July 15, 2002
For Immediate Release
To: News Directors and News Editors
From: Veronika Brown, Coordinator of Media Relations, 342-5444

A Question of Justice New South Governors and Education, 1968-1976 by The University of Louisiana at Monroe Assistant Professor, Gordon E. Harvey was recently published.

Gordon E. Harvey is Assistant Professor of History at The University of Louisiana at Monroe. He has published articles about liberalism in New Deal Alabama and Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy, as well as a biographical essay on Governor Albert Brewer in Alabama Governors: A Political History of the State. The book was originally Harvey's Ph.D. dissertation at Auburn and took about 6 years to complete. It is also the first in-depth study of the "New South" Governors elected after 1970.

One review of the book reads: "A Question of Justice adds texture and complexity to facile stereotypes of politics and education in the South. . . . The scholarly strength and appeal of this work is its subtlety, i.e., its prompting readers to rethink those narrow stereotypes," said John R. Thelin, University of Kentucky

From the UA press Website: This illuminating study treats three pivotal governors whose impact on southern identity, politics, and culture has been profound, changing the region forever. In southern politics, 1970 marked a watershed. A group of southern governors entered office that year and changed both the way the nation looked at the South and the way the constituents of those states viewed themselves. Reubin Askew in Florida, John West in South Carolina, Jimmy Carter in Georgia, and Albert Brewer in Alabama all represented a new breed of progressive moderate politician that helped demolish Jim Crow segregation and the dual economies, societies, and educational systems notorious to the Sunbelt South. Historian Gordon Harvey explores the political lives and legacies of three of these governors, examining the conditions that led to such a radical change in political leadership, the effects their legislative agendas had on the identity of their states, and the aftermath of their terms in elected office.

For more information on the book visit http://www.uapress.ua.edu/authors/harvey02.html

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