Rosalie Gardiner Jones biography marches into Women’s History Month

Websigte Rosalie Cover ImageCelebrate Women’s History Month and the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment by sharing the story of one of America’s original social justice warriors in Zachary Michael Jack’s 2020 narrative nonfiction Rosalie Gardiner Jones and the Long March for Women’s Rights.

In February 1913 young firebrand activist “General” Rosalie Gardiner Jones defied convention and the doubts of better-known suffragists such as Alice Paul, Jane Addams, and Carrie Chapman Catt to muster an unprecedented equal rights army. Jones and “Colonel” Ida Craft marched 250 miles at the head of their all-volunteer platoon, advancing from New York City to Washington, DC in the dead of winter, in what was believed to be the longest dedicated women’s rights march in American history. Along the way their band of protestors overcame violence, intimidation, and bigotry, their every step documented by journalist-embeds who followed the self-styled army down far-flung rural roads and into busy urban centers bristling with admiration and enmity. At march’s end in Washington, more than 100,000 spectators cheered and jeered Rosalie’s army in a reception said to rival a president’s inauguration.

This first-ever book-length biography details Jones’s indomitable and original brand of boots-on-the-ground activism, from the 1913 March on Washington that brought her international fame to later-life campaigns for progressive reform in the American West and on her native Long Island. Consistently at odds with conservatives and conformists, the fiercely independent Jones was a prototypical social justice warrior, one who never stopped marching to her own drummer. Long after retiring her equal rights army, Jones advocated nonviolence and fair trade, authored a book on economics and international peace, and ran for Congress, earning a law degree, a PhD, and a lifelong reputation as a tireless defender of the dispossessed.

An Education in Place: On Higher Education, Home, and the Necessity of Local Learning

Education in Place ThumbnailIn An Education in Place professor and national commentator Zachary Michael Jack asserts that higher education’s greatest existential threat may not be decreasing numbers of high school graduates, but a crisis of confidence originating in an industry’s failure to honor the values of deeply rooted college students and their parents. Jack challenges an Academy that has bartered away its heart and soul in the name of educational buzzwords and band-aid fixes while offering as potential antidote a panoply of place-based proposals for students, faculty, administrators, and policymakers who seek to make higher education feel more like home again. Intergenerational education, respect for student rights and student research, opportunities for local learning, a balance of in-person and distance education, rooted rather than rootless professors, and more politically inclusive dialogue–all promise to reinvent campus and community. An Education in Place makes an impassioned plea for common-cause coalitions among well-grounded educators, students, and parents as well as non-conformist academics, industry dissenters, and conscientious objectors allied in opposition to displaced corporatist models of higher education.

Zachary Michael Jack offers a welcome addition to place studies and conversations about the meaning and value of postsecondary education. In this artful collection…Jack persuasively argues that colleges and universities should learn to embrace students who hail from rural regions, small towns, and inner cities, populations too often marginalized in conversations about postsecondary education.” –Dr. Bill Conlogue, Professor of English, Marywood University

An Education in Place will be a breath of fresh air for anyone troubled by the corporatization of American higher education. Each of its twenty-nine component essays could stand alone as a cautionary tale, yet their unifying theme is clear: to regain the public’s trust, we must respond with more than lip service to its needs.” –Dr. John L. S. Daley, Professor of History, Pittsburg State University

“Zachary Michael Jack uses his personal experience as a scholar and teacher to argue for place-based learning, and an approach to post-secondary instruction that is broadly conceived.” –Dr. Christopher Norment, Professor of Environmental Science and Ecology, College at Brockport, State University of New York

YA Novel added to folio of San Francisco’s curated list of sports Titles

Zachary Michael Jack’s well-loved YA sports novel, Pond Ball Clintock and the Gods of Golf (2013) is back, this time in the curated list of sports books for teens from Folio Books of San Francisco. “If you love to play golf or watch it…this book is a must…. It s for everyone, since everything is in it…family, friendship, courtship…and the world of the spirit.” –ROBERT J. HIGGS, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of God in the Stadium

Book Release of Country Views Brings Rave Reviews

IMG_1640A shot of the book-signing table, as Country Views: The Essential Agrarian Essays of Zachary Michael Jack hits bookstores  on October 24th as part of a nationwide publisher release. Join Zachary Michael Jack at the Presidential Politics Conference in Sioux Center and at Beaverdale Books in West Des Moines for an exciting  book launch in heart of the agrarian heartland: central Iowa.

