bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A New Generation Needs a New Name
Authors: La Serna Miguel
Published: September 2021

This chapter uses the political biography of Victor Polay Campos, the future MRTA leader and onetime roommate of future Peruvian president Alan Garcia, as a lens for tracing the MRTA’s political origins. As with many founding members of the MRTA, Polay engages the politics of APRA, MIR, and the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (GRFA) of Juan Velasco Alvarado before founding the MRTA in the early 1980s.
La Cumpa
Authors: La Serna Miguel
Published: September 2021

In 1985, the MRTA steps up attacks on symbolic targets, particularly those that it associates with US imperialism. The chapter introduces Lucero Cumpa Miranda, a young militant who will go on to become the MRTA’s most recognizable woman leader. Cumpa’s early involvement as a low-level militant highlights the gendered assumptions of some MRTA men.
Capture the Flag
Authors: La Serna Miguel
Published: September 2021

When APRA candidate Alan Garcia wins the presidential election in 1985, Polay and the MRTA propose a ceasefire. The Garcia administration refuses the ceasefire as long as the group remains armed, but the MRTA refrains from targeting government officials and buildings for a year. Instead, the group continues its symbolic war, capturing the flag of independence leader Jose de San Martin and continuing to attack symbols of US imperialism. By mid-1986, Polay announces that the MRTA will reinitiate its war on the state.
Crime and Punishment
Authors: La Serna Miguel
Published: September 2021

Peter Cardenas, one of the MRTA’s Lima commanders, is arrested while attempting to leave the country. Victor Polay, Nestor Cerpa, and the remaining MRTA leaders convene the MRTA’s second congress in 1988 to outline a progressive and equitable platform. In practice, however, the group becomes more ruthless in its identification and targeting of enemies. Victor Polay is captured in Huancayo.
In the Wolf’s Mouth
Authors: La Serna Miguel
Published: September 2021

Daniel Bravo is a teenager in 1991, and he joins the Peruvian military. Some MRTA members in captivity at his military base in San Martin recognize him and turn him. He is tortured for days on end before finally escaping from the base, seeking refuge in an MRTA camp headed by Nestor Cerpa
The Stripe-Painted Dog
Authors: La Serna Miguel
Published: September 2021

Lucero Cumpa and Nestor Cerpa plan an attack on Moyobamba, the capital of San Martin. Daniel Bravo joins a column led by Tito Cruz Sanchez on the aborted attack. Esperanza Tapia escorts a wounded MRTA guerrilla from the Moyobamba attack to the hospital. A betrayal in the ranks leads to Lucero Cumpa’s arrest. Fujimori issues his Law of Repentance, leading to further desertion and betrayal among Daniel Bravo’s column. Abandoned and isolated, Bravo and his remaining comrades meet Rolly Rojas, aka The Arab.
Captivity
Authors: La Serna Miguel
Published: September 2021

Bishop Juan Luis Cipriana leads the negotiations with Nestor Cerpa and the MRTA occupiers of the Japanese ambassador’s residence; Marco Miyashiro and Luis Giampietri cope with captivity inside the residence. Two MRTA women, Herma Luz Melendez, aka La Gringa, and Luzdina Villoslada, experience abuses by the other MRTA men. Alberto Fujimori promises to resolve the hostage crisis peacefully, but Cerpa has reason to believe otherwise.
Exiles
Authors: Kerby Lauren R.
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores how white evangelicals cast themselves as outsiders from political and cultural power in the United States, despite the lingering legacy of white Christian hegemony. Their sense of alienation depends on their concomitant sense that they ought not to be outsiders at all, based on their claims about the nation’s Christian heritage. But casting themselves as exiles is a savvy political move. Americans tend to romanticize outsiders, assuming they possess a novel perspective and moral clarity that insiders lack. This chapter examines how Christian tourists in D.C. depict themselves as exiles, despite the material culture they encounter at the Washington Monument, U.S. Capitol, and other sites. Phrases such as “In God We Trust” as well as biblical inscriptions and statues of Christian leaders demonstrate continued Christian power. It also looks at how this exile role was constructed by the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition in the late twentieth century. Finally, it considers the political benefits of the exile role in a nation that reveres tradition yet cheers for underdogs. Together, the roles of founders and exiles allow white evangelicals to maximize their political power by claiming the most expedient role in a given situation.
Victims
Authors: Kerby Lauren R.
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores how white evangelicals cast themselves as victims of an anti-Christian American mainstream in order to gain a political advantage in the culture wars. Christian heritage tourists expressed their feelings of persecution at numerous sites in D.C., including the National Cathedral and Supreme Court, where they lamented the coming legalization of same-sex marriage. They also interpreted the discomfort and inconveniences of being tourists, such as security checks, as unjust treatment. Even when the presence of Christian material culture challenged their claims to marginality, tourists adapted their stories to predict the coming victimization of Christian objects alongside Christians themselves. Tourists’ stories revealed a broader pattern among white evangelicals, who have borrowed the rhetoric of marginalized groups to position themselves as victims seeking fair treatment, not political hegemony. They used this strategy to resist Barack Obama’s administration, especially in regard to healthcare, and Donald Trump deployed his own victimization narrative to court white evangelical voters. This chapter shows that white evangelicals’ claims to victimhood do not necessarily reflect reality. Rather, they allow white evangelicals to sustain their sense of alienation even when they experience victory.
Saviors
Authors: Kerby Lauren R.
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines how white evangelicals cast themselves as saviors of the United States and how Christian heritage tours offer an initiation into the battle to restore the nation’s Christian heritage. Most white evangelicals today feel that the United States has deviated from the course the founders set for it. But salvation will require sacrifice. Like the American soldiers commemorated in D.C.’s war memorials and Arlington National Cemetery, white evangelicals are called to give their own lives to save the nation from decline. Christian heritage tours ask participants to join the battle for Christian America, usually through becoming politically involved themselves and supporting efforts to promote Christianity in the American public square. They are told they may face ridicule, persecution, or even death for their troubles, but that the fate of the nation and the world hang in the balance. The jeremiad initiated by the Christian Right culminates in this call to action, and this narrative provides the foundations of Christian nationalism.
Prologue
Authors: Coleman Billy
Published: September 2021

