bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Indigenous Homelands and American Homesteads
Authors: Witgen Michael John
Published: December 2024

Exchange—ritualized gift giving, trade, and intermarriage—bound together the Assiniboine, the Cree, and the Ojibweg as allies since the late seventeenth century. Their alliance proved critical to the development of French, English, and, later, American and Canadian trading operations that relied on commerce with the peoples of the Northwest interior. The story of captive adoptee Zhaazhaawanibiisens (born John Tanner) provides a provocative look at how this Indigenous social world was transformed in the wake of settler colonialism. As his story highlights, creating treaty conditions that would terminate Indigenous custom was as much a moral issue as it was a matter of national security for the U.S. Republic. The Treaty of Saginaw represented the emergence of a political economy of plunder that would come to define American expansion in the Old Northwest. With the extinction of Native title, vast tracts of Indigenous lands were transferred into public domain, creating a market monopoly in western land for the federal government and subsidizing the expansion of white property ownership in the form of homesteads. In this new political landscape, the status of mixed-race peoples and captive adoptees became precarious.
In Pursuit of Health Equity
Authors: Carter Eric D.
Published: December 2024

Throughout Latin America, social medicine has been widely recognized for its critical perspectives on mainstream understandings of health and for its progressive policy achievements. Nevertheless, it has been an elusive subject: hard to define, with puzzling historical discontinuities and misconceptions about its origins. Drawing on a vast archive and with an ambitious narrative scope that transcends national borders, Eric D. Carter offers the first comprehensive intellectual and political history of the social medicine movement in Latin America, from the early twentieth century to the present day. While maintaining a consistent focus on health equity, social medicine has evolved with changing conditions in the region. Carter shows how it shaped early Latin American welfare states, declined with the dominance of midcentury technocratic health planning, resurged in the 1970s in solidarity against authoritarian regimes, and later resisted neoliberal reforms of the health sector. He centers socialist and anarchist doctors, political exiles, intellectuals, populist leaders, and rebellious technocrats from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and other countries who responded to and shaped a dynamic political environment around health equity. The lessons from this history will inform new thinking about how to achieve health equity in the twenty-first century.
Networks
Authors: Carter Eric D.
Published: December 2024

This chapter examines the international networks that influenced ideas and policy in social medicine in the 1930s and 1940s in Latin America, focusing on institutional networks organized by the League of Nations Health Organization, the International Labor Organization, and the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau. After examining the architecture of these networks, this chapter traces their influence on social and health policy in Latin America. Closer scrutiny of a series of international conferences and local media accounts of them reveals that international networks were not just “conveyor belts” for policy ideas from the industrialized countries of the US and Europe into Latin America; rather, there was often contentious debate over the relevance and appropriateness of health and social policy models in the Latin American context. The chapter also examines the role of a small group of Latin American socialists, who were mostly peripheral to the episteme of international health but would influence social medicine in the 1930s and even more so in the long run.
Politics
Authors: Carter Eric D.
Published: December 2024

This chapter reexamines the conventional narrative of Chilean social medicine by moving Salvador Allende out of the spotlight, highlighting the institutional structures developed ahead of his involvement, including an obligatory state-run social insurance system; discussing other key figures, include Allende’s (usual) allies in the AMECH (the Chilean Medical Association) as well as his influential rival, Eduardo Cruz-Coke, whose social medicine thought drew on Catholic social doctrine, not socialism; and presenting social medicine as a relatively open domain that encompassed varied analytics of the political, economic, and social causes of health crisis, while entertaining a world of alternative models for constructing a strong welfare state that would protect public health via the management of technical and scientific experts. Amidst ideological conflicts, comity was maintained through practices of professional deference and mutual respect, well-developed social networks, and recognition of shared class interests. Social medicine was a fluid field of policy experiment, where participants drew inspiration from a hodgepodge of internationally available health policy options and worked to adapt them to their subjective impressions of Chilean realities.
Conclusion
Authors: Carter Eric D.
Published: December 2024

Returning to major themes of the book, chapter begins with an in-depth discussion of two questions raised in the book’s introduction, regarding the role of expert networks and the question of political will. Then, it offers some key conclusions about the history of Latin American social medicine that emerge from the book’s narrative, which covers several decades across a large region with diverse national experiences. Shortcomings of the analysis and opportunities for further research are also discussed.
Making Ka’a South American, 1520s–1810s
Authors: Pite Rebekah E.
Published: December 2024

