UGA Professor Wins National Award for Book

A UGA professor’s work on the formal education of freed slaves in the South has been cited by the History of Education Society as the Outstanding Book of the Year for 2010. He recently received the award at a meeting of the group.

Ron Butchart, a social historian who teaches in the , wrote Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning and the Struggle for Black Freedom, which was published in 2010. He heads the department of elementary and social studies education at UGA.

For his research, he studied the people who taught slaves, the schools they created, the way the teachers taught and the students in those schools. He and a team of researchers look at archives from the freedmen’s aid societies and ones from southern states, the created a listing of over 11,600 people who taught in black schools in the South between 1861 and 1876.

He found that one-third of teachers were African Americans; that these black teachers taught longer than white counterparts; that half were Southerners; and that Northern teachers were more diverse than once thought.

The Organization of American Historians gave the book an honorable mention for the 2011 prestigious Avery Craven Award.

Butchart is interested in the history of African-American education, the social history of teachers and teaching, and the history of classroom discipline. He has been on the UGA faculty since 1999.