This prologue surveys the key political challenges, debates, and ideologies that animated American political life following the creation of the United States. It also gestures to the emerging political purposes of music within this context. It distinguishes Federalists from Republicans, explains their conflicting visions, and overviews the logic Federalists used to justify their desire for social control and their insistence on social order and hierarchy as preconditions for freedom and liberty. The prologue similarly outlines the social context of early American music, especially its connections to religion, morality, science, and European standards of excellence. Finally, it highlights music’s perceived capacity to help define the terms of a new, uniquely American national identity.
Musical Organizations and the Politics of American Civil Society
Authors: Coleman Billy
Published: September 2021

This chapter follows the influence of elite ideas about the role of music into the realm of early musical organizations and societies. Through a focus on the founding of two of the most influential early American musical organizations–the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia and the Boston Academy of Music–the chapter, more than simply highlighting the scale and variety of early American civic society, argues that these organizations consciously sought to influence the relationship between civil society and the state by promoting a highly hierarchical vision of society–one in which the nation’s success depended on respect for authority, subordination to an educated elite, and a willingness of the majority to accept their place in the greater chorus of the nation.
The Sex of Revelation
Authors: Knight Michael Muhammad
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines the salience of Muhammad’s body to constructions of bodies and masculinity in the hadith corpus, discussing ways that gender informs access to the prophetic body—and the gendered prophetic body, in turn, accesses figures popularly presumed to be genderless and/or incorporeal, namely angels and God.
Conclusions
Authors: Knight Michael Muhammad
Published: September 2021

This concluding chapter reexamines the arguments of preceding chapters and the key themes of the book, returning to the instability and heterogeneity of hadith reports as they depict Muhammad’s bodily powers and limits.
The Prescription for the Dream
Authors: Lin Tony Tian-Ren
Published: September 2021

This chapter focuses on the formula that Prosperity Gospel teaches its adherents to obey in order to obtain prosperity and success. This chapter shows how average Prosperity Gospel believers negotiate the demands of their faith as immigrants in daily life. The paradox is sometimes puzzling to outside observers: Why is it that people who are promised wealth but never receive it become more ardent believers instead of turning away from this faith? The answers to these questions are discovered through the logic that church members are taught in these churches; they justify and legitimize their lives through the doctrines of Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism.
Changed by the Dream
Authors: Lin Tony Tian-Ren
Published: September 2021

Devotion to Prosperity Gospel beliefs and practices assists these Latino immigrants in pursuing the American Dream and helps them adjust to life in America. This chapter highlights the challenges to assimilation for non-white immigrants and explain how these immigrants are engaging in a new form of assimilation. Like European immigrants from previous generations, these Latin American immigrants are planting roots in America and working hard to succeed in this country. But unlike previous immigrants, they are not completely leaving their old land behind to start anew. In a globalized world where international communication is uninterrupted and the transport of goods is simple, immigrants do not have to leave their home countries behind.
Step It Up and Go
Authors: Menconi David
Published: September 2021

In its 1930s prime, Durham was as important a blues hub as any city in America thanks to Blind Boy Fuller, Rev. Gary Davis, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee and others, most of whom made their living busking in and around the city’s tobacco warehouses. It was a scene centered around houseparties and street corners, not remembered well today but very influential on the 1960s rock generation. Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Grateful Dead and Peter, Paul & Mary are just some of the acts to cover their songs. Local merchant J.B. Long played a key role, recording Blind Boy Fuller extensively.
From Gospel to Rhythm and Blues
Authors: Menconi David
Published: September 2021

