Nicholas Lemann

"This book shows us for the first time the ideas, the people, and the politics behind the fifty-year-old system that determines the course of Americans' lives." "It began as a utopian experiment - launched by James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University, and Henry Chauncey, head of the brand-new Educational Testing Service (ETS) - to use the then-young science of intelligence testing to assess and sort American students fairly and dispassionately in order to create a new democratic elite that would lead postwar America to progress, strength, and prosperity. No writer before Nicholas Lemann has gained access to the archives of the all-powerful ETS, and none has understood the significance of this extraordinary drama." "Lemann describes the consequences, for individual lives and for society as a whole, of this effort to create a new meritocracy." "For the utopian experiment didn't turn out as planned. It created a new elite but also generated conflict and tension, particularly over the issue of race, and America is now a society whose best-educated, most privileged, and most powerful people seem to be leaders without followers - prosperous, resented figures who don't hold the country together around their ideas yet who are trying, like the old elite, to perpetuate themselves down through the generations. Lemann shows that this American meritocracy is neither natural nor inevitable, and it does not apportion opportunity equally or fairly."--BOOK JACKET.

A New York Times bestseller, the groundbreaking authoritative history of the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. A definitive book on American history, The Promised Land is also essential reading for educators and policymakers at both national and local levels.

The author retraces the lives of the people shown in the early 1940's photographic project commissioned by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, under the direction of Roy Stryker. Many of the photographers of this survey worked with Stryker when he was the director of the FSA. They include: Russell Lee, John Vachon, Sol Libsohn, Esther Bubley, Todd Webb [and others].