bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Providence, the Renaissance Atlantic, and Law
Authors: Haskell Alexander B.
Published: January 2018

This chapter introduces the late Renaissance preoccupation with the interplay between God's will and earthly power by focusing on three issues. Envisioning the law as pathways of rightful conduct where Providence and human initiative intersected, colonizers viewed Christopher Columbus's discovery as as a divine sign that Christians were free to cross the ocean. Because distinguishing lawful pathways from erroneous ones was a matter of conscience, the literature that emerged to justify the Virginia venture took the familiar form of casuistry. Centered on the callings or divinely appointed offices by which humans contribute to bringing about the eschatological promise of the world's redemption, casuistry underlay, for instance, the magus and humanist John Dee's claim, in 1577, that Elizabeth I had a duty as a grace-filled empress to issue her first letters patent authorizing Sir Humphrey Gilbert's colonizing voyages. And colonization was inevitably defined as a project in forging commonwealths that brought everyone to his or her duties, for only in such a morally complete polity would Virginia satisfy God and contribute to coaxing sinners away from the primitive individualism left by the Fall.
Talking with Southerners
Authors: Cooper Christopher A. , Knotts H. Gibbs
Published: January 2018

This chapter relies on evidence from a series of focus groups. These focus groups allow us to explore southern identity in more detail and follow up on many of the themes that developed in earlier chapters. Focus-group participants included adult southerners from a variety of backgrounds—young and old, white and black, native and nonnative. The focus groups reveal many similarities about how blacks and whites think about regional identity and the South. Folkways—like hospitality, manners, pace of life, a connection to the land, and food—are key components of southern identity for both groups. Similar to chapter 3, however, this chapter identifies key differences in southern identity across the two groups. The most notable differences have to do with the ways whites and blacks talk about history, politics, and race relations.
“Can You Be Surprised at My Discouragement?”
Authors: Duane Anna Mae
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the warring—and yet mutually constitutive—discourses of education and colonization through a particular focus on the New York African Free School (1787-1834), an institution designed by the New York Manumission Society to prepare black children for freedom. The school produced a remarkable roster of alumni, including Alexander Crummell, James McCune Smith, Henry Highland Garnet, Ira Aldridge, Patrick Reason and others. The development and curriculum of this school, when placed in context with early republican conversations about education, race and citizenship, provides a means of understanding how in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Enlightenment notions of a child’s malleability had become a means of determining whether non-white occupants of United States soil could be educated into citizenship, or whether they would have to be excised from the nation’s borders. Ultimately, this chapter attends to the conversations about black education that unfolded in the interplay between parents and administrators, and between students and the schoolwork those students were assigned, to better understand how and why colonization would emerge as the reigning antislavery philosophy during these years, and how African Americans engaged and eventually dismantled the racial logic underlying the American Colonization Society.
I Will Gladly Give My Life for a Victory
Authors: Cutrer Thomas W.
Published: January 2018

Narrates the decisive split between secessionist and Unionist Missourians in 1861, the early battles between the pro-Confederate Missouri State Guard and Federal forces for control of the state, the intervention of Confederate forces, and the battle of Wilson’s Creek.
We Are Men and Braves
Authors: Cutrer Thomas W.
Published: January 2018

Deals with the Union’s attempt, during a greater civil war in the East, to retain control of the Western frontier and, in particular, the Santa Fe Trail and other routes to California, in the face of Native American—particularly Apache and Navajo—resistance.
Texas Must Take Her Chances
Authors: Cutrer Thomas W.
Published: January 2018

Examines the growing Federal naval blockade of the Texas coast and the sporadic attempts of the Union navy to occupy various point along the Gulf. A dramatic Confederate counteroffensive resulted in the recapture of the major port city of Galveston and the capture or destruction of several Federal blockaders.
Much Unmerited Loss and Suffering
Authors: Cutrer Thomas W.
Published: January 2018

Examination of the continuing brutal unconventional warfare along the Kansas/Missouri border and, in particular, William Clark Quantrill’s sacking of Lawrence, Kansas in August 1863.
More Remarkable than Thermopylae
Authors: Cutrer Thomas W.
Published: January 2018

In an attempt to gain a foothold in Texas and to discourage the imperialistic ambitions of the French emperor Napoleon III in Mexico, early in 1863 Maj. Gen. William B. Franklin led a massive joint naval and army task force to the mouth of the Sabine River, planning to quickly capture Houston and remove Texas from the war. The tiny, under-gunned garrison of an earthen fort at the mouth of the pass handily repulsed the invaders, preventing a landing and destroying several Union ships.
We Must Fight Them and Whip Them
Authors: Cutrer Thomas W.
Published: January 2018

