bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Epilogue
Authors: Fischer Anne Gray
Published: May 2023

We must reckon with the fact that in twenty-first century cities, law enforcement authorities and politicians have engineered a situation in which the perception of urban “safety” is built on profound violence: the arrest, abuse, and banishment of women—poor, trans, undocumented, Latina, Asian, Indigenous, and Black. The women who have been surveilled, harassed, entrapped, arrested, and assaulted by police may not be as visible as the male casualties of police power. But in our overpoliced and gentrified cities, we bear daily witness to the outcomes of the harm done to them. Luxury condos, outrageous rents, trendy shops and restaurants—and a powerful army of richly funded police to protect this property wealth—are at once the stark proof and perverse erasures of state violence against women. Sexual policing is structured as an inevitable and unaccountable breeding ground of state-sponsored violence and abuse. Rape and the extortion of sex in exchange for the withholding of arrest are built-in features of sexual policing. Antiprostitution programs have provided the template for urban authorities to target a longer list of vulnerable city residents. Sexual policing widens the urban carceral net: it is tightly knitted into sprawling structure of urban law, economy, and government.
Before the White People Came in Large Numbers and Brought Their Customs
Authors: Yarbrough Fay A.
Published: May 2023

This chapter outlines the basic social organization of traditional Choctaw society, describes the contours of the new written Choctaw constitution, and provides a brief summary of the Choctaw removal to Indian Territory. The Choctaw traditionally practice matrilineal and matrilocal social organization though patrilineality made inroads during the nineteenth century. This exploration of Choctaws’ traditional values, motivations for institutionalizing their form of governance, and negotiation of the process of removal sheds light on how Choctaws would later approach their decision to join the Confederacy in the Civil War: Choctaws prioritized protecting their legitimacy as a nation and their coherence as a community with a shared identity. In short, the Choctaws attempted to safeguard their sovereignty.
The Choctaws and Chickasaws Are Entirely Southern and Are Determined to Adhere to the Fortunes of the South
Authors: Yarbrough Fay A.
Published: May 2023

This chapter surveys the internal debate within the Choctaw Nation as a civil war seemed increasingly likely and then as white southerners, particularly from Arkansas and Texas, attempted to coerce and cajole Choctaws and other Native nations in Indian Territory to ally with the Confederacy once southern states seceded. This chapter also compares the Cherokee Nation’s extended effort to remain neutral in the war to the Choctaw Nation’s relatively swift decision to side with the Confederacy to demonstrate the strength of Choctaws’ affinity with the South. Finally, the chapter offers a detailed investigation of the Choctaw alliance treaty with the Confederacy to reveal all of the incentives that Confederate officials offered to secure Native support for their cause. After the defeat of the Confederacy, some Choctaws revised the circumstances of their alliance with the South to frame it as reluctant which belies their earlier rhetoric. In short, Choctaw officials negotiated for Confederate promises to respect and protect Choctaw sovereignty and to provide financial support in return for Choctaw allegiance.
Dis Land Which Jines Dat of Ole Master’s
Authors: Yarbrough Fay A.
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the terms under which Reconstruction took place in the Choctaw Nation. Part of the Choctaw Reconstruction story is the treaty requirements and legislative action taken to address the position of newly freed people in Choctaw society. The other part of the story, however, is more individual and considers the experiences of formerly enslaved people. How did the people formerly enslaved by Choctaw Indians, and in Indian Territory more generally, discuss and imagine freedom or emancipation within this context? To answer this question this chapter turns to the WPA slave narratives. The formerly enslaved people of Native peoples in Indian Territory gained rights to land, while those from the southern states did not. Property ownership, however, did not necessarily improve the political or legal status of the freedpeople in Indian Territory. As it turns out, Choctaw officials opposed the extension of full citizenship rights to their formerly enslaved people almost as fiercely as many white southerners did.
Conclusion
Authors: Yarbrough Fay A.
Published: May 2023

The Conclusion summarizes the arguments of the book and insists on the importance of studying what people in western spaces thought of slavery, the balance between state and federal power, and definitions of citizenship. The Civil War had a profound effect on the inhabitants of Indian Territory and on Native sovereignty. Further, ideas about sovereignty, expansion, and citizenship that were being worked out in Indian Territory had effects on the United States. Obviously, Native people inhibited expansion with their mere existence in the West, as well as their organization into sovereign nations. Moreover, land cessions by Native peoples were the basis for the creation of many western states. But the presence of self-governing indigenous peoples also reordered the racial hierarchy in ways that manifested themselves in the Oklahoma state constitution.
Afropolitan Projects
Authors: Adjepong Anima
Published: May 2023