This chapter tells the story of how a native plant introduced to the Spanish by the Guaraní became a high-status commodity that European artists associated with elites of European heritage born in the New World, even as it was enjoyed by men and women of all socioeconomic backgrounds within colonial South America. Yerba mate made its way from Paraguay across most Spanish-held territory in the region, specifically the Viceroyalty of Peru and the Viceroyalty of La Plata. In native forests and on Jesuit plantations, indigenous laborers toiled in the harvesting and production of yerba. Given the book’s focus on how the emergence of nations shaped yerba as a commodity and mate as a ritual, this chapter allows us to see how the colonial era initiated a new phase in the exploitative production and massive consumption of a stimulating plant native to the upper Río de la Plata region that endures to this day.
Taking the Herb of Paraguay, 1860s–1910s
Authors: Pite Rebekah E.
Published: December 2024

This chapter tells the story of how South America’s Great War (also referred to as the War of the Triple Alliance or the Paraguayan War) dramatically shifted the dynamics of yerba production and consumption. It helps us understand the impact of the privatization of the Paraguayan yerba industry after the war and leftist writers’ increased attention to the exploitation of yerba workers. It also examines why Paraguay acquired national symbols that differed from those of its neighbors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While prewar visual culture emphasized Paraguayan locals’ regular consumption of yerba, in the postwar era, another picture emerged. In postcards and other manifestations of visual culture seeking to represent national customs, Paraguay was depicted as a land of women and agricultural production, rather than a site of consumption or gauchos. These national symbols portrayed as a country meant to serve others in the region whatever they desired.
Picturing Mate as Rural in Argentina and Uruguay, 1870s–1920s
Authors: Pite Rebekah E.
Published: December 2024

This chapter traces the most dramatic changes with regards to the practice and representation of mate drinking in the lower Platine republics of Argentina and Uruguay from the 1870s to the 1920s. We first explore the reasons behind urban elites’ in Buenos Aires move away from mate drinking in public, and then shift to immigrants’ interest in adopting this local ritual. In the second half of the chapter, we witness a shift in the visual depiction of mate drinking in paintings, photographs, and especially postcards purporting to represent national culture. Tracing this visual culture over time enables us to see how and why the rural figures of the gaucho and the china became, respectively, the most important mate drinker and the most important mate server on both sides of the Río de la Plata.
Premeditation
Authors: Swanson Drew A.
Published: December 2024

The introduction provides background on the notorious 1870 assassination of North Carolina state senator John Stephens by a group of Ku Klux Klan conspirators led by John Lea. It situates this event within the broader context of North Carolina’s Reconstruction, arguing that it was a crucial turning point in the post-Civil War state. The introduction also discusses the importance of place, labor, and public memory in creating local meaning, and outlines the effectiveness of microhistory in illuminating the details of the past.
Prior Appropriation
Authors: Swanson Drew A.
Published: December 2024

Chapter 6 opens with an account of John Lea’s 1919 confession to orchestrating Stephen’s assassination. This was the fullest account of the murder to date and was sealed by the North Carolina Historical Commission and prominent state officials like R. D. W. Connor at Lea’s request, to be made public only after his death in 1935. The chapter then details the change in interpretation of both the assassination and North Carolina’s Reconstruction experience that came with a wave of revisionist historians in the 1960s. Although these new histories fundamentally shifted academic understandings of the period, they did relatively little to change popular stories about Stephens or Reconstruction at the state and local levels. Within North Carolina the work of the Dunning School proved remarkably durable.
Wondrous Transformations
Authors: Li Alison
Published: December 2024

Harry Benjamin (1885-1986), a German-born endocrinologist, was a pivotal figure in the development of transgender medicine. He was physician to transgender pioneers such as Christine Jorgensen, the 1950s “Ex-GI" turned “Blonde Beauty” media sensation, and in turn, she and other collaborators helped to shape Benjamin's influential 1966 book, The Transsexual Phenomenon. Alison Li’s much-needed biography of Benjamin chronicles his passion for hormones and his lifelong interest in sexology.

Drawing from extensive research in archival documents, secondary sources, and interviews, Li tells the story of Benjamin’s early ventures in gerontology and his later work with over a thousand transgender patients. Benjamin’s contributions to treatment, education, research, and networking helped to create the institutional foundations of transgender medicine. Moreover, they set the stage for a radical reconsideration of gender identity, challenging us to reflect upon what it is to be male or female and to envision moving beyond these long–held categories.
Part of That Power, Not Understood
Authors: Li Alison
Published: December 2024

In February 1913, Harry Benjamin arrived in New York as clinical assistant to Friedrich Franz Friedmann, a physician who claimed to have developed a treatment for tuberculosis. Friedmann’s party was the focus of much publicity and attracted crowds of desperate tuberculosis patients. Benjamin broke with Friedmann when it became apparent to him that Friedmann’s claims were not warranted. Benjamin survived on odd jobs until July 1915, when he had an opportunity to return to Germany. His ship was at sea when the First World War broke out, leaving him an enemy alien in England. After several months, he was permitted to return to the United States.
A Black Cloud Lifting
Authors: Li Alison
Published: December 2024

