Title of dissertation: LEARNING TO DIVIDE IN THE WORLD: YOUTH EXPERIENCES IN A MID-ATLANTIC COMPREHENSIVE

This history interprets and critically examines the cross-gender, cross-racial, and cross-class relationships of serial generations of students, who attended a Mid-Atlantic comprehensive high school between 1950 and 2000, as revealed in the oral histories of thirty-seven alumni, African-American, white and Eastern European, richer and poorer. Miller High was chosen for its early integration, in 1956, and for its location in a community that transformed, over the last half of the twentieth century, from rural, to suburban, to urban-suburban; and from a predominantly white middle-class town along which lived a small African-American community established since the nineteenth century, to a multicultural population that by the 1990s included Russian immigrants, and African-American youth newly arrived from city schools. Alumni’s recollections revealed three generations of students who, bound in time by different demographic configurations, different levels of school disciplinary measures, and different shades of hierarchy in student-teacher relations, constructed their associations with peers and school authorities markedly differently: “The Divided Generation ” (1950-1969), “The Border-Crossing Generation ” (1970-1985), and “The Re-divided Generation ” (1986-2000). Of the three generations, “Th