PRAISE FOR COUNTRY VIEWS

“Like Art Cullen or Sarah Smarsh, Jack can be angry, funny, nostalgic and hopeful by turns, with a sharp eye for detail and lean, economical prose. Not content to merely idealize rural America, he cherishes it, asking hard questions about how it has changed, what it still has to offer, and what it demands of those who live here and of those who do not.”

–Laura Sayre, editor of Fields of Learning: The Student Farm Movement in North America

 

“Zachary Michael Jack’s writings illustrate that those whose roots are close to the soil, where plants and animals live or die, carry through life an uncommon sensitivity.”

–Dr. Duane C. Acker, former president of Kansas State University, former assistant secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture for Science and Education

 

“After reading Country Views, I felt like “someone had remembered me.” The commentaries are a delightful mix of sentimental journeys, statistical analysis, and rural policy issues relevant for any legislator to ponder.”

–Dr. Jeff Kaufmann, Former Speaker Pro Tem, Iowa House of Representatives, Professor of History, Muscatine Community College

 

“Zachary Michael Jack has given us more of his witty, insightful commentaries in his newest book. Jack offers a unique perspective on the lighter side of complex agrarian issues, addressing everything from “barnyard English” to “rural ghouls.” I highly recommend Country Views.”

-Dr. Dana Hoag, Professor of Agricultural Economics, Colorado State University

 

Reading Country Views is like sitting down to a plate heaping with delicious home-cooked servings…. Whether you grew up agrarian or are tasting agrarianism for the first time, you are not only in for a treat but also may be surprised by what you learn that will influence how you think about rural America.

 

Loren Kruse, retired editor-in-chief, Successful Farming magazine

Zachary Michael Jack joins Tulsi Gabbard, Jeff Taylor, and Joe Walsh at presidential politics conference

Website PPCI-banner logoZachary Michael Jack joins Tulsi Gabbard, Dr. Jeff Taylor, Joe Walsh, and other historians and experts on presidential politics at the Andreas Center for the quadrennial Presidential Politics Conference October 24-26. Zachary reads from his new book of  Midwest-based political and cultural commentaries, and discusses political pluralism, purple politics, and agrarian sentiments in the lead-up to the 2020 general election.

Votes for Women! New Historical Drama Debuts at Madden Theatre

VotesforWomen1913Votes for Women! a new historical drama written by Zachary Michael Jack opens the weekend of March 2 and 3 at Madden Theatre in the Wentz Fine Arts Center on the campus of North Central College in Naperville. The stage play is part of the Illinois Humanities’ Forgotten Illinois series  and celebrates both Women’s History Month and the Illinois Bicentennial. Read more about the unique collaborative production here.

Zachary Michael Jack presents “The Citizen’s Art” Workshop in California

Join Zachary Michael Jack as he presents “The Citizens’ Art of the Op-Ed” at the Merced Branch in Lakeside, California, on Saturday, December 15 at 2:30 p.m. Don’t miss this important writing for social change public workshop.
The citizens art

New Full-length Play Set for World Premiere April 13

YourFloridaFantasyThe new full-length comedy by Zachary Michael Jack, Your Florida Fantasy, is set for world premiere at Florida Gulf Coast University on April 13. Check out the listing at ArtSWFL.com or Fort Myers News-Press preview by Charles Runnells.