Harry Benjamin introduced the Steinach Operation to the US and was a leading proponent of Steinach’s ideas. In 1921, author Gertrude Atherton underwent the Steinach therapy for rejuvenation under the care of Harry Benjamin. Feeling greatly restored, she went on to write the best-selling novel Black Oxen, which was published by Horace Liveright. The novel was later made into a popular film. The story, a fictional account of rejuvenation, brought much public attention to the Steinach treatment and to Benjamin’s work.
In the Border Fields
Authors: Li Alison
Published: December 2024

Many researchers and clinicians were drawn to endocrinology in the 1920s and 1930s by the promise of a greater understanding of physiology and the possibility of finding new therapies. Enthusiasts thought hormones might to be the key to understanding sex, growth, aging, metabolism, behavior and even inheritance, and that finding ways to control or manipulate these functions might allow scientists and physicians not only to treat disease but to shape human destiny. Harry Benjamin’s practice focused on gerontology, but he worked in the borders of conventional medicine and was at times viewed with suspicion by the medical community. Morris Fishbein, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, mocked rejuvenation therapy in his book Medical Follies. Benjamin brought a libel suit against Fishbein and the publisher, Liveright. At the same time, Benjamin was engaged in a leading-edge enterprise with physiological chemists Benjamin Harrow and Casimir Funk, an attempt to isolate and mass manufacture a hormone from the testes. Benjamin married Greta Gülzow, known as Gretchen, who became a loving wife and helpmate to him. They lived a glamourous life, and Benjamin served an elite clientele in his Park Avenue office.
Wanderer between Two Worlds
Authors: Li Alison
Published: December 2024

Harry Benjamin regularly visited Berlin and Vienna during the 1920s and early 1930s and saw himself as serving as a bridge for the ideas of Magnus Hirschfeld and Eugen Steinach in the US. Some of the earliest-known hormone and surgical treatments for gender transition were carried out at Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science. Patients included Dora Richter and Lili Elbe. In 1930, Benjamin hosted Hirschfeld in New York at the start of his world lecture tour. Hirschfeld was away from Germany on 6 May 1933 when the Institute for Sexual Science was sacked by students backed by the Nazi Party. Hirschfeld died in exile in France in 1935. Eugen Steinach went into exile in Switzerland after Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938; the work of the Vivarium destroyed. Steinach died in 1944. Benjamin’s work in gerontology evolved as endocrinology science developed and more potent hormone products became available. Benjamin began treating Otto Spengler around 1925. Spengler identified as a transvestite and sought x-ray irradiation of his testes and estrogen therapy for the purpose of feminization. Spengler’s case is a link between Benjamin’s rejuvenation therapy and his later work in transgender care.
Changing the Body to Match the Mind
Authors: Li Alison
Published: December 2024

Harry Benjamin established a summer office in San Francisco. In 1949, Benjamin treated Val Barry (pseudonym) who had been assigned male at birth. Benjamin was introduced to Barry by his friend and colleague the sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Benjamin provided Barry with estrogen therapy and assisted her in trying to obtain surgery for gender transition. Although Benjamin was in his 60s and had been considering retirement from his gerontology practice, this experience launched him into a whole new career in transgender care that would last over two decades. Benjamin became known in transgender networks as a sympathetic physician, and he began to treat a number of other transgender patients.
Defining Sex in the Atomic Age
Authors: Li Alison
Published: December 2024

In 1953, Harry Benjamin began a long association as friend and physician to transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen when she returned to New York after her medical transition in Denmark. Jorgensen became a celebrity, bringing public attention to the lives of people who identified as transsexual. Benjamin’s practice in gerontology declined in the 1950s so he had time to begin writing up his clinical findings about his transgender patients. He was aided by his secretary, later research associate, Virginia Allen. Reed Erikson, a trans man, created the Erickson Educational Foundation which funded research, education and support for many areas, especially transsexualism. The Harry Benjamin Foundation was created in 1964, thanks to support from the Erickson Educational Foundation; it consisted of a community of physicians and psychologists gathered by Benjamin who were sympathetic to medical gender transition. Together, they conducted research to evaluate the success of their treatments and to investigate possible genetic, hormonal or neurophysiological factors underlying cross-gender identities.
The Transsexual Phenomenon
Authors: Li Alison
Published: December 2024