Ray Charles gets credit for turning gospel into soul music in the early 1950s, but Winston-Salem’s “5” Royales beat him to the top of the R&B charts by a couple of years. The Royales were a key transitional act in soul’s evolution, with a particular gift for bawdiness. They also contributed a number of oft-covered standards, most notably “Dedicated to the One I Love.” Steve Cropper of the legendary Memphis soul combo Booker T & the MG’s has admitted that Royales guitarist Lowman Pauling was his biggest influence.
The American Folk Revival Comes to North Carolina
Authors: Menconi David
Published: September 2021

During the big folk revival, one of the acts to emerge was blind guitarist Arthel “Doc” Watson. He became a legendary and much-beloved figure on the folk circuit, with a highly influential style of flat-picking, even though he himself always claimed to be nothing special. Gone since 2012, Watson’s influence lives on through MerleFest, the annual music festival in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, that he started in the 1980s to honor his late son and accompanist Merle Watson.
Breaking Color Lines at the Beach
Authors: Menconi David
Published: September 2021

In the decades after World War II, a subculture of beach music emerged in segregated, Jim Crw coastal resort towns in North and South Carolina, when vacationing white kids would sneak across the tracks to the nightclubs in the “colored” parts of town to listen to R&B songs from jukeboxes and deejays. A style of dance called “shagging” emerged to go with it, and those kids took it off to college, where a generation of R&B bands including The Drifters, The Coasters, “5” Royales and many others played the campus frat-house circuit. When those white kids started forming bands, too, The Embers emerged as the greatest of the latterday beach bands.
Chapel Hill
Authors: Menconi David
Published: September 2021

During the 1990s, record companies were looking for the next big alternative rock breakout and focused a lot of attention on Chapel Hill, where bands like Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, and Polvo resided. Two Chapel Hill bands would hit it big, but they were the last two anyone would have expected -- the hot-jazz band Squirrel Nut Zippers and piano-pop trio Ben Folds Five.
Y’alternative
Authors: Menconi David
Published: September 2021

In the shadow of alternative rock, another generation went back to country music with a punk edge. In the 1990s it was called alternative country, and North Carolina had the highest and best concentration of such bands in America -- from old-timers like Red Clay Ramblers and Southern Culture on the Skids to newcomers like Backsliders and 6 String Drag. That has persisted into the present-day Americana age with bands including Hiss Golden Messenger, American Aquarium and Mandolin Orange.
Salvation Songs
Authors: Menconi David
Published: September 2021

Another group of one-time North Carolina punks playing quieter is Avett Brothers, the Concord duo of Seth and Scott Avett. They’ve worked incredibly hard, touring the world and headlining festivals while growing more mature, stately, and majestic as a recording act with producer Rick Rubin. And they still live and work at home, in the Concord area.
If We Are Not Citizens, Then What Are We?
Authors: Taylor Brian
Published: September 2021

This chapter reviews the history of black military service in previous American wars, an analysis of which black Northerners relied on when they thought that about how to respond to the opportunity to serve in the Civil War. This chapter coves black activists’ antebellum rhetorical use of black service, black Northerners’ goal of bringing lived reality in the United States in line with the founding US ideal of equality, the history of black citizenship prior to the Civil War, and antebellum African Americans’ ideas about what, if any, duty black men possessed to fight for the United States in the event of war. This chapter also covers the expansion of slavery, the growth of the Northern black community, and the coming of the Civil War.
Making Black Service Matter
Authors: Taylor Brian
Published: September 2021

This chapter deals with black activists’ post-war campaign to convince federal officials to encode black citizenship and political rights in law. Black military service during the Civil War served as a linchpin in African Americans’ post-war arguments for black rights and citizenship. This chapter explains the dynamics of the Reconstruction period that led Congressional Republicans to pass the 14th and 15th Amendments. This chapter also covers the downfall of Reconstruction and the process by which, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, white Americans undermined the rights and citizenship that African Americans possessed in theory.
The Optics of Liberian Emigration
Authors: Gonzalez Aston
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores the life and work of Augustus Washington, the free African American photographer, who envisioned more rights and freedoms than those available in the United States. Anticipating a future in the United States bound by racial restraints, he packed up his successful photography studio in Hartford, Connecticut, and emigrated to Monrovia, Liberia. Washington worked closely with the American Colonization Society to convince black Americans to leave their homeland for Liberia and attempted to provoke viewers of his images to envision the potential of black rights in the United States that he enjoyed in Liberia. Washington’s images promulgating black Liberian political leadership and economic promise abroad offered a vision of freedom that belied a hierarchical, and often oppressive, Liberian society. In the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, his images brought into focus the debates among African Americans about the uncertain, and perhaps imperiled, future of black people in the United States.
Freedom and Citizenship
Authors: Gonzalez Aston
Published: September 2021