Beyond simplistic binaries of “the dark continent” or “Africa Rising,” Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices and cultural politics. Amongst the privileged classes, these articulations can be characterized as Afropolitan projects--cultural, political, and aesthetic expressions of global belonging rooted in African ideals. This ethnographic study examines the Afropolitan projects of Ghanaians living in two cosmopolitan cities: Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana. Anima Adjepong’s focus shifts between the cities, exploring contests around national and pan-African cultural politics, race, class, sexuality, and religion. Focusing particularly on queer sexuality, Adjepong offers unique insight into the contemporary sexual politics of the Afropolitan class. The book expands and complicates existing research by providing an in-depth transnational case study that not only addresses questions of cosmopolitanism, class, and racial identity but also considers how gender and sexuality inform the racialized identities of Africans in the United States and in Ghana. Bringing an understudied cohort of class-privileged Africans to the forefront, Adjepong offers a more fully realized understanding of the diversity of African lives.
Introduction
Authors: Adjepong Anima
Published: May 2023

The introductory chapter defines Afropolitan and introduces the class-privileged communities of Ghanaians who are the subjects of this book. Emphasis is placed on how the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality, and class shapes Afropolitan projects. The book’s engagement with cultural politics, capital, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism, are also presented to show how attention to the meaning-making strategies, material cultures, and practices of Ghanaian Afropolitans expands our understanding of these concepts. A discussion of the book’s “promiscuous methodology,” which includes ethnography, in-depth interviews, autoethnography and cultural analysis of films, artworks, social media and other found items situates the methods of this book at postcolonial queer feminist knowing.
Accra’s Afropolitan Vibe
Authors: Adjepong Anima
Published: May 2023

This chapter introduces Accra, Ghana’s capital, from the perspective of its class-privileged and politically active residents. Accra is presented as a cosmopolitan city with dynamic class hierarchies and distinct diasporic connections. The author argues that the city’s transnational connections produce Afropolitan vibes, which positions the city as international, uniquely African, and progressive in its politics. Accra represents and reproduces Afropolitan mentality as middle-class residents feel connected to an Africa beyond the continent’s boundaries and reject ideas about what is typically African – poor, unworldly, backward. The chapter’s focus on class offers insight into how Accra’s middle-class residents engage in a cultural politics that refuses to be locked into ideas of an underdeveloped Africa. In focusing on the city, the chapter explores how Afropolitan cultural politics in Accra navigate a gentrifying city plagued by inequalities yet with access to world-wide or international connections and amenities.
Afropolitan Politics in Accra
Authors: Adjepong Anima
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers how Accra’s class-privileged residents position themselves as progressive citizens of the world by engaging in a self-conscious progressive politics. Here, the author examines how Afropolitan Ghanaians acknowledge and attempt to overcome class barriers and invite less privileged others into their Afropolitan social world. Language use serves as an important component of this inclusive politics and the author explores how the cultural producers’ intentional use of indigenous languages seeks to bridge this class divide. However, an overarching belief that progressive politics, or “wokeness” as the book’s interlocutors called it, is made possible by middle-class positionality undermines this Afropolitan project. By foregrounding the experiences of and critiques made by relatively new entrants into this Afropolitan class, the author assesses the limits and possibilities of Accra Afropolitans’ progressive politics.
Afropolitan Sexual Politics
Authors: Adjepong Anima
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines how notions of what is means to be Ghanaian and African shape the gender and sexual politics of class-privileged Ghanaians in Houston and Accra. Through a discussion of compulsory heterosexuality, queer activism, and indigenous orientations to gender and sexual expansiveness, the author explores how Ghanaian Afropolitans navigate an open and embracing politics within a context of compulsory heterosexuality, patriarchy, and homophobia. The chapter finds that while Ghanaian Afropolitans might express queer affirming politics in private, the force of homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality in the public sphere produces a culture of silence, which is complicit in reifying Ghana, and indeed Africa as a whole, as heterosexual. The chapter’s theorizing on indigenous sexualities extends frameworks for queer African studies.
Settler Memory
Authors: Bruyneel Kevin
Published: May 2023

Faint traces of Indigenous people and their histories abound in American media, memory, and myths. Indigeneity often remains absent or invisible, however, especially in contemporary political and intellectual discourse about white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and racism in general. In this ambitious new book, Kevin Bruyneel confronts the chronic displacement of Indigeneity in the politics and discourse around race in American political theory and culture, arguing that the ongoing influence of settler-colonialism has undermined efforts to understand Indigenous politics while also hindering conversation around race itself. By reexamining major episodes, texts, writers, and memories of the political past from the seventeenth century to the present, Bruyneel reveals the power of settler memory at work in the persistent disavowal of Indigeneity. He also shows how Indigenous and Black intellectuals have understood ties between racism and white settler memory, even as the settler dimensions of whiteness are frequently erased in our discourse about race, whether in conflicts over Indian mascotry or the white nationalist underpinnings of Trumpism. Envisioning a new political future, Bruyneel challenges readers to refuse settler memory and consider a third reconstruction that can meaningfully link antiracism and anticolonialism.
Introduction
Authors: Bruyneel Kevin
Published: May 2023

