Katherine C. Reynolds

"A Separate Sisterhood" examines the personal lives and professional accomplishments of a group of wise and persistent women whose collective work in the early twentieth century crucially influenced educational reform in the New South. Working at the intersection of race, gender, and class, these women fought for educational improvement in a region of exceptional poverty, rural isolation, and racial prejudice. Their work, explored collectively for the first time in this groundbreaking text, demonstrates the roots of early advances in southern literacy education, vocational education, community outreach education, adult education, equal educational opportunity, curricular integrity, public support, and teacher pay equity.

In celebration of the University of South Carolina's bicentennial, this remarkable volume reveals the personal stories of Carolina students over the past two hundred years. Told in their own words, these writings - from antebellum manuscripts to e-mails - capture the color and spirit of the times, revealing attitudes and opinions, issues and passions. From those first young boys chopping wood to warm their rooms, to today's young men and women surrounded by the latest technology, the voices of Carolina's students testify to the transforming power of the college experience. To gather this collection of texts from 1801 to the present, the editors searched family papers, collections of letters, university archives, autobiographies and histories, journals and diaries, student newspapers and literary magazines, and oral histories. In this volume students share their own versions of the University of South Carolina story - explaining their activities, voicing their opinions, cheering their teams, and sometimes writing home from far away. Some of their concerns have changed; twenty-first century students worry more about parking tickets and phone bills than the price of fuel or the threat of smallpox. Throughout the years, however, each generation weaves tales of living conditions and classroom practices within the context of larger historical events. In their letters and diaries, poems and memoirs, editorials and e-mails, students illustrate a colorful picture of campus history and evoke the important events of their time. Their words provide intimate illustrations of life on and around the campus as they reveal the rich history of the University of South Carolina.