundaries of belonging and exclusion. By establishing common practices, they enacted a mutuality that both reflected and subverted racial-ethnic hierarchies.