The sixth chapter analyzes the technological revolutions that influenced representations of black people during the Civil War. Illustrated periodicals visually cataloged the war and depicted the trauma and uncertainties experienced by African Americans. At the same time, black photographers advanced their own views and ideas about the possibilities of emancipation, citizenship, and African American military service. Their images ran counter to racial stereotypes that dominated the visual landscape at the start of the Civil War. The production of these views coincided with numerous black leaders planning a national exhibition of African American art and industry. They proposed an unprecedented display of black artistic and mechanical production to convince people of all races of black intellect and to improve race relations. The exigencies and opportunities seized by fugitive slaves and enlisting black men created by the Civil War appeared in the visual production of African American activists.
Epilogue
Authors: Gonzalez Aston
Published: September 2021

The epilogue shows how the democratization of photography allowed black people to produce images of themselves and their communities when a massive wave of racial caricatures flooded homes in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Visual technologies of the nineteenth century vastly expanded access to cameras which enabled more people to record African American communities and challenge racist ideas. W. E. B. Du Bois exhibited hundreds of photographs taken by Thomas Askew, the African photographer, at the Paris Exposition of 1900. These scenes of black life in Georgia conveyed the power of the ordinary and Du Bois himself wrote that they challenged “conventional American ideas” of black people.
A Long Dreadful Day
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: September 2021

The Union attack on May 19 was not well planned, and it was based on poor intelligence of the Confederate defences and the opposing troops. But Grant wanted to make the effort, banking on the emotional impact of his overland campaign on Confederate morale. It was a logical hope and if successful would have delivered Vicksburg into Federal hands without the time and investment of resources and loss of life incurred by a lengthy siege of the city. But his hopes for a general attack fell through. The only serious attack that went in as scheduled at 2 p.m. was that conducted by Frank P. Blair’s division of William T. Sherman’s Fifteenth Corps, on the Union right. Blair attacked the strongest segment of the Confederate line of earthworks, the areas around Stockade Redan and the 27th Louisiana Lunette at the northeastern corner of Lockett’s line. Blair’s men were repulsed with substantial losses.
This Will Be a Hard Place to Take
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: September 2021

Ulysses S. Grant spent nearly two days evaluating the results of the May 19 attack in order to decide whether to try another assault or initiate siege operations. Meanwhile the Federals concentrated on consolidating their position outside Vicksburg on May 20-21, especially firming up their supply line by way of the Mississippi River. Realizing that the May 19 attack had not been a true test of whether the army could break into Vicksburg, Grant decided to try one more time. He issued orders on May 21 for a general attack the next day at 10 a.m. He was largely supported in this decision by William T. Sherman who thought it had a real chance of succeeding. Grant worried about the presence of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston at Jackson, Mississippi, forty-five miles east of Vicksburg. He knew that Johnston was assembling troops to save Vicksburg and a quick entry into the city would neutralize that threat. Grant also thought his troops would be reluctant to begin a siege unless they had one more chance to attack. In this, however, he was mistaken, for many Federal soldiers received the news of the pending attack with dread.
Now, Boys, You Must Do Your Duty
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: September 2021

On the Seventeenth Corps sector the main effort was launched by John A. Logan’s division along the Jackson Road. John E. Smith’s brigade advanced in column formation and struck the 3rd Louisiana Redan. It deployed into line before reaching the redan and all of its regiments managed to lodge at the foot of the parapet. They found it impossible to scale the slope, however, and remained there for the rest of the day. John D. Stevenson’s brigade, to the south of Smith, advanced out of a protective ravine toward the Great Redoubt. Some regiments made it to the foot of the slope but could not enter the work while others, especially the 81st Illinois, got stuck part way to the fort and suffered heavy losses. Thomas Ransom’s brigade of John McArthur’s division, north of Logan, spent the morning and the early afternoon making contact with the rest of Blair’s division to the north so the combined force might launch a coordinated attack. Meanwhile, James B. McPherson’s other division, commanded by Isaac F. Quinby, advanced to the south of Logan to demonstrate against the Confederates but did not launch an attack.
Boys, You Have Just Fifteen Minutes to Live
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: September 2021

Troops from two Thirteenth Corps divisions, Eugene A. Carr’s and Andrew J. Smith’s, attacked along Baldwin’s Ferry Road toward 2nd Texas Lunette. Two brigades advanced through a ravine and emerged onto the roadbed 150 yards from the lunette where the troops received heavy fire. The leading unit, William P. Benton’s brigade, broke apart under the pressure and fragmented, some pieces moving toward the Confederate line south of the lunette and other pieces moving farther south to join other Union formations. The second unit, Stephen G. Burbridge’s brigade, managed to maintain cohesion and advanced to the north side of the lunette. While most of Burbridge’s men managed to lodge close to the ditch fronting the work, only a part of Benton’s went that far and no one was able to scale the parapet or enter the Confederate defences. The 2nd Texas, which held the lunette, was barely able to hold on, pummelled by heavy Union artillery fire. The cotton bales lining the interior of the parapet caught fire and a Union gun was daringly dragged within a few yards of the lunette and fired through an embrasure. Nevertheless, stalemate reigned for the rest of the day along Baldwin’s Ferry Road.
It Made the Tears Come to My Eyes
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: September 2021