The introduction defines and explain the concept of settler memory in detail and how it is shaped by Indigenous feminist and Black radical thinkers, to give a name and explanation to why Indigenous people often reside in the background of US Race politics, memory, and analyses. It also defines and explain the important role of disavowal in the meaning and practice of settler memory.
Mocking Disavowal and Cruel Celebration
Authors: Bruyneel Kevin
Published: May 2023

This chapter adds to the analysis of the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism by accounting for the role of settler colonialism in his articulation of a white nationalist vision and politics. Bruyneel argues that one cannot understand Trump and Trumpism through a racial or whiteness perspective alone. Rather, we must see how the domination of land and racialized and gendered bodies – and in Trump’s case the celebration of this very domination – is central to his politics, popularity, and the movement that carries his name, but which precedes him and continues after the end of his one term in office. The role of gender and violent fantasies of sexual and racial domination are important to this understanding. Bruyneel connects Trump’s white settler nationalism to the violent policing of the border and his support for Israel settler colonial domination of the Palestinian people that goes even beyond what previous presidents have done.
A Nation Was Born Here
Authors: Titus Jill Ogline
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the clash between emancipationist, Lost Cause, and reconciliationist interpretations of Gettysburg’s significance on display during the July 1963 battle anniversary and the range of contemporary political purposes for which the memory and legacy of the battle were deployed, including debating the validity of the legislation that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It provides a deep dive into the ways in which Confederate memory was employed to fight the Cold War and oppose the civil rights movement through examining the dedication ceremonies at two new monuments honoring troops from the State of Florida and the State of South Carolina. The chapter also explores the role of George Wallace – at the time, the nation’s leading political defender of white supremacy – in utilizing the commemorative activities to champion massive resistance and advance his political career on the national stage. Finally, the chapter includes discussion of the symbolic reenactments and family-friendly historical vignettes that served as a highlight of the commemoration for many attendees.
The Pen Is Mightier than the Sword
Authors: Titus Jill Ogline
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the November 1963 commemoration of the centennial anniversary of Gettysburg Address, which was less populist, more global in focus, and more racially diverse than the July battle anniversary. Cold War ideology and increasing commitment to anticolonialism across the globe helped prompt national figures such as former President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dean Rusk to use the anniversary to repeatedly emphasize the Gettysburg Address’s role as the foundation of American foreign policy. Though the vision of civil rights reform espoused was fairly moderate in nature and the need to shore up diplomatic relations abroad provided much of the impetus for connecting Abraham Lincoln’s call for “a new birth of freedom” to racial equality, the Gettysburg Address centennial nonetheless was more aligned with the emancipationist interpretation of Gettysburg than the battle anniversary had been. The chapter also includes brief descriptions of earlier Cold War-influenced commemorations of the Gettysburg Address, such as the 1948 visit of the Freedom Train to Gettysburg.
Epilogue
Authors: Titus Jill Ogline
Published: May 2023

The book’s epilogue explores the post-centennial transition from the twin foci of civil rights and the Cold War to the Vietnam War as the lens through which the Battle of Gettysburg’s meaning was refracted. It examines the ways in which both support of and opposition to US actions in Vietnam was expressed through various commemorative activities. Special attention is paid to the 1969 antiwar march to the Eternal Peace Light Monument, affiliated with the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam; Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 Memorial Day speech at Soldiers’ National Cemetery; and C.T. Vivian’s “Second Gettysburg Address,” delivered during a 1972 rally on behalf of the Harrisburg Seven. The epilogue also reflects on the similarities and differences between the 100th and 150th anniversary commemorations and Gettysburg National Military Park’s shift from framing the battle as “the High Water Mark” to portraying it as “A New Birth of Freedom.” Finally, it details continuing efforts to utilize Gettysburg’s historical landscape and iconic status for the purpose of crafting a usable past suiting contemporary needs.
The Vote Collectors
Authors: Graff Michael , Ochsner Nick
Published: May 2023

