The Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths : And Other Documents of Social Reform in the Progressive Era South

William A. Link is professor of history and associate dean at the University of North Carolina at Greeensboro. His research has focused on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century South, Progressive Era America,and the social history of American education. Link is the author of A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920 (1986) and The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 (1992), which won the Mayflower Cup Award, given annually for the best nonfiction book written by a North Carolina author. His most recent book, William Friday: Power, Purpose, and American Higher Education (1995) examines the evolution of one of the leading figures in North Carolina and American higher education in the post-1945 era.