Frederick Steele’s Fifteenth Corps division was ready to participate in the renewal of Union assaults that afternoon. All morning it had spent hours moving to an advantageous position from which to attack, losing men in the process, until massing opposite the 26th Louisiana Redoubt. Regiments from Charles R. Woods’ brigade and John M. Thayer’s brigade advanced up the very steep side of Fort Hill Ridge, protected part way up by the profile of the slope. But when they reached near the top they were exposed to heavy short range fire from the redoubt. The attack came to a bloody halt as the Federals lay flat on the open ground for cover until nightfall gave them a chance to retire. Again, the only thing this assault proved was the difficulty inherent in attacking strong sections of the Confederate line when the defender was waiting for the Federals. Throughout Steele’s ranks and among Blair’s men, these afternoon attacks were bitterly resented by the survivors as an unnecessary waste of valuable lives.
Boys, Don’t Charge Those Works
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: September 2021

Grant’s order to resume attacks failed to spur McPherson into vigorous action. John A. Logan’s division of the Seventeenth Corps already held exposed positions near 3rd Louisiana Redan and the Great Redoubt. Ransom’s brigade had already advanced with Blair’s two brigades north of 3rd Louisiana Redan. The only other formation available to McPherson was Isaac Quinby’s reserve division. Grant ordered it to move to McClernand’s sector and help the Thirteenth Corps. Quinby arrived at 5 p. m. but McClernand separated his three brigades. John B. Sanborn’s brigade advanced on 2nd Texas Lunette but Stephen G. Burbridge assumed Sanborn was to replace his tired men and retired without orders as soon as Sanborn’s men arrived. Sanborn was unable to go any farther than had Burbridge and retired when the Confederates mounted a counterattack. George B. Boomer’s brigade advanced between 2nd Texas Lunette and Railroad Redoubt but stopped part way due to heavy fire that killed Boomer. Samuel A. Holmes’ brigade marched to the sector held by Peter J. Osterhaus’ division but Osterhaus failed to make any use of it. In short, Quinby wasted his strength in piecemeal and poorly planned actions and the fault mostly lay with McClernand.
An Ardent Desire to Participate in the Capture of Vicksburg
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: September 2021

The Mississippi Squadron, under David D. Porter, played an important supporting role in the Vicksburg operations conducted by Grant. The war ships protected the civilian steamers that funnelled supplies and reinforcements to the Army of the Tennessee, enabling Grant to maintain his position. Porter also bombarded the Confederate river batteries along the east side of the Mississippi north and south of Vicksburg to support the attack of May 22, and his mortar boats bombarded Vicksburg itself during this time. The bombing of the city produced civilian casualties as well as wrecked private houses and buildings used by the Confederate army. Porter also supported a brigade from John McArthur’s Seventeenth Corps division which advanced along the east bank of the Mississippi toward South Fort, a Confederate earthwork anchoring the southern end of Samuel H. Lockett’s defence line. That brigade, however, was ordered east to help McClernand before it could launch an attack on South Fort. The Federals literally had Vicksburg surrounded with warships in the Mississippi north and south of the city and Union infantry occupying De Soto Point west of town. Grant had the option to starve Pemberton out of the city now that storming the defences had played out.
I Feel Sad but Not Discouraged
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: September 2021

The Federals concluded from the attack of May 22 that it had been a mistake. They were more than ready to accept the time and labor involved in conducting siege approaches. Some of them were bitter over what they considered the useless sacrifice of life but few of Grant’s men were despondent. They knew they could take Vicksburg by siege and retained their respect for and confidence in Grant. Few blamed him for the losses of May 22. For the Confederates, the successful defence of Vicksburg on May 19 and 22 greatly repaired their shattered morale. They felt capable of withstanding a siege long enough to allow Joseph E. Johnston to assemble a relief force and rescue them. Reports of the repulse spread rapidly, with exaggerated estimates of Federal losses filtering through the Confederacy. In the North, exaggerated reports of success in the attacks were succeeded by more sober and realistic reports of their repulse. Grant’s troubled relationship with Thirteenth Corps commander John A. McClernand suffered irreparable harm because of the latter’s unreliable report of success on May 22, which led Grant to authorize further attacks. It would not be long before Grant acted to remove McClernand from the army.
Limits at Sea
Authors: Crawford Sharika D.
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines disputes over the turtle fishery across several circum-Caribbean locales: the southern cays of Cuba, the Miskito Cays of Nicaragua, and the Colombian archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina. It shows how these conflicts over Caymanian access to turtle fishing grounds in national waters reveal the messy multilateral process of maritime boundary making, in which contestations among multiple national and imperial state actors as well as foreign and local turtlemen helped to consolidate a once porous but contested space in the circum-Caribbean. The chapter argues that legislation to regulate the turtle fishery eventually led to the closing of the turtle commons, which had been a robust transnational maritime zone.
Conclusion
Authors: Crawford Sharika D.
Published: September 2021