By the 1960s, Harry Benjamin was regarded as the foremost expert on transsexualism and anyone interested in the subject would probably have found their way to his office. He treated trans pioneers such as Jan Morris and Renée Richards. Benjamin’s sympathetic manner and deep concern for his patients was admired by many. In 1966, Benjamin published the ground-breaking book The Transsexual Phenomenon, the first major text to define transsexualism in clinical terms and to argue for compassionate treatment. It caused a sea-change in public awareness of transgender identity and influenced a generation of transgender people and their health professionals. John Money and other researchers consulted with Benjamin and used his large collection of clinical data to support setting up university-based services for transgender people. Gender identity clinics offering surgery for gender transition opened at Johns Hopkins in 1966 and soon after at the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Stanford University and the University of Washington. Benjamin’s views on transsexualism continued to evolve over the years. In 1979, the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association was named in his honor. Benjamin retired in 1975 at the age of 90.
Epilogue
Authors: Li Alison
Published: December 2024

The epilogue briefly examines the changes experienced by the trans community since Harry Benjamin’s death, including the rise of the transgender rights movement and the emergence of a greater understanding of the many varieties of trans experience. Benjamin’s legacy is as a compassionate, though somewhat paternalistic, advocate for his transsexual patients who, in his day, was the world’s most prominent expert on transsexuality. Benjamin’s early work in rejuvenation and his later work in transgender care are linked by his fascination with hormonal therapies and his conviction that he should use his skills to alleviate suffering where he could. In 2006, the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association changed its name to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to dissociate itself from a pathological view of gender nonconformity. The stories of trans elders Aleshia Brevard, Jennifer Finney Boylan and Jan Morris reveal an increasingly complex understanding of trans identity and aging.
Introduction
Authors: Magloire Marina
Published: December 2024

The introduction introduces the tensions and contradictions that have arisen over the course of the past century of Black American women’s engagement with Haitian spirituality. From a lack of engagement with Haitian women writers to the feelings of fear, shame, and incomprehension that some Black American women have experienced during visits to Haiti, this chapter outlines the way Haiti exists largely as an idea in texts by Black American women. Though the idea of Haiti is often in tension with the reality of life in Haiti, it continues to hold a powerful sway over the hearts and minds of Black women in diaspora who long for freedom, self-determination, and ancestral connection.
An Ethics of Discomfort
Authors: Magloire Marina
Published: December 2024

This chapter traces the evolution of Katherine Dunham’s relationship with Haiti through archival research and a consideration of her 1969 ethnographic memoir, Island Possessed. Beginning with the influence of the American occupation of Haiti on the Harlem Renaissance, it argues that primitivist discourses framing Vodou as an instinctive capacity latent in all people of African origins provided interwar black artists like Dunham with a tantalizing possibility of Pan-African solidarity, through which they could mobilize their desire for connection with an obscured past and an imagined community in the present. When her 1930s fieldwork inevitably ran aground on the wall of cultural difference, however, Dunham’s initial feelings of discomfort in Haiti transformed her writing into an interrogation of the supposedly innate and homogeneous nature of blackness. The language and praxis of Vodou proved flexible enough to provide her with the vocabulary to articulate a more nuanced version of diasporic blackness beyond her pre-conceived notions of an easy or automatic alliance between all black people.
Uneasy Blackness
Authors: Magloire Marina
Published: December 2024

Chapter Three considers the role of black American women’s engagements with Afro-diasporic religious systems more broadly to critique gender politics within black communities, revealing internecine rifts in black liberation ideologies. It puts poets Audre Lorde and Lucille Clifton in conversation with black power ideologies of the 1970s and 1980s, discourses into which they are seldom scripted. For Lorde and Clifton, Afro-diasporic spirituality becomes both escape and antidote to a gender restrictive black nationalism which they could never want or hope to access. The virulent authenticity politics of the era and the dominion that these held over memories of Africa shunted both women onto spiritual paths deemed outside of the movement. In her poetry collection The Black Unicorn and in her essays collected in Sister Outsider, Lorde turned to African and diasporic pantheons of spirits for a version of revolution in which black lesbians are the vanguard rather than the outliers. Meanwhile, in her unpublished spirit writings, Clifton turned to an ancestral practice of spirit communication that allowed her to position herself as an omniscient authority on the past, present, and future of black people. Despite the nascent popularity of African derived spiritualities among African Americans in the 1970s, they are rarely considered to be black power ideologies.
Weird Sisters
Authors: Magloire Marina
Published: December 2024

Chapter Four turns to the ambiguous and overdetermined influence of New Orleans on Black feminism. This chapter focuses on Luisah Teish’s 1985 spiritual autobiography Jambalaya: A Natural Woman’s Handbook and Toni Cade Bambara’s 1980 novel The Salt Eaters to argue that New Orleans represented many of the pitfalls and possibilities of Third World feminist spiritual connections. Both texts work at the intersection between a burgeoning New Age spirituality and Third World women’s movements that sought to consolidate different cultural traditions into a unified liberation front.
Looking for Marie
Authors: Magloire Marina
Published: December 2024