In November 2018, Baptist preacher Mark Harris beat the odds, narrowly fending off a blue wave in the sprawling Ninth District of North Carolina. But word soon got around that something fishy was going on in rural Bladen County. At the center of the mess was a local political operative named McCrae Dowless. Dowless had learned the ins and outs of the absentee ballot system from Democrats before switching over to the Republican Party. Bladen County’s vote-collecting cottage industry made national headlines, led to multiple election fraud indictments, toppled North Carolina GOP leadership, and left hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians without congressional representation for nearly a year. In The Vote Collectors, Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner tell the story of the political shenanigans in Bladen County, exposing the shocking vulnerability of local elections and explaining why our present systems are powerless to monitor and prevent fraud. In their hands, this tale of rural corruption becomes a fascinating narrative of the long clash of racism and electioneering—and a larger story about the challenges to democracy in the rural South. At a time rife with accusations of election fraud, The Vote Collectors shows the reality of election stealing in one southern county, where democracy was undermined the old-fashioned way: one absentee ballot at a time.
The Missing Piece April 6, 2017
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

Baptist preacher Mark Harris wants to run for Congress in 2018 in the 9th Congressional District—a sweeping district that stretches more than 100 miles from east to west. Harris needs friends in rural areas and urban areas to be successful. On a spring day in 2017, he drives from his Charlotte home to meet with Republican leaders in rural Bladen County. They gather in a furniture store, Ray’s Furniture Liquidators, owned by a county commissioner. There, Harris is introduced to McCrae Dowless, a known operative and get-out-the-vote expert. All the local men in the room, including a judge, tell Harris that if he wants to win the election, he must hire Dowless.
The Ballad of the Flim-Flam Man October 1995
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

McCrae Dowless is a low-key, chain-smoking Bladen County native who can name just about everybody there—and tell you who they’re likely to vote for. He’s also a former felon who spent time in prison for insurance fraud, something he doesn’t regularly tell people. The book authors know Dowless well but struggle to trust him. Each meeting is easy-going but underscored by the reality that Dowless has a long history of being a small-town con artist. He’s a lot like the character Mordecai Jones in “The Ballad of the Flim-Flam Man,” which, as it happens, was written by Bladen County native Guy Owen. But McCrae’s knowledge of the county and its voters, built over years and years of working elections, makes him a valuable resource for candidates like Mark Harris.
The Storm October 2016
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

As the 2016 election boiled around the country, the biggest news story in eastern North Carolina was Hurricane Matthew, a so-called 500-year storm that turned downtowns into swamps and pushed homeowners into homelessness for years. It created an ideal environment for voter apathy. Operatives on both sides—the McCrae Dowless (Republican) side, and the Bladen Improvement Association (Democrat)—organized door-knocking efforts to remind people to request absentee ballots and to fill them out. That much is legal, but collecting the ballots is not. In the 2016 election, Republican Donald Trump swept North Carolina in the presidential contest, but Republican incumbent governor Pat McCrory lost to Democrat Roy Cooper in the governor’s race. The results were so close—about 5,000 votes—that McCrory didn’t concede the election for more than a month. Meanwhile, he sent a team of lawyers and consultants around the state to find evidence of fraud.
Broken Men April 10, 1865
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

Part II of The Vote Collectors starts in 1865, long before the 2018 election: Bladen County resident Matthew Sykes served in the Confederacy but secretly joined the Union. This made him a traitor to many of his neighbors. Neill McGill led a group of men to punish Sykes one rainy morning. They found him hiding in a pile of raw cotton in a storeroom, tied him up and took him into the woods. Sykes’s wife Catharine found him hanging from a sapling. The men were tried and sent to prison, but their lawyer—a former Confederate lieutenant colonel named Alfred Waddell—defended them relentlessly. Weeks later, the men escaped from jail, in part because Wadell had paid a prison guard to allow them to chisel out a hole in the wall with a jackknife.
The Firebombing at Fowler Simmons April 27, 1971
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

Racial tensions grew in Bladen County to the point where a bomb was discovered at the predominantly Black East Arcadia High School, and six Black people were shot outside of a nightclub in 1971. Prominent civil rights activist Ben Chavis responded by organizing protests in the county. As they marched through Elizabethtown, they were heckled by white workers at a department store named Fowler Simmons; days later the store was firebombed in the night, sending smoke throughout Bladen County.
The Thanksgiving Surprise November 7, 2018
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

Part III of The Vote Collectors begins where we left off in Part I—on election night 2018, with Mark Harris celebrating his supposed victory in the 9th Congressional District race. He spends the night texting back and forth with McCrae Dowless, the infamous Bladen County political operative who helped deliver Harris to a 900-vote win. That weekend, Harris went to Bladen to thank supporters at a winery that specializes in super sweet scuppernong grapes. But elsewhere, state board of elections vice chairman Josh Malcolm was preparing to pull the rug out—on November 27, just after Thanksgiving, Malcolm made a motion that the board certify the results of all elections in North Carolina, except one, the 9th District. The motion passed, sending people scrambling for answers from North Carolina to Washington.
The NAACP at First Baptist Church December 18, 2018
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

