Publications:
Books
High School Students Unite!: Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025
High School Students Unite! is a national history of high school student activism in the 1960s and 1970s, featuring stories from the San Francisco Bay Area, Albuquerque, New Orleans, Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Philadelphia, New York City, Baltimore, Ann Arbor, and numerous other communities.
It traces how teenagers organized around antiwar activism, civil rights, free speech, and school reform, while also showing how authorities responded through discipline, policing, and FBI surveillance. It also includes two appendices cataloging over 500 independent student groups and more than 1,000 high school underground newspapers from all 50 states.
The book features a selection of curated, character-driven stories, some told for the first time, including San Francisco’s Students’ Organized Education and Action League; the New York High School Student Union; the Mission High School strike; Philadelphia’s Students’ Bill of Rights; the first comprehensive history of Cleveland’s Collinwood High School riots; and FBI surveillance targeting teenagers.
Articles
“Building a Student Movement in Naptown: The Corn Cob Curtain Controversy, Free Speech, and 1960s and 1970s High School Activism in Indianapolis,” Indiana Magazine of History 114, no. 3 (September 2018): 202-237
Winner: Indiana Association of Historians James H. Madison Best Article Prize
“The Right to Sit: Symbolic Expression and the Pledge of Allegiance in New York Public Schools, 1969-1973,” New York History 96, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 84-100
“The War in the Schools: San Francisco Bay Area High Schools and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, 1965-1973,” California History 92, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 22-41
Works in Progress
“The Backbone and Organizers: High School Students in the Anti-Vietnam War Movement” in Youth in the Movement: High School Student Activism in Postwar America since 1945. Eds. Jon Hale, Alexander Hyres, and Dara Walker (forthcoming Oct. 2026)
Book Reviews
Jones, Brian. The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History. New York: New York University Press, 2022. Reviewed in the Journal of American History 110, no. 4 (March 2024): 813-814
Aaron G. Fountain, Jr., PhD 