Chapter Five blends personal narrative and New Orleans cultural history to create a transhistorical theorization of black feminists’ search for mentors in the archive. The chapter first follows Zora Neale Hurston’s search for the nineteenth-century priestess Marie Laveau in New Orleans in Mules and Men (1928), then contrasts Alice Walker’s parallel search for Zora Neale Hurston’s grave in Florida in 1975. While Hurston positions herself as an apprentice to Marie Laveau’s fantastic and semi-fictive public legacy, Walker represents herself as a loving daughter speaking her mother’s buried truth. Both models of historical reclamation respond to a lacunar and unknowable history of black women’s resistance, and that their creation of alternative historical narratives is always in the service of political goals in the present. In the face of lost archives, the methodology of black feminists often resembles the methodology of New Orleans hoodoo practitioners: using the grave dust of the dead for the empowerment and advancement of the living.
Conclusion
Authors: Magloire Marina
Published: December 2024

The conclusion discusses the resurgence of interest in Afro-diasporic religious and magical practice among black women, as well as queer and trans people, within the past five years. The renewed interest in astrology, tarot, and plant-based medicine among black women is linked to the earlier spiritual explorations of the black feminists discussed in the book. The conclusion argues that ancestral reconciliation can be achieved, not through a return to a fictive African past, but through a careful attention to our more recent ancestors detailed in the book, whose messiness serves as a cartography of an affective landscape that has changed surprisingly little since Hurston and Dunham embarked on their Caribbean fieldwork.
Introduction
Authors: Mayorga Sarah
Published: December 2024

This chapter describes how Cincinnati, Ohio, is a place of duality, asking how residents of the Riverside and Carthage neighborhoods understand this duality. A theory of racial capitalism as a relation is presented to understand the experiences of working-class residents and put them in conversation with the broader political-economic context of the city.
Neglect and Underdevelopment
Authors: Mayorga Sarah
Published: December 2024

This chapter explores how residents used the specter of neglect in urban space. Residents used neglect to interpret the exploitative and dehumanizing conditions of underdevelopment as a relation of racial capitalism. Neglect at the hands of the city and landlords is discussed. Underdevelopment in Cincinnati is also discussed detail, giving a fuller account of racial capitalism’s shape and harms.
Respectability, Antiblackness, and Suspicion
Authors: Mayorga Sarah
Published: December 2024

In this chapter, norms of racial capitalism are identified. Most residents relied on racial capitalist norms of respectability, antiblackness, and suspicion when interacting with one another. These norms were directly related to the racial capitalist specters of neglect (respectability), trash talk (antiblackness), and security (suspicion) discussed in previous chapters.
Beginnings
Authors: Menconi David
Published: December 2024

Rounder had collegiate roots, as its co-founders Ken Irwin, Bill Nowlin and Marian Leighton Levy all met while students at universities in the Northeastern U.S. They were all music fans, of folk music most of all, spending a lot of time at Boston’s legendary Club 47 hearing the likes of Greenbriar Boys and Dock Boggs. Over time, they were drawn to the place that music came from, the American South.
Ol’ Number 0044
Authors: Menconi David
Published: December 2024

J.D. Crowe & the New South was Rounder’s next major milestone, released in 1975 and called by many (Alison Krauss among them) the greatest bluegrass album of all time. It was also Rounder’s first super-group, featuring Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas, and Ricky Skaggs. Rounder’s success was making it a destination for bluegrass, the label everyone wanted to be on and a haven for acts too raw for Nashville. Louisiana also emerged as another Rounder center in the mid-1970s, many associated with Cajun fiddler Dewey Balfa.
Bad to the Bone
Authors: Menconi David
Published: December 2024

Rounder’s first appearance on the mainstream pop charts was with an unlikely act, George Thorogood, who they had to be talked into signing because his blues-rock was so different from everything else they did. But he unexpectedly blew up, eventually earning Rounder’s first gold record. There were inevitable growing pains as a result, and Thorogood eventually took the jump to a major label.
More Money, More Problems
Authors: Menconi David
Published: December 2024

After George Thorogood’s departure, Rounder continued finding success with mainstream Nashville cast-offs like Riders in the Sky while expanding into world music with the Heartbeat Records imprint. Some growing pains came home to roost in 1980 when Rounder’s employees voted to unionize, a move the founders fought.
O Brother (and Sister), Where Art Thou?
Authors: Menconi David
Published: December 2024

A Rounder compilation played a significant role in the Coen Brothers’ 2000 movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” yielding up the opening-credits song. Rounder was key to the whole project, with many roster acts appearing on the unexpectedly successful soundtrack album, which made stars of bluegrass patriarch Ralph Stanley and singer-songwriter Gillian Welch. Rounder scored with albums like “O Sister! The Women’s Bluegrass Collection” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Once More, with Feeling.”
September 29, 2016
Authors: Menconi David
Published: December 2024