Having failed three times to establish a beachhead in Texas, N. P. Banks attempted once again in the early spring of 1864, moving toward the rich cotton producing area of central Louisiana and northeast Texas. With a massive three-pronged offensive—which included a large naval component moving up the Red River as well as his own Army of the Gulf, veterans of U. S. Grant’s successful campaign against Vicksburg, and Frederick Steele’s army at Little Rock—he easily captured Alexandria and continued to converge on the strategically vital Confederate city of Shreveport, Louisiana.
The Rebel
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

Corpus Christi activist Lionel Lopez leads the author on a tour of the colonias, the unincorporated communities that began cropping up in the Texas borderlands in the 1950s when developers foisted off cheap plots of land lacking running water, sewage systems, electricity hookups, fire hydrants, and paved roads to low-income (and largely Mexican-American) families. Upwards of 400,000 Texans live in such neighborhoods today. Diabetes are rife here, as is asthma. Scores of babies have birth defects. Too many people are dying of cancer. And when the colonias flood each year during the rainy season, outhouses and septic tanks do too, causing outbreaks of infections and diarrhea. Mothers lose their toenails.
The Healing
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

Her continued search for miracles leads the author to the Flores family. Gilbert, the patriarch, is famous in Robstown, Texas, for spotting la Virgen de Guadalupe beneath the pulpit of St. Anthony’s Catholic Church after its carpet got ripped out for replacement. The author accepts Gilbert’s invitation to attend a “healing mass,” wherein parishioners are tapped on the forehead with a golden monstrance by a priest and then fall in rapture on the floor. After hours of debating, she finally decides to partake in the ritual, too, as part of her own spiritual journey as a lapsed (yet hopeful) Catholic.
The Sort of Homecoming
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

Part Two of the book commences when, after five years of story-gathering in her native South Texas, the author relocates to the region of upstate New York known as “The North Country” for a year-long professorship at St. Lawrence University. She soon learns that the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne is just a 40 minute drive away. She recognizes this nation as the setting for the haunting 2008 film “Frozen River,” about human trafficking across the St. Lawrence River. After an encounter with the U.S. Border Patrol, the author quickly realizes she is back in nepantla, the land of in-between.
The Trade
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

The author begins her exploration of the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne by visiting the many smoke shops lining the highway. After befriending a clerk at one shop, she starts to see the community’s similarities to Tejanos, particularly in regards to drug trafficking. She also learns that Mohawks do not consider their covert transferring of cigarettes from one nation to the next “smuggling,” but rather: “trading.” That is because Mohawks have been living in the St. Lawrence River Valley since time immemorial—long before white men drew arbitrary lines across it. The United States and Great Britain signed The Jay Treaty two centuries ago granting Indians the right to trade with each other. Canada, however, sharply disagrees with this reasoning, as its government loses upward of $2 billion annually to lost tax revenue.
The Saint
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the cult of Kateri Tekakwitha, the Mohawk maiden whose tremendous spiritual discipline (which included daily self-flagellation with tree branches, hot coals, and thorns) convinced Jesuit missionaries that Indians could be “holy” too. Since dying at age 24 in 1680, she—like Mother Julia in South Texas—hasn’t had a moment’s rest: she’s been causing miracles around the St. Lawrence River Valley (and beyond) ever since. In October 2012, she was canonized a Saint by the Vatican—the first Native American ever to be so. More than a thousand Mohawks flew to Rome to bear witness. In this chapter, the author joins the thousand who descended upon Kahnawake, the Mohawk Nation just south of Montreal, Quebec, where Kateri is buried, instead. There, at the Mission of Saint Francis Xavier, she meets an Algonquin woman who graduated from Indian Residential School and learns about the brutal legacies of Catholicism on Mohawk land.
The Southern Origins of Bohemian New York
Authors: Whitley Edward
Published: January 2018

The first Americans to identify as artistic bohemians gathered at a Manhattan beer cellar in the 1850s. They counted Walt Whitman as one of their number, and considered Edgar Allan Poe a bohemian avant la letter. But New York’s first bohemians were not displaced Parisians living in a section of the Latin Quarter magically transplanted to the United States. Rather, bohemianism in the United States has roots in Charleston, South Carolina, the hometown of both Ada Clare (the “Queen of Bohemia” and host of a weekly literary salon) and Edward Howland (the financial backer for the bohemians’ literary weekly, The New York Saturday Press), as well as in the setting of Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843), which influenced the first literary representation of American bohemianism in Fitz-James O’Brien’s short story “The Bohemian” (1855). Charleston’s cotton plantations provided Howland and Clare with the money to fund the institutions that were essential for bohemianism to flourish: the periodical and the salon. With Poe at the imaginative center of American bohemia and Clare and Howland at its financial center, U.S. bohemianism emerges as a complex network of people, money, and ideas circulating between the North and the South as well as New York and Paris.
Southern Expressions of the Blues Revival
Authors: Barretta Scott
Published: January 2018