By mid-December, any doubts that race played a part in the story of the 2018 election fraud scandal were erased when the NAACP and local Democrats gathered at First Baptist Church in Bladenboro for a public forum. Lennon Lacy’s mother was in attendance, and in a speech North Carolina NAACP president T. Anthony Spearman drew connections between the shoddy investigation into Lacy’s death and the apparent defrauding of Black voters in 2018. Meanwhile, less than a mile away, McCrae Dowless and white Republicans were gathered at the house of Cynthia Montgomery, Dowless’s lawyer, for a jubilant Christmas party.
Time Check 6:30 P.M. on a February Night
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

On Martin Luther King Jr. weekend in 2019, Mark Harris became ill with sepsis and nearly died, but told his family and lawyers he still wanted to participate in the state hearings surrounding his election the next month. He believed he would be vindicated. Just before the state hearing looking at the 2018 9th district election, local Bladen County Republicans invited state party executive director Dallas Woodhouse to town to update them. Woodhouse showed up late—something that infuriated powerful Republican Pat Melvin—and delivered a message that made everybody in the room mad. “The one thing we know,” Woodhouse said, “is McCrae Dowless is going to jail.” To Melvin and others in the room, the message was clear: state Republicans were selling them down the river.
The Hearing’s Opening Lies February 18, 2019
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

After months of turmoil and suspense, the North Carolina Board of Elections opened its hearing into the irregularities in the 9th Congressional District. The state’s first witness was Lisa Britt, McCrae Dowless’ stepdaughter, who had worked for him on campaigns. The night before the hearing began, Britt spent time with the board’s lead investigator, Joan Fleming, rehearsing her testimony. Fleming assured Britt that if she did as asked, her children would be okay. Their story would be that Britt was coerced into giving the December interview with Nick where she made false statements. It was good for the state; it was also not true. The first day of the hearing ended with the board calling Dowless as a witness. His lawyer, Cindy Singletary, kept him from testifying.
The Pastor’s Call for a New Election February 21, 2019
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

Mark Harris took the stand on the fourth day of the 9th Congressional District hearing. Harris arrived after a grueling overnight trip to Charlotte and back to receive IV treatment for the serious infection that had put him in the hospital just a month earlier. During his testimony, he gave an untruthful answer to a specific and pointed question from the Board of Elections’s lawyer, Josh Lawson. Harris’ lawyer called for a break and urged Harris to correct the record and call for a new election, which he did.
A Glass of Tea February 27, 2019
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

Days after the results of the 9th Congressional District race were officially vacated, McCrae Dowless was enjoying an unseasonably warm February morning when he was arrested by special agents with the NC Bureau of Investigation. Dowless and other alleged co-conspirators were charged with crimes that amounted, essentially, to election fraud. He was taken to jail in Raleigh, more than an hour away. Pat Melvin, Bladen County’s richest man, drove to Raleigh and tried to bail out Dowless with untraceable cash, but the jail didn’t take cash. So Dowless spent the night in jail. The next day, another Bladen County politico, Ray Britt, came with a check and got McCrae out of jail just minutes before he would’ve had to spend another night.
EPILOGUE
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

McCrae Dowless continued to struggle with the fallout from the 2018 election, particularly the decreased role he had in local politics. He lost his re-election to the Soil and Water Conservation Board. His nemesis, Michael Cogdell, nearly lost his re-election to the Board of Commissioners, too. A podcast from Serial Productions, a project originally launched by the popular show This American Life and now owned by the New York Times, dug into the history of the Bladen County Improvement Association, which heavily featured Cogdell and his efforts to keep a control on local politics. Amid all the turmoil churned up in the wake of the 2018 election, one thing seemed clear: politics in Bladen County had changed.
Closing the Golden Door
Authors: Pegler-Gordon Anna
Published: May 2023

The immigration station at New York’s Ellis Island opened in 1892 and remained the largest US port for immigrant entry until World War I. In popular memory, Ellis Island is typically seen as a gateway for Europeans seeking to join the “great American melting pot.” But as this fresh examination of Ellis Island’s history reveals, it was also a major site of immigrant detention and exclusion, especially for Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian travelers and maritime laborers who reached New York City from Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, and even within the United States. And from 1924 to 1954, the station functioned as a detention camp and deportation center for a range of people deemed undesirable.Anna Pegler-Gordon draws on immigrants’ oral histories and memoirs, government archives, newspapers, and other sources to reorient the history of migration and exclusion in the United States. In chronicling the circumstances of those who passed through or were detained at Ellis Island, she shows that Asian exclusion was both larger in scope and more limited in force than has been previously recognized.
Introduction
Authors: Pegler-Gordon Anna
Published: May 2023