The Rounder founders got their due from the International Bluegrass Music Association Hall of Fame in 2016, when they were inducted alongside many of their acts. Alison Krauss made the induction speech.
Introduction
Authors: Myers Sarah Parry
Published: December 2024

When the U.S. military utilized women pilots to fly military aircraft for the first-time during World War II, women joined for similar motivations as male pilots who all possessed a deep love of flying. There were gendered debates within these female pilots’ families and expectations for military women in American society. The WASP fought against stereotyped conceptions of their abilities as they flew on military bases across the continental United States. The thirty-eight female pilots who lost their lives in service to their country did not receive recognition as the WASP were officially civilians during the war. Ultimately, the WASPs battled male resistance and denigration of their abilities within contested airspaces while creating a military sisterhood and an identity as pilots, which they harnessed in the 1970s to fight for their rights to the title “veteran.”
We Live in the Wind and Sand and Our Eyes Are on the Stars
Authors: Myers Sarah Parry
Published: December 2024

The WASP fostered camaraderie and identity as pilots in this unique military space dedicated to training only women aviators at airfields in Texas. Creating and maintaining traditions such as class songs, pilot rituals, and newsletters, they formed a military sisterhood and pilot culture that fostered trainees’ successes while challenging definitions of military personnel. Fears of military women’s sexuality led the Army Air Force to institute additional gendered military rules and regulations. The WASP actively fought gendered assumptions about the limitations of their bodies, intelligence, and psychological abilities as they fought their way to graduation and demonstrated their flying skills. As they donned their uniforms after graduation, they constructed an identity that denoted status, citizenship, and the language of the military. As they left the all-female base in Sweetwater and entered male-dominated bases across the United States, they proved their ability to adeptly fly military aircraft and put their training to use.
Not One of Congress’s Cares
Authors: Myers Sarah Parry
Published: December 2024

The Congressional debates surrounding the militarization bill for the WASP illuminated gendered wartime fears. Despite their wartime successes piloting every type of aircraft available in the Army Air Force with an aptitude similar to men’s, congressmen viewed the WASP program as a threat to gender roles, and they chose to listen to falsified testimony rather than the testimony of top AAF officials. The 1944 militarization bill failed in Congress due to numerous factors, including the media’s coverage, the conclusion of the War Training Service, which left male pilot instructors eligible for combat, media portrayals, and the actions of Jacqueline Cochran. The WASP program disbanded without military status or benefits, and women were excluded from military flying until the early 1970s. This disbandment left high altitudes as spaces literally for men, who now also dominated jet and space aviation.
Food Denied, Food for Freedom
Authors: Smith II Bobby J.
Published: December 2024

Through an analysis of extensive archival materials and historical scholarship, this chapter examines the 1962-63 Greenwood Food Blockade in the Delta town of Greenwood in Leflore County. The Blockade reveals how Black activists and sharecroppers were blindsided by the use of food as a form of voter suppression by white elected officials. This move instigated a six-month food crisis that exacerbated food insecurity in Black sharecropping communities. In response, the communities and civil rights activists operationalized an innovative food program known as “Food for Freedom”: a translocal network of actors including activists, sharecroppers, community leaders, political figures, and organizations that came together to transform food into a symbol of freedom, representing one of the first manifestations of emancipatory food power in the movement. This chapter shows how the Food for Freedom program brought food power politics not only to the center of the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi but also exposed the use of food as a weapon against the movement to the nation. Tensions surrounding the blockade reveal how the event is an entry point for the food story of the Mississippi civil rights movement that created space for new articulations of white supremacy and Black freedom.
Another Kind of Oppression
Authors: Smith II Bobby J.
Published: December 2024

Drawing on rarely used archival materials, newspapers, legislative hearings, and correspondences, this chapter documents a forgotten 1960s food stamps campaign that mobilized white grocers and their affiliates in the Delta. Led by the Lewis Grocer Company, Mississippi’s largest wholesaler-retailer at the time, the campaign used food stamps to transform food into an economic weapon against Black sharecropping communities. Civil rights activists like Fannie Lou Hamer knew this, as she described the federal food stamp program as “another kind of oppression.” This chapter reveals how the advent of food stamps in Mississippi was instigated by the president of the Lewis Grocer Company to protect the self-interests of white grocers and exert the company’s domination over commercial food spaces. This level of food power was shaped by white supremacy and rooted in the history of the Lewis Grocer Company’s role in the region’s plantation economy which in turn shaped the food realties of Black sharecroppers between the late 1800s and 1960s. The interactions between white grocery stores, plantation culture, and civil rights provide the necessary context for understanding how activists organized against the food stamps and the reemergence of emancipatory food power in the movement.
Black Food, Black Jobs
Authors: Smith II Bobby J.
Published: December 2024

