For many years, the role of the pastor's wife has been an emerging role in American religious history (Sweet, 1983). While on their journey in building and nurturing their relationship with God, supporting their husbands, families, congregations, and communities, pastors' wives have experienced joys and blessings as well as challenges and issues. A tremendous joy for some pastors' wives has been the privilege, the opportunity, and the honor to serve, minister to, assist and care for others. However, one major challenge for many pastors' wives has been preparedness, or the lack of preparedness, knowledge, and instruction (Obleton, 1996). Wives of pastors are a large population of adult learners in need of educational programming opportunities. Providing adult and continuing education courses is one viable option and a resource that could assist with the needed knowledge, skills, and abilities for their role in ministry.;The primary purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the educational needs of African-American pastors' wives from the perspective and voice of the participants. to explore these educational needs, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs was used as a framework. The participants for this study included three educational planning partner groups or a triangular component that encompassed adult learners, specialists, and educators. For the purposes of this study, the adult learners included a sample of five African-American pastors' wives. The specialists included persons who had been in a leadership role in a ministers' wives organization. The convenience sample for this group included four participants. Finally, the educators, were the administrators or the implementors from selected higher education institutions or religiously affiliated organizations who offered adult and continuing education, and had interacted with African-American pastors' wives. The educators included a sample of four participants. In total, the 13 participants used in this study were African-American, affiliated with the Baptist denomination in the United States, and affiliated with, representative of, or had exposure to selected African-American church congregations in Virginia.;Based on the design and parameters of this study, phenomenology was employed as the methodological perspective "to enter the field of perception of several individuals, while looking for and making meaning of their experiences" (Creswell, 1998, pp. 31, 51). as a result, data collection was accomplished by using semi-structured interviews.;The results from the interviews in this exploratory process were presented in two components. The first component provided narrative descriptions on each participant. The second component utilized the constant comparative method to analyze the transcriptions from all 13 interviews. From the coded transcriptions, both within-case analysis to draw out prominent themes, and cross-case analysis to examine the data in terms of similarities and differences between the three participant groups was performed. The data, descriptions, and results provided in this study could be used to inform practice relative to: educational programming for pastors' wives, clergy families, religious higher education, adult and continuing education, counseling, pastoral care, and WomanistCare.

On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court handed down one of its most important decisions in the twentieth century. Brown v. Board of Education ordered twenty-one U.S. states, including Virginia, to end racial segregation in their public schools. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a nationally-known African American civil rights organization, had led the legal campaign to bring about the Brown decision. After its victory, the organization focused on how to bring about the implementation of the decision in the South in order to effectuate school desegregation. In the later 1950s, the NAACP filed lawsuits in many southern states, including Virginia, where school boards had been unable, or unwilling, to comply. as the possibility of school desegregation grew, white southerners bitterly attacked the NAACP and proponents of integration. In Virginia this led to state-sanctioned investigations of the organization, among other things. Utilizing legislation passed by the state legislature, the governor of Virginia also closed public schools in several Virginia communities in the fall of 1958 to avoid desegregation. The following January, state and federal courts overturned the state's school closing laws, and in February 1959 initial school desegregation began in Virginia. Afterward, the state allowed token, or minimal, school desegregation in an attempt to both avoid judicial scrutiny but also maintain as much segregation as possible. In the 1960s the federal government demonstrated a renewed commitment to school desegregation, and both legislative and executive action pressured the southern states, including Virginia, to increase the amount of school desegregation taking place within their borders. In the late 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a series of new school desegregation decisions, starting with Green v. New Kent County (Virginia) in 1968, which sped up the desegregation process in the South. This dissertation examines the NAACP, Virginia's political leaders, white liberals and moderates, and segregationists during this tumultuous time in Virginia's history. Outside of the desegregation of public education, the manuscript also considers the desegregation of higher education, public transportation and accommodations, the expansion of black voting rights and political activity, racial violence, and related civil rights issues. Blending social, legal, political, and African-American history, this dissertation seeks to shed new light on the Civil Rights Movement and white resistance to civil rights in Virginia and the South.

Lewis Burwell II designed Fairfield plantation in Gloucester County to be the most sophisticated and successful architectural and agricultural effort in late seventeenth-century Virginia. He envisioned a physical framework with the intent to control the world around him so that he might profit from growing tobacco, while raising his family's status to the highest in the colony through the display of wealth and knowledge and the enslavement of both Africans and the natural surroundings. The landscape he envisioned contrasted with those of the enslaved Africans he purchased and put to work in the fields and buildings surrounding his '1694 brick manor house. These overlapping and often competing landscapes are visible in the surviving material culture, archaeological remains, and historic documents. Individuals created these landscapes from their personal experiences, a product of their constantly changing perspectives extending outward from themselves, their "way of seeing" tempered by a culture rooted in Senegambia, England, or Virginia. at a crucial period in Virginia history, perhaps the most significant period of plantation development prior to the Civil War, Lewis Burwell II's Fairfield plantation reflected the struggle between the co-dependent strains of agricultural expansion and racialized slavery. This dissertation attempts to explain how and why individuals created and manipulated these landscapes, how landscapes provided opportunities and constrained possibilities, defined interpersonal relationships, individual and group identities, and the relative success and failures of a society constantly confronted with a physical environment it could not wholly control. By studying past landscapes and how others used them to define and redefine their identities, it is possible to gain insight into our present condition, deepening an understanding of how our interactions with landscape define our own identity.

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Dinah Mayo-Bobee will lead discussions on issues raised by the movie Lincoln in connection with the traveling exhibition "Lincoln: The Constitution and the Civil War," which will be at the Johnson City Public Library through Oct. 16.

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The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship among self-concept, racial identity development, and perceptions of the graduate and professional educational experience of African American female college students planning to pursue advanced degrees. The researcher explored the relationship among the factors to determine if they were predictive of the pursuit of advanced degrees among African American female college students. The investigation would provide counselors, educators, and administrators with information which could positively impact the enrollment and retention of African American women in advanced degree programs.;A sample of 85 graduating African American female college seniors at a very selective, private, historically Black institution was studied. The institution selected has historically produced a high number of African American female students who pursued advanced degrees upon graduation. Data were gathered utilizing the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale, the BRIAS Social Attitude Scale-Revised, a researcher developed Graduate and Professional School Perception Survey and a demographic questionnaire. The student's plans of pursuit were assessed using five items from the demographic questionnaire (acceptance, attendance, entrance exam, cumulative grade point average, enrollment).;It was hypothesized that (1) a significant relationship existed between self-concept and plans to pursue advanced degrees, (2) a significant relationship existed between racial identity development and plans to pursue advanced degrees, (3) a significant relationship existed between perception of the graduate and professional educational experience and plans to pursue advanced degrees, (4) a significant difference existed between advanced degree program pursued and the three independent variables, and (5) a significant difference existed between definite and tentative plans to pursue groups and the three independent variables.;In general, the results revealed four significant relationships and no significant evidence of discrimination. Significant relationships existed for self-concept (social self-concept) and cumulative grade point average; two measures of racial identity development (pre-encounter and encounter), pre-encounter and acceptance and encounter and enrollment; and the perception of the graduate and professional educational experience and acceptance.;Additional investigations that focus on the complexities of the independent variables with a more diversified sample of African American women may reveal significant findings relating to self-concept, racial identity development, and perceptions of graduate and professional schools.