Although Ellis Island has typically been associated with European immigration and Angel Island with Asian exclusion, Asians have long traveled to New York from points in the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, Canada, and Asia, as well as from other regions of the United States. Ellis Island was the central office for Asian exclusion in the eastern United States as well as the region’s main deportation and detention center. The importance of Ellis Island in facilitating detention and deportation challenges the Ellis Island model of immigration, which imagines Ellis Island as a welcoming place and US immigration as relatively free and racially unmarked. At the same time, the work of immigration officials in New York complicates the Angel Island model of strict exclusion. This chapter explores the ways in which exclusion was both more extensive in scope and more limited in force than previously understood. Exclusion radiated beyond the regulation of immigrants to groups such as sailors and into areas outside of immigration policy, such as Japanese internment. At the same time, exclusion was sometimes limited in its force, as explored in chapter one.
Smugglers and Stowaways
Authors: Pegler-Gordon Anna
Published: May 2023

As the largest port in the United States, New York City was the central location through which seaborne smuggling activities were directed in the eastern United States. Chinese immigrants who smuggled themselves into New York used complex multiracial and transnational networks to facilitate their journeys. As exclusion and immigration laws became increasingly strict, smuggling and stowing away became increasingly common. As with exclusion and expulsion, race operated differently for Asians smuggling themselves into the United States than for European and other groups, sometimes providing them with greater security and sometimes putting them at greater risk. Chinese, Bengali, Filipino, and Japanese sailors formed a substantial portion of the maritime workforce, offering Asians more opportunities to stow away on ships and smuggle themselves into the United States. However, if they were detected, Asians faced more stringent restrictions than laws governing European stowaways.
Conclusion
Authors: Pegler-Gordon Anna
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the 1954 closing of Ellis Island in the context of Chinese New Yorkers who were profoundly affected by the Red Scare. All immigrant radicals faced the threat of deportation, but this was particularly significant for Chinese who were more likely to be illegally in the United States, who were closely surveilled and who were suspected even if they were not radicals. Despite the end of Chinese exclusion in 1943, Chinese immigrants in New York and across the country remained particularly vulnerable to the threat of deportation. These threats fostered anxieties about Chinese people’s loyalties and place within the United States. Throughout the postwar period, deportation practices were expanded through four intersecting practices: voluntary departure procedures, parole practices, locally contracted detention centers, and the extension of inspection and deportation to airports throughout the United States. These practices dispersed immigration regulation away from traditional stations, leading to the closing of Ellis Island.
Introduction
Authors: Rector Josiah
Published: May 2023

The Introduction begins by describing an environmental health crisis in 21st century Detroit. In the decade before the COVID-19 pandemic, the city forced over 250,000 residents to live without running water, and rates of bacterial infection and child lead poisoning increased. Toxic Debt links these public health disasters to the confluence of racialized poverty in the aftermath of deindustrialization with the catastrophic impacts of deregulation, privatization, austerity, and “welfare reform” policies in the 1990s and 2000s. The introduction uses these recent disasters to introduce the central argument of Toxic Debt: that finance and real estate are no less implicated than heavy industry in environmental inequality.
The Inequality of the Burden
Authors: Rector Josiah
Published: May 2023

During the 19th century, Detroit expanded from a small, fortified colonial trading post where Euro-American settlers enslaved Indigenous and African American people to a smoky industrial city with a largely foreign-born working class. As Detroit industrialized, the gap in living and working conditions between the business elite and the middle class, dominated by native-born white Protestants, and the immigrant and Black working class widened. Increasing water and air pollution contributed to recurrent cholera and typhoid epidemics. Beginning in the 1890s, a coalition of municipal reformers, led by Mayor Hazen Pingree, sought to ameliorate the appalling filth and inequities of the Gilded Age city. Although Pingree’s reforms benefited working-class immigrants and, to a lesser extent, African Americans, conditions for many improved little in this era. Financial panics and depressions added to the ranks of the urban poor, and unsanitary shack dwellings proliferated in Detroit’s alleyways. The fiscal constraints of municipal government in an era of strict state-imposed bond debt limits and the use of street-level special assessments slowed the build-out of sanitary infrastructure. Gilded Age Detroit was a site of grand dreams for economic and environmental transformation, but also of well-organized elites who succeeded in entrenching inequality.
I Do Mind Dying
Authors: Rector Josiah
Published: May 2023