Interfacing the records of the North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative (NBCFC) and other archival materials, this chapter examines how the NBCFC generated emancipatory food power in the Mississippi civil rights movement. To do this, the NBCFC created a local Black food economy that empowered Black sharecroppers and rural Black mothers to place their material needs at the center of the movement. Facing a shifting post–1965 civil rights movement that collided with food stamp politics and changes in the agricultural economy of the Delta, the NBCFC’s local Black food economy was a source of food security and economic mobility. Led by activist Mrs. L. C. Dorsey, the NBCFC continued the regional Black agrarian tradition of agency and self-determination in the production, consumption, and distribution of food. This chapter shows how this tradition shaped the emancipatory food power wielded by the NBCFC to sustain the lives of its members as the Delta’s plantation system collapsed. The NBCFC’s ability to operationalize a local Black food economy sets the stage for understanding how the food story of the Mississippi civil rights movement continues today in the food justice efforts of rural Black youth in the Delta.
From Civil Rights to Food Justice
Authors: Smith II Bobby J.
Published: December 2024

Drawing on interviews, primary sources, newspapers, and media, this chapter fast-forwards to the present-day food story of the Mississippi civil rights movement. It examines how Black youth in the North Bolivar County Good Food Revolution (NBCGFR) in the Delta are extending the civil rights struggle for food and economic security initiated by the North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative (NBCFC) to generate an updated version of emancipatory food power. Many of the youth in the NBCGFR are descendants of Black sharecroppers in the Delta who navigated a plantation system that was designed to strip them of their agency and autonomy in the production, consumption, and distribution of food. While the geographic lines that demarcated large plantations in the region have disappeared, questions around food struggles in rural Black communities remain. Through agripreneurship, farming, and youth leadership development, the NBCGFR takes up these questions as they operationalize their vision for their growing food justice movement in the Delta. Working with the Delta Fresh Foods Initiative and local Black farmer-mentors, the NBCGFR builds on the past to build sustainable Black food futures where Black communities have food security and the power to dictate when, where, and how they access food.
Conclusion
Authors: Smith II Bobby J.
Published: December 2024

The conclusion discusses how the food story of the Mississippi civil rights movement challenges us to think explicitly about how we understand the civil rights movement and how it can be used to enhance current struggles for food justice and food sovereignty in Black communities. This discussion clarifies how food power politics as a social struggle and theoretical framework pushes us to think critically about how power—in historical and contemporary contexts—shapes the food realities of Black people. It raises questions about emancipatory food power that point to the ways in which social change in Black communities involves the simultaneous process of dismantling oppression and building sustainable solutions in their fight against inequalities in and outside the food system. The conclusion ends by reflecting on how this book creates a space to think critically about how the interaction between food and power in Black life offers us a way to rethink the past, navigate the present, and build a socially just and food secure future for all.
Murky Waters and Muddy Ground
Authors: Nelson John William
Published: December 2024

The Introduction begins with the arrival of a young fur trader, Gurdon Hubbard, to Chicago’s portage for the first time in 1819. His account shows Chicago as a cosmopolitan space that served to connect two major watersheds of the continent through its key portages, where canoes and supplies could span the Mississippi drainage and the Great Lakes waters. The introduction goes on to lay out the historiographic stakes of exploring the prolonged contest over Chicago’s local space, with an eye towards how geography and local ecologies shaped the terms of cross-cultural encounter. In so doing, it proposes that the environmental and human history of local spaces can tell us as much, if not more, about the continental history of contact and conquest as a vast early American perspective. Through the microhistorical saga of Chicago’s canoe routes, we can appreciate the broader trends that shaped power dynamics in the borderlands of early America from its earlier Indigenous history through the era of the early republic.
Crossroads
Authors: Nelson John William
Published: December 2024

Chapter Three introduces the Anishinaabeg (the collective autonym of the related Odawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe peoples) as the key groups of Indigenous newcomers to Chicago’s portages. The chapter begins with the first documented arrivals of Anishinaabeg in the late 1740s, drawn by the significant potential of the area as a nexus of travel routes, commercial outlets, and hunting opportunities beyond direct French oversight. This chapter takes an explicitly Indigenous centered approach to understanding the significance of Chicago’s geography. Indigenous skills in waterborne travel and environmental knowledge allowed the Anishinaabeg to prosper in a space which had eluded earlier European efforts to consolidate control over Chicago’s portages. The chapter documents how, from the 1740s through the Revolutionary era, Chicago’s Anishinaabeg demonstrated a profound resilience undergirded by the power of their new location at this periphery-turned-homeland. Chicago’s powerful geography in the uncertain borderlands of Revolutionary America allowed the Anishinaabeg who settled there to prosper and endure through a half-century of upheaval.
Thoroughfare
Authors: Nelson John William
Published: December 2024