This chapter discusses what is learned from a maritime perspective of the Caribbean and explore how a study of the Caymanian turtle fishery informs our understanding of contemporary boundary disputes. It also notes the consequences of sea turtle conservationism in the western Caribbean. In doing so, the chapter insists that undergirding stories about mariners on small islands in peripheral parts of the world have much to tell us about modern-day concerns related to border control systems, migration, and environmental conservationism.
Blues Feelings and “Real Bluesmen”
Authors: Gussow Adam
Published: September 2021

This chapter seeks to do two different things: deconstruct the concept of the “bluesman” as a trope of blues authenticity and, on the other hand, explore the surprisingly variegated group of emotions—blues feelings—that generate, and are represented lyrically by, blues songs. It must be remembered that pre-war southern blues players like Robert Johnson were essentially songsters, human jukeboxes, whose ability to evade a life of badly-recompensed cotton sharecropping depended on their ability to perform a far wider range of material, for both whites and blacks, than the cliches “deep,” “dark,” “tortured,” and “primitive” allow for. Black record buyers, according to scholar Elijah Wald, were attracted to blues not by the race-based grief it sounded, but by its “up to date power and promise.” While agreeing with elements of Wald’s revisionism, this chapter argues that race-based grief, powerfully evoked by B. B. King’s memories of how stricken he was at the witnessed aftermath of a lynching, is retained in the music as an evocative “cry” that moves audiences. A fuller appreciation of the music comes when we find a way of synthesizing these two perspectives, both of which emerge out of a sustained struggle against white racist domination.
Blues Expressiveness and the Blues Ethos
Authors: Gussow Adam
Published: September 2021

The preceding two chapters investigate blues conditions and blues feelings, the first two elements of a four-part schema elaborated by the author as an aid to classroom instruction. This chapter explores the third and fourth elements, blues expressiveness and the blues ethos. Blues expressiveness includes the AAB stanzaic structure employed by blues singers and adapted by blues poets; call-and-response or antiphony, the staging of a musical (or romantic or ideological) dialogue; vocalizations, the “making it talk” element of blues instrumental performance; blues idiomatic language, the rich linguistic stew in which members of the blues subculture conduct their daily lives, on and off the bandstand; and signifying, often with sexual overtones, which consists of saying one thing but strongly implying another. The blues ethos—an attitudinal orientation towards experience, a sustaining philosophy of life—expresses itself in a range of ways, including a stoic determination to persist in the face of disaster; a readiness to improvise one’s way out of trouble, and a kind of dark, rough comedy described by Kalamu ya Salaam as “[a] combination of exaggeration and conscious recognition of the brutal facts of life.”
W. C. Handy and the “Birth” of the Blues
Authors: Gussow Adam
Published: September 2021

Where do the blues come from, when do they come into being, and why has the metaphor of blues “birth” proved so irresistible over the years to music historians, tourism boosters, and others who traffic in the blues? This chapter offers some answers, beginning with a survey of revisionist scholarship that sources early blues music in a range of places other than the Mississippi Delta. Sheet music, much of it composed by white songwriters, is a part of the story; so is early black vaudeville, epitomized the unrecorded and forgotten star, Butler “String Beans” May.” W. C. Handy, as songwriter, autobiographer, and foundational mythmaker of the blues, is another key figure. By finding a sheet music analogue for the tensed major-minor tonality of Black southern blues singing, he introduced that bittersweet and compelling sound into American popular music through his best-known composition, “St. Louis Blues.” He also crafted a myth, with the help of two episodes in Father of the Blues (1941), through which the Mississippi Delta becomes the primal scene of blues music’s national emergence and the Black male musicians who make “weird” music there become the carriers of the tradition that Handy will later popularize and profit from.
Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and the Southern Blues Violences
Authors: Gussow Adam
Published: September 2021

One of the most frequently quoted descriptions of the blues--“an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically”--was penned by Ralph Ellison in a 1945 review essay of Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy. This chapter uses Ellison’s formulation as an opening through which to explore the way in which three distinct but related modes of southern violence play significant roles in the major works of both authors. Disciplinary violence, including lynching, vagrancy laws, and prison farms, is white-on-black violence that aims to terrorize, immobilize, and punish. Retributive violence is black-on-white violence that resists or strikes back at disciplinary violence. Intimate violence is black-on-black violence driven by jealousy, hatred, and other strong passions. All three forms of violence show up in the blues tradition—and in Black Boy, where they help Wright craft a portrait of a blues-surcharged young Mississippian who, although bereft of the tools and training needed to express those blues musically, will ultimately find in literature, where words can be “weapons,” the outlet he so desperately needs. In Invisible Man and other texts, by contrast, Ellison employs the southern violences in ways that often heighten the comic element within blues’ tragicomic palette of emotions.
Giving It All Away: Blues Harmonica Education in the Digital Age
Authors: Gussow Adam
Published: September 2021

