Category Archives: News and Reviews

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