With the ending of the American Revolution, the United States began advancing claims on the lands south of Lake Michigan and north of the Ohio River, including Chicago. American officials became convinced that controlling key geographic features, like Chicago’s portage, was the solution for frontier stability in the early years of American expansion. This chapter explores the Americans’ geographic logic, tracing how the U.S. made a concerted effort to bring the space and movement of Chicago’s waterways under U.S. authority by securing the adjacent lands and building a military post there by 1803. These efforts brought the U.S. into a headlong clash with Chicago’s local population—both the Anishinaabeg and resident fur traders—who still claimed sovereignty over the area and used the portages to facilitate unrestricted travel and trade between the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley. These clashing visions culminated in the Battle of Fort Dearborn, a deadly encounter which took place between Chicago’s Anishinaabeg and the American garrison stationed there during the War of 1812. After a stunning victory, the Anishinaabeg of the region had reasserted their role as sole brokers of geographic authority at the portages.
The Afro-Latino Memoir
Authors: Masiki Trent
Published: December 2024

Despite their literary and cultural significance, Afro-Latino memoirs have been marginalized in both Latino and African American studies. Trent Masiki remedies this problem by bringing critical attention to the understudied African American influences in Afro-Latino memoirs published after the advent of the Black Arts movement. Masiki argues that these memoirs expand the meaning of Black identity for both Latinos and African Americans. Using interpretive strategies and historical methods from literary and cultural studies, Masiki shows how Afro-Latino memoir writers often turn to the African American experience as a model for articulating their Afro-Latinidad. African American literary production, expressive culture, political ideology, and religiosity shaped Afro-Latino subjectivity more profoundly than typically imagined between the post-war and post-soul eras. Masiki recovers this neglected history by exploring how and why Black nationalism shaped Afro-Latinidad in the United States. This book opens the border between the canons of Latino and African American literature, encouraging greater intercultural solidarities between Latinos and African Americans in the era of Black Lives Matter.
Introduction
Authors: Masiki Trent
Published: December 2024

In the Introduction, I argue that Afro-Latino memoirs often bridge the gap between the cultures and literary canons of Latino Americans and African Americans, broadly defined. These memoirs often function as, what I call in Chapter 1, transcanonical texts. Using the concept of the post-soul condition as a point of departure, I review the history of the Afro-Latino presence in the US; identify five significant Afro-Latino memoirists and their African American influences; introduce the concept of ethnoracial apprenticeship by examining the relationship between the memoir and bildungsroman genres; introduce the concept of the Afroethnic Renewal to explore the intersection of Black immigration, Black literary production, and the politics of panethnic nomenclature; and theorize how the relationship between Latinidad, African American culture, and the post-soul condition help us understand how and why African American narrative strategies, cultural tropes, and political ideologies influence the process of ethnoracial identity formation in the Afro-Latino memoir.
Laughing the Demons Away
Authors: Masiki Trent
Published: December 2024

In Chapter 1, I call attention to Piri Thomas’s literary apprenticeship under John Oliver Killens. Killens and Thomas were both members of the Harlem Writers Guild (HWG), of which Killens was one of five co-founders. The HWG had aesthetic roots in the Popular Front and its members played decisive roles in the development of the Black Arts Movement. The analytical sections of the chapter examine the relationship between Latinidad, heteronormative masculinity, and Black consciousness. In these sections, I focus on two instances of Thomas’s use of African American racial humor and vernacular culture. I analyze a cowardice joke that contrasts the trope of Indigenous bravery with the stereotype of African American pusillanimity as responses to White racial terror. In addition, I demonstrate that Thomas’s use of signifying to resist White infantilization intertextually “tropicalizes” an African American protest joke derived from Youngblood, the debut Killens novel that inspired Down These Mean Streets. The analysis of the immersion narrative, the cowardice joke, and the signifying protest joke reveals that Down These Mean Streets is what I call a transcanonical text. It is, I contend, as much a foundational text of the Black Arts Movement as it is of the Nuyorican Movement.
From Bohemian Piolo to Leftist Jorocón
Authors: Masiki Trent
Published: December 2024

Chapter 2 brings attention to an understudied Afro-Latino memoir, Carlos Moore’s Pichón: Race and Revolution in Castro’s Cuba (2008). Moore was born in Central Lugareño, Cuba in 1942. However, from 1957 to 1961, he lived in New York City. During this adolescent period of his life, Moore came of age ideologically and politically. I explore the uneasy tension between his bohemian liberal humanism and the flowering of his radical Pan-African consciousness, a flowering that was nurtured by his Afro-Panamanian English teacher and through encounters with African American intellectuals and activists like Lewis H. Michaux, Maya Angelou, Harold Cruse, and Malcolm X. Chapter 2 examines this tension by analyzing the role that African American jazz/blues interventions and Black nationalist oratory play in the transformation of Moore’s political consciousness.