Karen Anderson is professor emeritus of history at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II and coauthor of Present Tense: The United States since 1945.
The author applies class and gender perspectives to enhance understanding of the roles women played in the crisis, especially the Mothers' League of Central High School and the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools. Anderson's book belongs in every college, university, and public library. Choice Karen Anderson's Little Rock is recommended for its acute examination of race and gender issues in the South in the 1950s. -- Oscar R. Williams Journal of African American History Little Rock is based on research in a wide variety of sources, from manuscript archives and newspapers to organizational and school records and oral histories, as well as the vast secondary literature on this topic. The result is a well-written account of an important battle in the struggle for racial equality in the United States. Scholars of civil rights, politics, and law in the United States will find this work worthwhile and enjoyable. -- Brian J. Daugherity Journal of Southern History Little Rock contributes much to our understanding of southern American desegregation... By acknowledging the connections between multifarious oppressions, Little Rock usefully contextualizes what could otherwise be taken for granted as only a story about race without downplaying the obvious racially based elements of conflict surrounding educational integration. -- Steven L. Foy European Legacy [T]his volume brilliantly details the moral shortfalls of people who sought 'the appearance of federal compliance rather than actual racial justice, leaving behind a legacy of white flight, poor urban schools, and institutional racism.' -- Ruth Tait Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World