Conventional narratives about blues revival activity in the U.S. in the 1960s treat it as a northern phenomenon. This chapter addresses lesser known efforts in the Deep South to enhance the cultural status of the blues, and how they were hampered by Jim Crow segregation. It also compares revival scenes in New Orleans, Memphis and Houston, focusing on the distinctive institutional arrangements of bohemia in each city.
Reimagined Old-Time Music Cultures in the Trainhopping Punk Rock South
Authors: Margolies Daniel S.
Published: January 2018

This chapter presents the first consideration of a little known network of radical musicians which has coalesced in the last decade into a vibrant new subculture within the broader (but still obscure) “old time music” scene. Since the late 1990s, old time music has been adopted and repurposed via the language of liberation and autonomy with great seriousness and complete novelty by a fluid group of alternative minded DIY anarcho-punks, many of whom are originally from outside of the region. These young musicians have relocated from around the country to the contemporary South in search of deeply authentic old time forms of music, life, and economy standing in opposition to dominant capitalist consumer culture. These “trainhoppers” search for community and authenticity among alternative-minded people and construct a unique old time musical ecology embedded within related pursuits like radical environmental politics, squatting, off-the-grid homesteading, alternative fuel production, and other aspects of the radical quest for hand-crafted experience conceived of as oppositional to dominant, contemporary American consumer culture.
Space, Time, and Race in Dirty South Bohemia
Authors: Robinson Zandria F.
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers how historical and contemporary patterns of racial segregation influence the development of bohemian scenes in the South with particular attention to the establishment and maintenance of southern black bohemian cultural spaces. Using Memphis, a city with a rich musical legacy rooted in the Mississippi Delta Blues, as a case study, I chronicle how black cultural entrepreneurs create a separate arts and intellectual space within the constraints of class and racial cultures. These Dirty South Bohemians combine influences from black bohemian cultures concentrated in the urban Northeast, like the Afropunk movement, with regionally-inflected understandings of race and bohemianism to create a racially and regionally distinct articulation of bohemianism within racially segregated spaces.
Nineteenth-Century Cuban Migrants in the Gulf World
Authors: Muller Dalia Antonia
Published: January 2018

This chapter defines and develops the concept of the Gulf World that is at the core of the book, tracing the evolution of the region from the 1600s forward. It then takes a long historical view of Cuban migration in the region from the 1820s through the 1890s focusing on famous figures like José María Heredia and Pedro de Santacilia as well as Antonio Maceo and José Martí and demonstrating that their lives and travels spanned Cuba, Mexico and the United States. The chapter ends with a close look at migration, flight and exile in the context of the War of 1895 waged between Cuban insurgents and Spanish colonial forces, which culminated in the Spanish American war.
Internationalizing Cuba Libre
Authors: Muller Dalia Antonia
Published: January 2018

This chapter situates Cuba’s long nineteenth-century independence struggle in a wider international context and makes a case for the central role of Cuban migrants in the development of transnational solidarities around the Cuban cause for independence. It argues that the Gulf World was the resonance chamber of the independence struggle and it makes a case for the importance of Latin America broadly, and Mexico specifically, in the evolution of the struggle, but also underscores the importance of the “Cuban Question” to politics in Latin America and Mexico specifically. The chapter ends with a focus on the importance of the press as a space of solidarity making and features a case study of a group of student journalist in Mexico City who adopted the Cuban independence cause as their own forging important and enduring transnational solidarities with Cuban migrants, while using the Cuban cause as a way to refocus their own local and national struggles.
Introduction
Authors: Windham Lane
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter is about how historians have overlooked a wave of private-sector union organizing efforts in the 1970s. These efforts were led by the women and people of color who had gained new access to the nation’s best jobs following the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and who transformed the U.S. working class. This book uses National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election records to show that an average of half a million workers a year went through NLRB elections in the 1970s. The fact that workers increasingly lost those elections due to weak labor law fed the nation’s new economic divide.
Resistance in Retail
Authors: Windham Lane
Published: January 2018

This chapter features a successful union organizing effort among 5300 women and men at the Woodward & Lothrop department store in Washington, DC. It explores retail workers’ demands for unions and economic security, even as the retail industry’s labor standards declined, and highlights 1970s labor activism among female, young and African-American workers. Newly uncovered anti-union lawyer’s documents reveal employers’ union busting tactics in retail.
9to5
Authors: Windham Lane
Published: January 2018

This chapter is about 9to5, an association founded by women office workers in Boston in 1973 who pioneered a new form of labor organizing. The young women built on new consciousness from the women’s movement to use affirmative action suits, public opinion, and novel organizing tactics to win power in Boston’s banks, insurance companies, and universities. In 1975, the women formed a sister union, Local 925, with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). They then replicated this dual structure on a national level by the end of the 1970s.
Psychedelic Chile
Authors: Barr-Melej Patrick
Published: January 2018

