bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sustaining Visions, 1873–1889
Authors: Hewitt Nancy A.
Published: January 2019

Amy Post remained active in numerous causes until her death in 1889. These included women’s rights, women’s suffrage, and spiritualism as well as new organizations devoted to industrial workers and to religious liberty and free speech. The last issues were addressed by the National Liberal League, for which Amy served as a founding officer. Although Post suffered a variety of ailments in later life, she regularly attended Progressive Friends’ meetings and other conventions, hosted lecturers in her home, joined spiritualist circles, and continued her friendships with Nell, Jacobs, Truth, Douglass, and other early co-workers. Post was also honored at woman’s rights anniversary celebrations. Her son Willet joined her in many activities, and her sister Sarah, her children and grandchildren provided joy and solace. Amy mourned the deaths of many fellow activists, and when she died in 1889, the Frederick Douglass League of Rochester, spiritualists, radical Quakers, friends and family gathered to celebrate her life. Although well-known in her time, Post’s activism and her broad vision of social justice slowly faded from memory. The Post Family Papers bring her social justice legacy and her diverse circle of friends and co-workers vividly back to life.
Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table
Authors: Hudnut-Beumler James
Published: January 2019

In this fresh and fascinating chronicle of Christianity in the contemporary South, historian and minister James Hudnut-Beumler draws on extensive interviews and his own personal journeys throughout the region over the past decade to present a comprehensive portrait of the South’s long-dominant religion. Hudnut-Beumler traveled to both rural and urban communities, listening to the faithful talk about their lives and beliefs. What he heard pushes hard against prevailing notions of southern Christianity as an evangelical Protestant monolith so predominant as to be unremarkable. True, outside of a few spots, no non-Christian group forms more than six-tenths of one percent of a state’s population in what Hudnut-Beumler calls the Now South. Drilling deeper, however, he discovers an unexpected, blossoming diversity in theology, practice, and outlook among southern Christians. He finds, alongside traditional Baptists, black and white, growing numbers of Christians exemplifying changes that no one could have predicted even just forty years ago, from congregations of LGBT-supportive evangelicals and Spanish-language church services to a Christian homeschooling movement so robust in some places that it may rival public education in terms of acceptance. He also finds sharp struggles and political divisions among those trying to reconcile such Christian values as morality and forgiveness—the aftermath of the mass shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel A.M.E. Church in 2015 forming just one example. This book makes clear that understanding the twenty-first-century South means recognizing many kinds of southern Christianities.
Christianities in the Now South
Authors: Hudnut-Beumler James
Published: January 2019

This book explores the extent to which there still is a distinctive southern religion, characterized by a predominant evangelical Christianity, composed of white and black representative churches. Recognizing the overdrawn quality of such evaluations even for the southern past, the argument is offered that intra-Christian diversity in the American South has reached the point where the term “Christianities” is more appropriate to capture the range of beliefs and practices visible in the 21st century. Christians in the Now South are so diverse as to sound at times more like a cacophony than the supposed southern harmonies of the past.
The Religion of the Lost Cause, Reloaded
Authors: Hudnut-Beumler James
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the ways the ancestral memory of Civil War service by such groups as the Sons of Confederate Veterans became hotly contested in the second decade of the 21st Century. What for some southerners was personal heritage, particularly as represented in the Confederate Battle Flag, was for many others a symbol of slavery and a continued belief in white supremacy. Matters came to a head in the killing of nine parishioners at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church during a Bible study. Yet the deeper issues of reverence or revulsion for the southern past continued with religion and religious leaders playing key parts.
Washed in the Blood in the Red States
Authors: Hudnut-Beumler James
Published: January 2019

