Thomas G. Dyer's definitive history of the University of Georgia celebrates the bicentennial of the school's founding with a richly varied account of people and events. More than an institutional history, The University of Georgia is a contribution to the understanding of the course and development of higher education in the South. The Georgia legislature in January 1785 approved a charter establishing "a public seat of learning in this state." For the next sixteen years the university's trustees struggled to convert its endowment-forty thousand acres of land in the backwoods-into enough money to support a school. By 1801 the university had a president, a campus on the edge of Indian country, and a few students. Over the next two centuries the small liberal arts college that educated the sons of lawyers and planters grew into a major research university whose influence extends far beyond the boundaries of the state. The course of that growth has not always been smooth. This volume includes careful analyses of turning points in the university's history: the Civil War and Reconstruction, the rise of land-grant colleges, the coming of intercollegiate athletics, the admission of women to undergraduate programs, the enrollment of thousands of World War II veterans, and desegregation. All are considered in the context of what was occurring elsewhere in the South and in the nation.

Amelia Akehurst Lines's diaries and letters provide an extraordinarily rich record of the attitudes and values of an "average" American woman of the mid-nineteenth century. Lines was a young New York schoolteacher whose ambition drove her to seek new opportunities in rural Georgia. Her letters and diary entries provide keen observations on Georgia society and yield a great deal of information concerning the family, child-rearing, and other facets of everyday life in both the North and the South. Lines's life, says historian Thomas Dyer in his introduction, is testimony to the mythical quality of the nineteenth century's conventional wisdom that hard work, piety, and personal commitment were all that was needed to reap the promise of American life.

This provocative study examines Theodore Roosevelt's ideas about race, focusing especially on his attitude toward blacks, American Indians, immigration, and imperialism. Thomas G. Dyer gives careful attention to formal and nonformal aspects of Roosevelt's thought, as revealed in his voluminous published works and personal papers. Dyer's book asks a number of important questions. In what proportions do popular thought and formal racial theory appear in Roosevelt's attitudes? What was the intellectual context of his speculations on race? How was his racial thought related to broader areas of intellectual activity such as natural science and social philosophy? How did Roosevelt regard various white and nonwhite ethnic groups? How did Roosevelt's racial thought conform to the prevailing philosophies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Historians have traditionally disagreed about the character of Theodore Roosevelt's racial ideology. Dyer's illuminating study clarifies many of the relevant issues by viewing Roosevelt's racial theory as an integrated whole.