In 2007, the author uploaded his first video to YouTube, a badly-lit and amateurish blues harmonica tutorial. Within a decade, his Dirty-South Blues Harp Channel had accumulated 500 videos, 20 million views, and 70,000 subscribers, and his website, ModernBluesHarmonica.com was enjoying 750,000 annual page views from 192 countries around the world. This chapter seeks to understand the way in which insurgent digital technologies have impacted the pedagogy of blues harmonica, a coterie pursuit whose trade secrets and professional practices had previously been communicated through face-to-face teaching between masters and apprentices. Acknowledging the ethical dilemmas provoked by a white blues musician who makes the harmonica’s esoteric technique available to a global audience, the author also describes the way YouTube’s “comments” section brought him together with Brandon Bailey, a young Black harmonica player from Memphis. The mentoring relationship they formed helped Bailey win a “Star Search” competition and benefited both men’s careers in unanticipated ways, suggesting that contemporary blues culture, although troubled, is also, if unevenly, a transracial brotherhood—an “inescapable network of mutuality,” in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words.
Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis
Authors: Eichler-Levine Jodi
Published: September 2021

Exploring a contemporary Judaism rich with the textures of family, memory, and fellowship, Jodi Eichler-Levine takes readers inside a flourishing American Jewish crafting movement. As she travelled across the country to homes, craft conventions, synagogue knitting circles, and craftivist actions, she joined in the making, asked questions, and contemplated her own family stories. Jewish Americans, many of them women, are creating ritual challah covers and prayer shawls, ink, clay, or wood pieces, and other articles for family, friends, or Jewish charities. But they are doing much more: armed with perhaps only a needle and thread, they are reckoning with Jewish identity in a fragile and dangerous world.
The work of these crafters embodies a vital Judaism that may lie outside traditional notions of Jewishness, but, Eichler-Levine argues, these crafters are as much engaged as any Jews in honoring and nurturing the fortitude, memory, and community of the Jewish people. Craftmaking is nothing less than an act of generative resilience that fosters survival. Whether taking place in such groups as the Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework or the Jewish Hearts for Pittsburgh, or in a home studio, these everyday acts of creativity—yielding a needlepoint rabbi, say, or a handkerchief embroidered with the Hebrew words tikkun olam—are a crucial part what makes a religious life.
Prologue
Authors: Eichler-Levine Jodi
Published: September 2021

The prologue explores the author’s personal connection with crafting through the heirlooms her own Jewish American family has passed down in the twentieth century, including a matzah cover and a wedding canopy. Using her grandmother’s kitschy mid-twentieth century needlepoint of a rabbi as a starting point, it lays out emotional resonance carried by tactility. Tactile memory is a central part of American Judaism.
Introduction
Authors: Eichler-Levine Jodi
Published: September 2021

At the 2017 convention of the Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework, dozens of Jewish women joined together in Atlanta, Georgia to hone their skills and build friendships. The book’s introduction begins there, then introduces readers to expansive definitions of Jews, Judaism, and religion, as well as the study’s ethnographic methodology. Crafting a “Judaism of feeling,” Jewish creators help readers to see a Judaism that is in process, not fixed.
Bezalel’s Heirs
Authors: Eichler-Levine Jodi
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores the dynamics of crafting communities among Jewish American women, with a particular focus on the Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework—a North American organization founded in 1977. For the women of the Pomegranate Guild and other people in the study, the power of making things takes on extra meaning when it is done in groups, so much so that one participant called stitching together “magic.” The chapter also includes a study of a Pennsylvania synagogue knitting circle, and comparisons with Christian crafting groups such as the Prayer Shawl Ministry.
Generating the Generations
Authors: Eichler-Levine Jodi
Published: September 2021

This chapter focuses on the idea of memory in order to understand how Jewish crafters generate memory through their creations. It studies the role of Holocaust memory in crafting, the use of heirloom fabrics in making family treasures, and the complex ways the ethnographer herself became enmeshed in networks of memory. The author also analyses Louise Silk’s work on memory quilts and attends to the way fabric “holds” memory. Ultimately, the members of the Pomegranate Guild and other interviewees seek ways of maintaining Jewish legacies not only in words, but also in thread.
The God Part of Him
Authors: Hilde Libra R.
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores the considerable, often insurmountable, constraints slavery placed on family and fatherhood, including sexual exploitation, forced pairing, breeding, and separation. Despite their adaptations, including abroad marriages and multilocal kin networks, enslaved people faced encumbered parenting regardless of their household arrangements. Although the emasculation of slavery imposed perverse dilemmas, enslaved men endeavored to act as caretakers and retained a sense of self, humanity, and manhood through love of family, religious faith, and their own definition of honor.
I Liked My Papa the Best
Authors: Hilde Libra R.
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines how enslaved men managed to influence their children despite the structural constraints of slavery, with a focus on former slaves’ commentaries on their fathers and the traits they appreciated and criticized. Because masters failed to uphold slave communities’ vision of honorable manhood, formerly enslaved people compared negligent and abusive black fathers to slaveholders, underscoring their rejection of paternalism. An examination of slave narratives produced in different times and under different circumstances reveals a robust and enduring vision of paternal duty and the ways that enslaved fathers often shaped the identity-formation of their children, even in cases of limited contact and forced separation. Enslaved fathers faced brutal conditions and agonizing choices and yet many valiantly tried to implement their understanding of paternal duty and honor.
Good to Us Chillun
Authors: Hilde Libra R.
Published: September 2021

