Karen Anderson . Little Rock: Race and Resistance at Central High School . (Politics and Society in Twentieth‐Century America.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. Pp. x, 330. $35.00.

Karen Anderson, author of Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II (1981) and coauthor of Present Tense: The United States Since 1945 (2004), has added an important book to the scholarship on the 1957 school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas. Although her work comes too late to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of this important event, her insights are valuable. She begins the book with the well-known confrontation involving Elizabeth Eckford (one of the Little Rock Nine), Hazel Bryan (a white segregationist student), and Grace Lorch (a white member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), squarely situating the monograph in discussions about gender and the role of working-class and middle-class African American and white women in shaping the debate over race and public education. She details the context under discussion early in the introduction: “In the postwar period adult southern whites and the region's male civic leaders found their power imperiled by the unsettling effects of changes in economic structures, the rise of youth culture, the increasing power of national media, changing sexual mores and practices, and dramatic shifts in gender and family relations” (p. 7).