This book illuminates modern Chilean history with an unprecedented chronicle and reassessment of the sixties and seventies. During a period of tremendous political and social strife that saw the election of a Marxist president followed by the terror of a military coup in 1973, a youth-driven, transnationally connected counterculture smashed onto the scene. Contributing to a surging historiography of the era’s Latin American counterculture, Psychedelic Chile draws on media and firsthand interviews in documenting the intertwining of youth and counterculture with discourses rooted in class and party politics. Focusing on “hippismo” and an esoteric movement called Poder Joven, the study challenges a number of prevailing assumptions about culture, politics, and the Left under Salvador Allende's “Chilean Road to Socialism.” While countercultural attitudes toward recreational drug use, gender roles and sexuality, rock music, and consumerism influenced many youths on the Left, the preponderance of leftist leaders shared a more conservative cultural sensibility. This exposed, a degree of intergenerational dissonance within leftist ranks. And while the allure of new and heterodox cultural values and practices among young people grew, an array of constituencies from the Left to the Right berated counterculture in national media, speeches, schools, and other settings. This public discourse of contempt ultimately contributed to the fierce repression of nonconformist youth culture following the coup.
The Opening Set
Authors: Barr-Melej Patrick
Published: January 2018

The book’s opening chapter takes the reader to the Piedra Roja rock music festival. It focuses on the voices and agency of those who gathered—many of them hippies—at that landmark event in Greater Santiago’s municipality of Las Condes during a three-day weekend in October 1970. One person in particular, Jorge Gómez Ainslie, is the chapter’s principal figure. His experiences and proclivities as a teenager point to why the festival happened, and the people and goings-on at Piedra Roja speak to the Chilean counterculture’s coalescence, attributes, and allure during the late sixties and early seventies.
Break Beats in the Bronx
Authors: Ewoodzie Joseph C., Jr.
Published: January 2018

The origin story of hip-hop—one that involves Kool Herc DJing a house party on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx—has become received wisdom. But Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. argues that the full story remains to be told. In vibrant prose, he combines never-before-used archival material with searching questions about the symbolic boundaries that have divided our understanding of the music. In Break Beats in the Bronx, Ewoodzie portrays the creative process that brought about what we now know as hip-hop and shows that the art form was a result of serendipitous events, accidents, calculated successes, and failures that, almost magically, came together. In doing so, he questions the unexamined assumptions about hip-hop's beginnings, including why there are just four traditional elements—DJing, MCing, breaking, and graffiti writing—and not others, why the South Bronx and not any other borough or city is considered the cradle of the form, and which artists besides Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash founded the genre. Ewoodzie answers these and many other questions about hip-hop's beginnings. Unearthing new evidence, he shows what occurred during the crucial but surprisingly underexamined years between 1975 and 1979 and argues that it was during this period that the internal logic and conventions of the scene were formed.
Herc: The New Cool in the Bronx
Authors: Ewoodzie Joseph C.
Published: January 2018

Chapter 1 presents an overview of the historical context in which hip hop emerged. The first section describes the social and economic context of the South Bronx during the 1970s, drawing on scholarship from history and sociology, journalistic accounts, and historical documentaries. The second section provides story lines about the most popular social activities engaged in by youth at the time: graffiti-writing, DJing, and dancing. The final section provides an explanation of how, within a chaotic social environment, these somewhat divergent social activities were linked together to begin forming the new entity. It also explores the historical role of Kool DJ Herc. By focusing on Herc, it demonstrates how sociologists can refrain from portraying actors as heroic and self-motivated yet still acknowledge their pivotal role as historical figures.
South Bronx DJs vs. Other DJs
Authors: Ewoodzie Joseph C.
Published: January 2018

This chapter’s first section, introduces two new actors, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, both of whom followed in the footsteps of Kool DJ Herc. It provides their biographical portraits and discuss how they became established DJs in the South Bronx. It present the different skill-sets they brought with them. It further discusses the importance, at least for Herc and Bambaataa, of graffiti writing. The chapter then takes the reader to Harlem, Brooklyn, and Queens to examine the DJing scene in these other locales. The stories included here, for the most part, have never been published, and thus have never been part of popular narratives about how hip hop emerged. Nevertheless, they are crucial because they illuminate the social worlds against which the South Bronx DJs defined themselves. The final portion of the chapter identifies the bases on which the South Bronx scene opposed itself to those of other parts of the city: (a) break-centered DJing versus song-centered DJing; (b) bigger, more established, and more lucrative venues versus smaller, less established, and less lucrative venues; (c) dancing with a partner versus competitive break dancing; (d) twenty-one-and-older audiences versus twenty-one-and-under audiences; and (e) formal attire, including suits and dresses, versus less formal attire, including jeans and sneakers.
A Magnetic Healer in Iowa
Authors: Folk Holly
Published: January 2018