Although middle-class white suburban homeowners dominate accounts of postwar environmentalism, inner-city residents and autoworkers increasingly began to protest industrial pollution in 1965-1973. Environmental activists perceived and responded to threats to health and property that were complex and variable by social and spatial location. Middle-class women, both Black and white, protested industrial polluters who added to their burdens of home maintenance and childcare. Working-class and poor women also fought the environmental endangerment of their families, but they often battled with slumlords rather than industrial polluters. In Detroit’s male-dominated automobile factories, working-class health and safety activists demanded protection from polluted air as well as from line speed-ups and poorly maintained equipment. But because white men monopolized the skilled trades, Black men were more likely to work in jobs that robbed them of old age. Organizations such as the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) linked health and safety with an antiracist and anticapitalistic politics. While environmental concerns did not cause the rebellions that shook Detroit neighborhoods and factories between 1965 and 1973, they contributed to widespread anger and political radicalization.
Before Warren County
Authors: Rector Josiah
Published: May 2023

In May 1976, the United Auto Workers (UAW)-sponsored Working for Environmental and Economic Justice and Jobs Conference in Black Lake, Michigan helped to popularize the concept of “environmental justice” for the first time. In response to deindustrialization and rising inner-city unemployment, activists at the Black Lake conference linked demands for environmental protection to economic justice and full employment. They did so over 5 years before the anti-PCB dumping protests in Warren County, North Carolina, in 1982 that scholars frequently cite as the “origin” of the environmental justice movement. This chapter does not posit Black Lake as a rival point of origin, or downplay the catalytic role of the Warren County protests in bringing together civil rights and environmental activism. Instead, it complicates conventional origin narratives by showing that the concept of environmental justice was already circulating in activist spaces over five years before. It shows how the meaning of environmental justice changed in the 1980s in ways that we can only fully understand by examining the political and economic restructuring of this period, and the transformation of both the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt.
Living Queer History
Authors: Rosenthal Gregory Samantha
Published: May 2023

Queer history is a living practice. Talk to any group of LGBTQ people today, and they will not agree on what story should be told. Many people desire to celebrate the past by erecting plaques and painting rainbow crosswalks, but queer and trans people in the twenty-first century need more than just symbols—they need access to power, justice for marginalized people, spaces of belonging. Approaching the past through a lens of queer and trans survival and world-building transforms history itself into a tool for imagining and realizing a better future. Living Queer History tells the story of an LGBTQ community in Roanoke, Virginia, a small city on the edge of Appalachia. Interweaving historical analysis, theory, and memoir, Gregory Samantha Rosenthal tells the story of their own journey—coming out and transitioning as a transgender woman—in the midst of working on a community-based history project that documented a multigenerational southern LGBTQ community. Based on over forty interviews with LGBTQ elders, Living Queer History explores how queer people today think about the past and how history lives on in the present.
Resurrecting Lesbian Herstory in a Nonbinary World
Authors: Rosenthal Gregory Samantha
Published: May 2023

This chapter is the first of three in the book to focus on a specific demographic group within the LGBTQ community—in this case, lesbians. The narrative explores intergenerational conflict over lesbian identity and history—or ‘herstory,’ as it is sometimes called. As young queer people increasingly identify as bisexual, pansexual, trans, and nonbinary, among other identities, lesbianism must adapt and change, including the way we talk about lesbian history. The chapter explores the history of First Friday, a lesbian feminist organization based in Roanoke, Virginia in the 1980s. The women of First Friday thirty years later—in the 2010s—are also featured through an exploration of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project’s partnership with them to tell their stories. The author also focuses on her own complicated relationship to lesbian identity and history as a transgender woman who dates other women. The chapter also profiles a young woman who is active in interpreting lesbian histories within the History Project, and a genderqueer person who has a complicated relationship to the lesbian past.
Digital Queers
Authors: Rosenthal Gregory Samantha
Published: May 2023

This final chapter explores the impact of the internet on queer spaces in Southwest Virginia. The narrative includes a history of how LGBTQ people in Southwest Virginia have used the internet since 1990s to find each other and build community, including the impacts of the Internet on queer sexual practices. The author explores two key initiatives of the History Project that have sought to reground young people in their material culture, including the Roanoke LGBT Memorial Library, and the project’s Arts Initiative, which has included public art, sculpture, zines, poetry, and spoken word performances. The author begins the chapter exploring her own sexual awakening online as a teenager in the 1990s, and how the Internet shaped her discovery of queer pornography. The narrative also explores the digital divide within LGBTQ communities.
Conclusion
Authors: Rosenthal Gregory Samantha
Published: May 2023

