In this collection of essays by leading experts, day care is profiled as a diversified and complex developmental setting. Collectively, the papers challenge the common assumption that day care settings are easily comparable. Instead, various types of day care environments are examined from a multilayered perspective and their diverse characteristcs are empirically documented.

On a long dark road in deep East Texas, James Byrd Jr. was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck one summer night in 1998. The brutal modern-day lynching stunned people across America and left everyone at a loss to explain how such a heinous crime could possibly happen in our more racially enlightened times. Many eventually found an answer in the fact that two of the three men convicted of the murder had ties to the white supremacist Confederate Knights of America. In the ex-convict ringleader, Bill King, whose body was covered in racist and satanic tattoos, people saw the ultimate...