Chiropractic cannot be understood without examining the decades of “metaphysical” healing before its development. Chapter two considers the early life of D. D. Palmer, who before discovering chiropractic, practiced vital magnetic healing, a popular therapy aimed at relieving obstructions of the life force in the body. An examination of Palmer’s self-published newspapers shows his belief in vitalism and his anti-authoritarian outlook. The chapter explores the roots of chiropractic in magnetism, and discusses the changes in that practice from its 18th century form as mesmerism through its 19th century encounter with neurology and other modern medical sciences. In the 19th century Midwest, magnetic healers were socially marginal in the Midwest, but their practice held appeal in a neurocentric health culture which prioritized spinal treatments. Some practitioners, like Sidney Abram Weltmer and Paul Caster, built their proprietary practices into full magnetic healing hospitals.
The Missing Day
Authors: Gaines Alisha
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers the iconic, cross-racial impersonator, John Howard Griffin, author of the bestselling Black Like Me (1961). This chapter uses archival research to reveal how Griffin prepared for his temporary (mis)adventures in Southern blackness, first published in a six-part series in the now defunct, black periodical, Sepia. Before those articles, Griffin wrote about his experiment in his personal journals. Close-reading those journals uncovered Griffin’s secret black persona, “Joseph Franklin.” Written in an unpublished Halloween journal entry, known in this book as the “missing day, this chapter centers that entry.” It reads Griffin’s later success in cross-racial empathy through the spectral persona of Joseph, an imagined identity on which Griffin projected anxieties about black masculinity, and his dread about his impending temporary blackness. This chapter details how the haunting absence of Joseph and the missing October 31, 1959, journal entry structure each iteration of Griffin’s empathetic racial impersonation—from his journals and articles for Sepia to the literary and film versions of Black Like Me. By tracing this strategic avoidance, Griffin’s archive uncovers the imagined spectre of black masculinity shaping the most iconic example of empathetic racial impersonation in this genealogy.
A Second hand Kind of Terror
Authors: Gaines Alisha
Published: January 2018

Chapter Three considers the political, racial, and social crises plaguing the late 1960s by reading Soul Sister, Grace Halsell’s 1969 memoir. A freelance journalist and a White House staff writer for the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, Halsell was also a protégé of John Howard Griffin, who famously passed for black in 1959. While previous scholarship on Griffin has wrestled with his place as an enduring icon of racial empathy, this chapter details Griffin’s previously unknown mentorship of Halsell. Bolstered by extensive archival research, this chapter demonstrates how Halsell prepared for her performance of black womanhood by relying exclusively on Griffin’s instruction without any advice from black women. The chapter also situates Halsell’s blackness within important discussions around the contentious relationship between racial equality and 2nd wave feminism. Ultimately, Halsell’s six-months as a black woman in Harlem and Mississippi during the burgeoning black power movement ironically reveals grotesque assumptions about black sexuality, authenticity, and class.
Empathy TV
Authors: Gaines Alisha
Published: January 2018

The fourth chapter takes on the televisual rescripting of Sprigle, Griffin, and Halsell with a reading of the FX cable series, Black.White., a 2006 reality television show where two middle class families—one black and one white—“switched” races to experience racial difference. This chapter attends to how Black.White. moves the genealogy of empathetic racial impersonation from the theatrical stage, newspaper, trade books, and film to the visual logics of television. This shift reveals an investment in empathetic racial impersonation at a moment dominated by the changing discourses about race and race relations in the 21st century. Importantly, this chapter expands discussions of racial experimentation beyond the U.S. South. Set in Los Angeles, this “reality” show spuriously reinscribes the black/white binary even though Los Angeles has long been recognized as a multiracial city. By focusing on the fraught relationship between the two families, this chapter contends that Black.White. dramatically exposes the limits of empathetic racial experimentation as a tool of racial reconciliation. Ultimately, it evidences an empathetic failure in the cross-racial promise supposedly demonstrated by this seemingly new, but ultimately decades old, impersonation experiment. It also considers the histories and politics of whiteface.
Introduction
Authors: Kutulas Judy
Published: January 2018

This introduction sets up the argument that because traditional authorities lost power and centrality by the end of the 1960s, the popular culture became a more potent model for how individuals might live their lives. This was especially true of members of the baby boomer generation because of their numbers and life stages in the 1970s. While there was a backlash against the diversity and equality that were important features of this new society, most individual American lives changed because of the 1960s revolutions.
Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid
Authors: Kutulas Judy
Published: January 2018

In November of 1978 more than 900 Americans died in Jonestown, all followers of Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple movement. Journalists themselves changed by the 1960s attempted to help Americans make sense of what happened there. In the end, the public response to the Jonestown tragedy demonstrates how many lessons from the 1960s Americans absorbed. They learned to be survivors and to fight the system however and whenever they could. Yet their viewpoint was fundamentally changed as they made more judgments in moral rather than legal or rational terms, thinking of Jones as evil.
Labor Under Fire
Authors: Minchin Timothy J.
Published: January 2018