From a national congressional map the political makeup of the southern United States appears to be solidly red, or Republican, with a few small urban blue, or Democratic, districts surrounding state capitols and major cities. At the state and local levels, however, contemporary religion and politics continues to be an interesting contest between remnants of the old civil rights coalition on the left and the family values coalition religious right. This chapter focusses on former Alabama jurist Roy Moore as an example of the religious right, on Rev. William J. Barber’s Moral Monday’s in North Carolina as a revival of the coalition politics associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., and on the remarkable stand of four Protestant and Catholic bishops in Alabama against making rendering humanitarian aid to undocumented immigrants a felony. The bishops won by appealing to the religious obligations to follow the teachings of their faith—to the frustration of some of their own coreligionists.
Mississippi Flooding
Authors: Hudnut-Beumler James
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores the motivations of the helpers and the experiences of those who were helped in New Orleans and on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. By and large, people got the help they needed and asked for face to face, though not without an occasional misunderstanding. Clergy that tried to live as the leaders of entire communities under stress did not fare so well, with burnout and worse ensuing. The case of Rev. Dr. Alice Graham an educator who had sworn never to set foot in Mississippi after the 1955 killing of Emmet Till exemplifies another group—people who were so caught up in the need to help that they found themselves moving to the region permanently out of a sense of religious vocation. One of Katrina’s surprises for many lifelong southerners was how many old racial boundaries were being broached as people helped one another, even as others seemed to remain in place.
Megachurches and the Reinvention of Southern Church Life
Authors: Hudnut-Beumler James
Published: January 2019

The phenomena of megachurches—churches with approximately two thousand in weekly worship attendance—is especially prevalent in the South. Not only is the South a region of many churches, but the likelihood that a given person attends a large congregation with giant screens, many services, ministries, programs for all ages, and perhaps even multiple locations is higher than anywhere else in the U.S. Not everyone in the South attends a megachurch but because so many do the strong megachurch model affects the general experience of church attendance and belonging, even in small churches. To examine southern megachurches in their variety, this chapter visits four churches that introduce important aspects of this innovative form: Bellevue Baptist Church just outside Memphis, Tennessee; Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, a church that grew the nation’s largest Christian college, Liberty University; New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia, associated with the prosperity gospel; and, St. Andrew AME, a neighborhood church that has grown into a multifaceted resource for its largely impoverished neighbourhood in south Memphis.
The Changing Face of the Catholic South
Authors: Hudnut-Beumler James
Published: January 2019

Of all European faiths transplanted to what became the U.S. southern states, Roman Catholicism came first. Southern Catholicism was mostly confined to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys, leading a Glenmary priest to dub the interior “No Priest Land.” This chapter depicts the Catholic filling of the southern interior in four waves: first, select immigrant towns were established like Cullman, Alabama in the 19th century, home to a Benedictine monastery; a second wave came in the early and mid-20th century with the Glenmary Home Missioners and a colorful nun named Mother Angelica, determined in different ways to evangelize and serve the South; the third wave came from rustbelt transplant Catholics moving south for jobs, especially with the auto industry in the 1980s forward; finally, the fourth and largest wave is composed of Hispanic Catholics helping making the South’s states the fastest growing in Hispanic population 2000-2010. This chapter features visits to two fast growing Hispanic congregations, one largely Mexican in ethnicity, the other pan-Central American. The principal emerging religious feature for Catholicism in the South that it has quickly become the most immigrant-embracing form of Christianity in the region.
Christian Homeschoolers
Authors: Hudnut-Beumler James
Published: January 2019

Framed by a visit to the Teach Them Diligently Christian Homeschooling Convention, the largest event of its kind, this chapter explores the large and growing phenomena of Christian homeschooling. Christian homeschooling differs from its secular, alternative lifestyle counterpart by a strong commitment to biblical teachings about family, science, and a concomitant conservative antipathy to so-called “government schooling.” At its oldest and simplest it embraces Anabaptist groups, who offer the most basic lessons to the rest of the community. Ken Hamm, and “young Earth creationists” (who argue for six actual days of creation and a maximum Earth age of 10,000 years are even more influential in the community, as are the Family Research Council, and groups urging women to have as many children as possible for biblical reasons. One of the interesting features of the movement is how many of today’s southern homeschooling parents were themselves the products of an earlier generation of the “Christian academies” devised in the 1960s and 1970s to avoid racial integration. Now that these same academies are mostly integrated, there is some evidence that the contemporary practice of educating one’s children at home (an activity differentially preferred by whites) has the effect of furthering educational segregation.
Southern Christianities in Harmony and Conflict
Authors: Hudnut-Beumler James
Published: January 2019

