Smith, Christi M. 2016. Reparation and Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education. University of North Carolina Press.

This is the first book to reveal the nineteenth-century struggle for racial integration on U.S. college campuses. As the Civil War ended, the need to heal the scars of slavery, expand the middle class, and reunite the nation engendered a dramatic interest in higher education by policy makers, voluntary associations, and African Americans more broadly. Through a detailed analysis of archival and press data, Christi M. Smith demonstrates that pressures between organizations–including charities and foundations–and the emergent field of competitive higher education led to the differentiation and exclusion of African Americans, Appalachian whites, and white women from coeducational higher education and illuminates the actors and the strategies that led to the persistent salience of race over other social boundaries.

Reparation and Reconciliation was recently the focus of a profile in Inside Higher Ed.