This chapter focuses on ex-slaves’ positive and negative assessments of their free fathers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. African American communities celebrated caretaking fathers who invested emotionally, provided materially, and made it possible for their children to gain an education. They criticized neglectful, abusive men. The records of formerly enslaved people speak to the importance of caretaking and an ideal of paternal duty that prioritized moral masculinity and selfless, family-centered leadership. Freedmen’s efforts to parent in the post-Civil War period have remained largely invisible. Because successful Black men became targets of violence, few openly displayed their caretaking.
Epilogue
Authors: Hilde Libra R.
Published: September 2021

As Americans grapple with the most recent spate of deaths of African American men and women at the hands of the police, we are once again confronting damaging stereotypes about the Black family and Black masculinity rooted in the legacy of slavery. This book explores the masculine hierarchy of slavery that continues to influence current attitudes and shape public policy. Even as the world has changed, attitudes about human hierarchies have remained deeply entrenched. By telling the story of the often quietly heroic efforts that enslaved and free men undertook to be fathers, this book offers a counterpoint to the dominant narratives about the pathology of the African American family and absent Black fathers.
We’ve Been Doing This for a Few Thousand Years
Authors: Royles Dan
Published: September 2021

From the beginning of the epidemic, African American AIDS activists had to contend with a variety of conspiracy theories, including the idea that AIDS had been created by the government to kill Black people. Sometimes AIDS activists themselves propagated these stories. Such was the case with the Nation of Islam (NOI), which in the early 1990s became involved in the fight over Kemron, a treatment for AIDS allegedly discovered by researchers in Kenya. NOI leaders organized trips to Kenya for African Americans with AIDS so that they could be treated with the drug, and later advocated for a National Institutes of Health-backed clinical trial to prove the drug’s effectiveness. Leaders sent emissaries around the country to speak to local Black community groups about the drug, arguing that, because of its African origins, Kemron would be uniquely suited to treating AIDS among people of African descent. The NOI did finally win approval for a trial in 1992, but the point became largely moot the following year, when the results of another large-scale study found Kemron to be totally ineffective. Nevertheless, the Kemron story sheds light on the complex dynamics within Black communities that have shaped their response to AIDS.
Conclusion
Authors: Royles Dan
Published: September 2021

This chapter considers what it means to write the history of a crisis that has not yet ended, and briefly traces connections among the stories told in previous chapters. It connects these stories to the ongoing fight for health equity in the United States, including the author’s involvement in the fight to preserve the Affordable Care Act in the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency. Finally, it compares HIV/AIDS to climate change, as both are existential crises that will disproportionately affect poor communities of color.
Introduction
Authors: Finley Alexandra J.
Published: September 2021

This chapter presents an overview of the book and defines three key concepts: domestic labor, socially reproductive labor, and the sexual economy of slavery. The introduction also provides background information on antebellum slavery in the United States and the antebellum slave trade. Finally, it includes a brief historiography of the place of women's socially reproductive labor in economic thought.
Fancy
Authors: Finley Alexandra J.
Published: September 2021

Chapter 1 tells the history of Corinna Hinton, an enslaved woman who had children with the man who enslaved her, slave trader Silas Omohundro, in Richmond, Virginia, to consider the lives of women caught in the so-called fancy trade, or the sale of enslaved women for sex. Omohundro paid Hinton for clothing the enslaved people he jailed; Hinton also ran the boarding house connected to his slave jail, cooking, sewing, doing laundry, and running errands for boarders. Hinton's experiences highlight the many forms that women's socially reproductive labor could take under capitalism: enslaved and free, waged and unwaged. The chapter draws primarily on financial records to uncover Hinton's life, highlighting the ways in which the archive limits the stories historians can and cannot write about the past.
Concubine
Authors: Finley Alexandra J.
Published: September 2021

This chapter tells the history of Sarah Conner, an enslaved woman sold through the domestic slave trade from Virginia to New Orleans, Louisiana. Conner used money earned through socially reproductive labor to purchase her freedom. Her emancipation was complicated, however, by the man with whom she lived and who legally enslaved her, Theophilus Freeman. Freeman failed to properly register Conner's freedom with the city courts. When Freeman filed for bankruptcy, his creditors attempted to claim Conner's body for payment of his debts, illustrating the ways in which women of African descent, enslaved and free, could be trapped within the sexual economy of slavery. Chapter three also considers the experiences of enslaved concubines more broadly, challenging a sharp divide between accommodation and resistance in their actions and focusing instead on the impossible position in which they found themselves.