From the Reagan years to the present, the labor movement has faced a profoundly hostile climate. As America’s largest labor federation, the AFL-CIO was forced to reckon with severe political and economic headwinds. Yet the AFL-CIO survived, consistently fighting for programs that benefited millions of Americans, including social security, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, and universal health care. With a membership of more than 13 million, it was also able to launch the largest labor march in American history--1981’s Solidarity Day--and to play an important role in politics. In a history that spans from 1979 to the present, Timothy J. Minchin tells a sweeping, national story of how the AFL-CIO sustained itself and remained a significant voice in spite of its powerful enemies and internal constraints. Full of details, characters, and never-before-told stories drawn from unexamined, restricted, and untapped archives, as well as interviews with crucial figures involved with the organization, this book tells the definitive history of the modern AFL-CIO.
Partial Détente
Authors: Minchin Timothy J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the AFL-CIO’s history during the presidency of George H.W. Bush (1989-1993). Overall, the Bush era was a moderate improvement for the AFL-CIO, and for American working people. During Reagan’s presidency, vice-president Bush had forged a workable relationship with the AFL-CIO, and the Federation’s leaders viewed him in a more positive light. Bush was not as hostile to labor as Reagan, and – helped by the improved economy – organizing picked up, there were some defensive victories in labor disputes, and the AFL-CIO also found common ground with the Bush administration in foreign affairs. As one AFL-CIO staffer put it, these years were characterized by a partial détente. Ultimately, however, there was no fundamental turnaround in labor’s fortunes.
He’s on Our Side?
Authors: Minchin Timothy J.
Published: January 2018

After the difficult Reagan-Bush years, the Federation expected a lot from new Democratic president Bill Clinton, and played an important role in his election. This chapter explores the AFL-CIO during Clinton’s presidency, particularly his crucial first term. To be sure, Clinton did much more for working Americans than his Republican predecessors. Consulting closely with the Federation, he passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, issued a reemployment order for the former PATCO strikers, and appointed more sympathetic officials to the NLRB. Despite these important achievements, Clinton’s administration failed on the three key issues that the Federation had identified: health care reform, workplace fairness legislation, and trade. Rather than ensuring fair trade, moreover, the administration pushed through NAFTA with considerable zeal. In an effort to stop NAFTA, the Federation launched an unprecedented campaign among its members, but the President’s commitment to the Agreement won the day. Demoralized after this defeat, the AFL-CIO failed to campaign sufficiently in the 1994 midterm elections, helping the Republicans to make stunning gains. The GOP’s clean sweep of Congress destroyed hopes for progressive reform, and led to internal criticism of Kirkland’s leadership, which continued to baulk at fundamental reform. The stage was set for Kirkland to be overthrown.
Epilogue
Authors: Minchin Timothy J.
Published: January 2018

This epilogue surveys developments since September 2009, when Richard Trumka replaced John Sweeney as AFL-CIO president. It covers events up to the end of 2015, when the research period of this project ended. Overall, Trumka continued many of Sweeney’s reforms, placing a big emphasis on organizing, political mobilization, and connecting with women and minority workers. He also continued to diversify the AFL-CIO’s leadership; in 2009, for example, for the first time, two of the Federation’s top three officials were women. Trumka also had to confront many negative developments, especially in the wake of the Tea Party elections of 2010. Many Republican governors now sought to take on unions, especially in the public sector, with the high-profile battle in Wisconsin (2011) being the best example. Despite being more “under fire” than ever, the AFL-CIO continued to fight back, defending important progressive legislation and remaining as the only mass membership, national organization fighting for working Americans.
Gender as Brand Management
Authors: Sparks Edith
Published: January 2018

Lewis, Beech and Rudkin positioned themselves in distinctly gendered ways relative to their products and their customers. For each one, their marketing messages changed over time, moving toward a more stereotyped presentation of themselves. All three played a role essential to their brand identities—Lewis as housewife, Beech as hostess and Rudkin as grandmother—that was a gendered idea leveraging the femaleness and femininity of the company leader to imprint its product with a particular emotion, value, and promise for mid-twentieth-century consumers and customers. Each of the brands promised quality, but since this claim no longer was a point of distinction for most companies by the middle of the 1900s, all three businesswomen used gender to feminize their delivery of quality and in so doing to distinguish themselves from competitors. It was a complex and even contradictory identity for women at the helm of big businesses in the mid-twentieth century, one that revealed women’s restrictive roles even as it advanced the trajectory of their brand management.
The Case for Municipal Surgery
Authors: Tochterman Brian
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the popular writings of New York City’s master builder Robert Moses. In newspaper and magazine articles Moses framed the need for slum clearance and redevelopment through the lens of the dying city, labelling slums a cancer that could kill New York. Thus, he employed fear to allow room for his technocratic experts to remake the city on a large scale.
Untangling the Pathologies of Ungovernability
Authors: Tochterman Brian
Published: January 2018

