Choice Outstanding Academic Title2024 Senators Bob and Elizabeth Dole Biennial Award for Distinguished Book in Veterans Studies, winnerWho writes novels about war? For nearly a century after World War I, the answer was simple: soldiers who had been there. The assumption that a person must have experienced war in the flesh in order to write about it in fiction was taken for granted by writers, reviewers, critics, and even scholars.

Between 1910 and the mid-1920s, more than sixty black students from the South bravely traveled north to Ferris Institute, a small, mostly white school in Big Rapids, Michigan. They came to enroll in college programs and college preparatory courses—and to escape, if only temporarily, the daily and ubiquitous indignities suffered under the Jim Crow racial hierarchy. They excelled in their studies and became accomplished in their professional fields. Many went on to both ignite and help lead ...

Between 1910 and the mid-1920s, more than sixty black students from the South bravely traveled north to Ferris Institute, a small, mostly white school in Big Rapids, Michigan. Haste to Rise is a book about the incredible resiliency and breathtaking accomplishments of those students. There is also an in-depth look into the life and work of the Institute's founder, Woodbridge Nathan Ferris, a racial justice pioneer who created educational opportunities for women, international students, and ...