The conclusion examines the historical contexts and settings of the work of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project in the period from 2015 to 2020. This was a time of heightened white supremacist activity and anti-LGBTQ activism in Virginia and throughout the United States, coterminous with the campaign and administration of the Trump presidency. The author jumps through several moments in her own trajectory during these years, from a celebration after the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, to a racial justice demonstration in Lexington, Virginia, followed by the riots in Charlottesville, to the author’s trip to Boca Raton, Florida to visit her grandmother and come out again to her family. In the end, the author describes a visit to an older Black gay man’s holiday party, Christmas Eve service at a gay church, and fellowship at an all-trans home, showcasing the diverse queer spaces that still exist today in Roanoke and are worth fighting for. The author positions the work of the History Project as crucial to the ongoing struggle for queer and trans belonging and survival in Southwest Virginia.
Introduction
Authors: Brooks Robin
Published: May 2023

The introduction presents the book’s core argument that contemporary African American and Caribbean women writers advocate for a reassessment of economic, social, and political practices within US and Caribbean societies while leading readers to greater class consciousness. Specifically, they use what is coined a “cross- class relationship trope” as a central way to critique class inequalities of their respective nations and class division within African American and Caribbean communities. The introduction also provides the book’s theoretical framework and methodological approach before offering a historical review of the development of class dynamics in African American and Caribbean thought and the complexity of defining class and examining issues of class. Finally, it provides an overview of the book’s organization. The book is separated into two parts: the first part focuses on African American literature and the second part concentrates on Caribbean literature, specifically on Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. Each chapter highlights class inequality or division, and the cross-class relationship trope is a connective thread throughout.
The Wrong and Right Side of the Tracks
Authors: Brooks Robin
Published: May 2023

Focusing on African American literature, the first chapter explores intraracial class antagonism by examining the portrayals of neighborhoods in Gloria Naylor’s and Dawn Turner’s novels, which serve as a backdrop for the relations between the African American characters. The chapter argues that the cross-class relationship trope exposes myths among the working and middle classes and engages the long history of housing discrimination against African Americans. The narratives participate in a dialogue about the realities and repercussions of intraracial class divisions among African Americans, and the pairing of these works allows one to see the accelerated or intensified concentration on this topic among Black women writers. Although the novels focus on intraracial class antagonism, interracial class antagonism and inequality play a role and act as a backdrop for the hostile intraracial relations.
Beyond the “Class” Room
Authors: Brooks Robin
Published: May 2023

Chapter 3 examines connections between class and education and analyzes how Merle Hodge and Olive Senior portray the difficult, precarious journey working-class characters in their fictive Caribbean societies undergo to achieve higher education and upward class mobility. The chapter explains that their novels are in conversation with Caribbean social scientists and historians who explore interconnections between educational systems and class hierarchies. It contends the novels use a cross-class relationship trope to examine ways people participate in reproducing hegemonic power relations that negatively affect their communities and to offer alternative modes that resist or take advantage of systems that perpetuate social and economic inequalities. It also argues Senior’s Dancing Lessons, published over 40 years after Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey, rewrites and continues the story of Hodge’s protagonist via the life of a main character in Senior’s novel, as these characters move from working-class family units to middle-class family units to attend school. A cross-class relationship trope is visible in the antagonistic relationships between the two family units in both works.
Bonds of War
Authors: Thomson David K.
Published: May 2023

How does one package and sell confidence in the stability of a nation riven by civil strife? This was the question that loomed before the Philadelphia financial house of Jay Cooke & Company, entrusted by the US government with an unprecedented sale of bonds to finance the Union war effort in the early days of the American Civil War. How the government and its agents marketed these bonds revealed a version of the war the public was willing to buy and buy into, based not just in the full faith and credit of the United States but also in the success of its armies and its long-term vision for open markets. From Maine to California, and in foreign halls of power and economic influence, thousands of agents were deployed to sell a clear message: Union victory was unleashing the American economy itself.
This fascinating work of financial and political history during the Civil War era shows how the marketing and sale of bonds crossed the Atlantic to Europe and beyond, helping ensure foreign countries’ vested interest in the Union’s success. Indeed, David K. Thomson demonstrates how Europe, and ultimately all corners of the globe, grew deeply interdependent on American finance during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the American Civil War.
A Thousand-Dollar Breakfast
Authors: Thomson David K.
Published: May 2023

This chapter is an in-depth overview of the early financial activities of the North through the year 1861. From a financial standpoint, the war at its outset was approached in the same way as prior American conflicts, which meant that the new Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase immediately encountered a nightmare upon his ascension to office. His efforts to coordinate with Wall Street elites and their colleagues in Boston and Philadelphia backfired completely and led to the suspension of specie payments in December 1861. Despite this setback, the financial situation in the first year of the conflict also afforded the opportunity for the little-known financier Jay Cooke to take the stage and promote the sale of state (and later federal) bonds directly to the Main Street populace.