In The Other America, Michael Harrington highlighted the persistence of poverty in New York City in an otherwise affluent era, hoping to spur federal policy that could help struggling neighborhoods like Harlem and the Bowery. As this chapter highlights, however, Harrington’s work ignited a debate on “urban pathologies” centered on New York. Conservative commentators took up Harrington’s representation of an urban “culture of poverty” to perpetuate a narrative of a pathological “underclass” destroying cities like New York
The Lure of Decay
Authors: Tochterman Brian
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the appropriation of the dying city by New York City natives and migrants drawn by the lure of decay, and the cultural explosion that followed, which birthed the downtown art scene, hip-hop, and new wave or punk music. This moment epitomized “the right to the city,” a more radical interpretation of Cosmopolis, making New York an open city in the 1970s.
Epilogue
Authors: Tochterman Brian
Published: January 2018

Assessing the landscape since the 1960s in the pages of Dissent, Marshall Berman noted that “things that happen in New York are beamed instantly all over America, indeed, the world, thanks to all the mass media that are located here. Facts become symbols instantly—often long before they are understood.” During the urban crisis, “New York came to symbolize ‘urban violence.’” These words appeared in the Fall 1987 issue, “In Search of New York,” after ten years of postcrisis restructuring under Mayor Edward Koch. ...
C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution
Authors: Treviño A. Javier
Published: January 2018

In C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution, A. Javier Treviño reconsiders the opinions, perspectives, and insights of the Cubans that sociologist C. Wright Mills interviewed during his visit to the island in 1960. On returning to the United States, the esteemed and controversial sociologist wrote a small paperback on much of what he had heard and seen, which he published as Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. Those interviews--now transcribed and translated--are interwoven here with extensive annotations to explain and contextualize their content. Readers will be able to “hear” Mills as an expert interviewer and ascertain how he used what he learned from his informants. Treviño also recounts the experiences of four central figures whose lives became inextricably intertwined during that fateful summer of 1960: C. Wright Mills, Fidel Castro, Juan Arcocha, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The singular event that compelled their biographies to intersect at a decisive moment in the history of Cold War geopolitics--with its attendant animosities and intrigues--was the Cuban Revolution.
The Book That Sold Half a Million Copies
Authors: Treviño A. Javier
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines how the information conveyed and topics covered in the interviews led Mills to construct Listen, Yankee’s full-throated message of revolutionary cry. Also included is a transcribed recording Mills made of a meeting he had with the publisher, Ian Ballantine, laying out his vision of, and production plans for, Listen, Yankee.
The Devil’s Gonna Get You
Authors: Gussow Adam
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores a major theme within the blues lyric tradition: the devil as a figure who haunts intimate relationships between African American men and women. In some cases, men imagine themselves as footloose, mistreating devils; in other cases, they complain about romantic rivals who act in that way; in still other cases, they rage as their women, in thrall to the devil, grow cold to the touch or transfer their feelings to some other man. Artists covered include Lonnie Johnson, Lightnin' Hopkins, Skip James, and Sonny Boy Williamson, along with Bessie Smith, Koko Taylor, and other black women who call on the devil to punish their no-good man—or, alternately, reject him as a mistreating devil rather than the angel he appeared at first to be.
Modesty, Marriage, and Motherhood
Authors: Taylor Ula Yvette
Published: January 2018

This chapter brings together multiple voices to discuss why women made the decision to join a patriarchal movement. By embracing modesty, marriage, and motherhood, female members debunked stereotypes of hypersexualized black women. Agency was found in patriarchal marriage because in theory a male breadwinner freed wives from financial burdens and the assaults often experienced working outside of the home. By accepting a religious identity anchored in patriarchal precepts, Nation of Islam women counted on the promise of protection and freedoms on their own terms.
Across the Chattahoochee, July 17–18
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: January 2018

On July 17, Sherman moved all of his troops to the south side of the Chattahoochee River and marched on Atlanta, with James B. McPherson's Army of the Tennessee moving the longest distance to reach Decatur east of Atlanta and tear up the Georgia Railroad as it advanced toward the city. This cut one of the three railroads Johnston relied on to feed his army in Atlanta. George H. Thomas' Army of the Cumberland had the shortest route to march, crossing the Chattahoochee near its junction with Peach Tree Creek, moving to Buck Head, and then marching south toward Atlanta. John M. Schofield's Army of the Ohio tried to fill in the distance between those two forces. As the Federals advanced with minor skirmishing against a screen of Confederate cavalry, Davis decided to relieve Johnston of command and elevate John Bell Hood to replace him. Hood, taken by surprise, tried to convince Davis to change his mind or at least postpone the change in commanders but the Confederate president refused to do so. Hood finally assumed his new command on July 18 and tried to prepare the Army of Tennessee to meet Sherman's advance.
Scott versus Geary
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: January 2018

Thomas M. Scott's Brigade of Loring's Division attacked John W. Geary's division, the only Twentieth Corps unit in place on good ground south of Peach Tree Creek. While Scott's right wing was stopped in bloody fighting, the left wing took advantage of a wooded ravine that lay to Geary's right (and should have been occupied by other Twentieth Corps troops if Hooker had placed his corps properly before the battle). Scott's left wing used this cover to flank Geary's line and throw his division into confusion. The right wing of Charles Candy's brigade fell back in and a bloody fight developed around the 13th New York Battery, in which the Federals held their ground and repulsed the Confederates. Meanwhile, Patrick H. Jones's brigade, to Candy's rear, adjusted its position to help Candy and oppose the enemy. David Ireland's brigade, to Jones' rear, broke up its column formation to go into action with some regiments moving forward to help the rest of the division and other regiments being forced back by the Confederates, who surged to the rear of Geary's position. In the end, after a confused, swirling battle in the woods, Geary's men repulsed Scott's attack.
O’Neal versus Williams and Reynolds versus McCook
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: January 2018

Edward A. O'Neal's Brigade of Walthall's Division struck Alpheus S. Williams' division on Hooker's right. Williams was taken by surprise but his men reacted quickly to the attack. His division formed line in time to repulse several advances by O'Neal's troops with extremely heavy firing. Even though O'Neal handled his men well and they penetrated the wooded, uneven ground to Geary's right, they had to retire by the end of the day. Meanwhile, Daniel Harris Reynolds' Brigade of Walthall's Division advanced to the left of O'Neal against Anson McCook's brigade of Richard W. Johnson's Fourteenth Corps division. McCook's command was ready for action but one regiment, Douglas Hapeman's 104th Illinois, was forced by the configuration of the ground to be placed forward of the brigade's main line. This enabled part of Reynolds' line to almost flank the right of the 104th Illinois. Only by personally leading a counterattack could Hapeman save his flank just before reinforcements arrived to help him drive the Confederates away. On the far left of Hood's line, Samuel G. French's Division advanced two brigades toward the Fourteenth Corps line, to Reynolds' left, but they made little headway before the battle ended that day.
The Mexican Community in the United States, 1933–1939
Authors: Fernando Saúl Alanís Enciso , Davidson Russ
Published: January 2018

This chapter describes the living conditions of many Mexican migrants, as well as how various political and social events impacted both the migration and deportation of Mexican workers in the U.S. It details how, in 1937, the influx of Mexican migrants to the U.S. decreased, due in part to the lessened incentive of local governments to drive them out of the country and from the growing social solidarity of the Mexican community within the U.S. An increased interest in obtaining citizenship rose among Mexican migrants to the U.S., driven in part by Roosevelt’s decision to cut the federal budget in 1937, which increased worker layoffs and increased the threat of deportation. This chapter notes that, in spite of this increased threat, many Mexican migrants began to thrive in the U.S.; some owned property, some elected to give up their Mexican citizenship, and some formed unions and joined strikes to assert their rights as workers. Lastly, this chapter notes that a slight uptick in the flow of returnees to Mexico was recorded in 1939.
The Mexican Government and Repatriation, November 1934–June 1936
Authors: Fernando Saúl Alanís Enciso , Davidson Russ
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the Cardenista government’s attempt to find a solution to the foreseen threat of a mass return of Mexican migrants from the U.S. Chapter 3 details how the Cardenas administration established that only a strict selection of skilled agricultural labourers would be permitted to return, and details how the administration determined that individual Mexican states should accept responsibility for providing both housing and assistance for repatriated nationals. Drawing on an overview of the studies conducted by the Cardenas administration on the population of Mexican nationals living in the U.S., this chapter states that ultimately, it was proposed that 450,000 people could be resettled at the cost of 366,345,291 pesos, and that this figure was well outside the government’s budget. Lastly, this chapter notes that plans for a resettlement colony in Baja California- called “Mexico Libre”- were established but never came to fruition.
The 18 March Agricultural Colony in Tamaulipas, 1939–1940
Authors: Fernando Saúl Alanís Enciso , Davidson Russ
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the establishment of the 18 March agricultural colony, a resettlement camp located in Tamaulipas; intended to be used to resettle 500 families, who would then be responsible for farming the land, the colony cost 786,450 pesos to establish. Chapter 7 details how resettled Mexican nationals ultimately faced dire circumstances at 18 March, as well as how the colony’s poor organization, lack of water, overpopulation, insufficient financing, disease, and lack of housing contributed to the colony’s collapse. Lastly, the chapter notes how, by 1940, repatriated settlers realized that the Cardenas administration could not deliver on the promises of provision that it had made in previous years.