The conclusion poses the question whether the dominant religious dimension of South is basically charitable and hospitable or morally judgmental and hostile to difference? It argues, based on the evidence introduced, that the answer is that the South is both and more. The Christianities encountered in this book are several, plural, and manifold. As such they fund the instinct to both help strangers and anathematize them. The extension beyond self and clan—a value the disparate Christians all learn from their Bibles and churches—is not perfect, and honoured sometimes more in the breach than in practice. Biblicism and moralism divide, yes, but the sources of reconciliation and change come from the very same sources. And from this dynamic strangers meet, and sometimes, are enabled to become friends.
Race Over Party
Authors: Bergeson-Lockwood Millington W.
Published: January 2019

In late nineteenth-century Boston, battles over black party loyalty were fights over the place of African Americans in the post–Civil War nation. In his fresh in-depth study of black partisanship and politics, Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood demonstrates that party politics became the terrain upon which black Bostonians tested the promise of equality in America’s democracy. Most African Americans remained loyal Republicans, but Race Over Party highlights the actions and aspirations of a cadre of those who argued that the GOP took black votes for granted and offered little meaningful reward for black support. These activists branded themselves “independents,” forging new alliances and advocating support of whichever candidate would support black freedom regardless of party. By the end of the century, however, it became clear that partisan politics offered little hope for the protection of black rights and lives in the face of white supremacy and racial violence. Even so, Bergeson-Lockwood shows how black Bostonians’ faith in self-reliance, political autonomy, and dedicated organizing inspired future generations of activists who would carry these legacies into the foundation of the twentieth-century civil rights movement.
Vote, That the Work Might Be Finished
Authors: Bergeson-Lockwood Millington W.
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines black participation in state level elections from the late 1860s and concludes with the controversies surrounding the 1872 presidential election. During these elections, African Americans increasingly questioned their electoral loyalty to the Republican Party and discussed potential alternatives.
Conclusion
Authors: Bergeson-Lockwood Millington W.
Published: January 2019

This chapter summarizes the book and recounts its major themes. It argues that while the pursuit of independent politics began optimistically, by the end of the nineteenth century such hopes were tragically misplaced. The legacy of the dedication to race-first politics, however, remained an influential force in Black political organizing of the twentieth century civil rights struggles.
Epilogue
Authors: Bergeson-Lockwood Millington W.
Published: January 2019

The final chapter examines the legacy of black political action in Boston. The emergence of William Monroe Trotter as editor of the Boston Guardian helped black Boston’s new political vision reach a national audience. In particular, Trotter’s influence encouraged W. E. B. Du Bois to join a more radical politics that had grown in Boston during the previous decades. This chapter argues that Trotter and Du Bois’s politics were rooted in the political legacies and traditions of Boston’s black community.
Conquering Old Ocean
Authors: Smith Jason W.
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines U.S. Navy’s hydrographic efforts after the American Civil War, in the period from 1865-1890, an era in which earlier commercial imperatives began to significantly breakdown with the near demise of the American merchant marine and amid slowly-growing geo-strategic imperatives related to the growth of American imperial aspirations, particularly in the Pacific Ocean. The chapter traces a multiplicity of hydrographic efforts from the North Pacific, to the Central American isthmus, the Arctic and the deep sea, arguing that this era was actually one of vigour for American naval science even as the American navy more generally shrank considerably from wartime peaks and lost ground in terms of technological innovation. The Navy’s hydrographic efforts show both a continued commercial imperative and now, emergent strategic interests that would fully emerge in 1898 during the Spanish-American War and with the acquisition of a territorial empire. Finally, despite a growing faith in technology and machines to both usher new dimensions of hydrographic surveys and to change the natural world, these American efforts remained limited, often undermined by the magnitude and dangers of scientific work in a difficult environment.
Bloodline Is All I Need and Defiant Indigeneity on the West Side
Authors: Teves Stephanie Nohelani
Published: January 2019

ʻBloodline is All I Need’ and Defiant Indigeneity on the ʻWest Side’,” looks closely at the “refusal” of aloha in the cultural production of a Kānaka Maoli rapper, Krystilez. This “refusal” represents a desire to contest hegemonic imagery of Hawaiʻi as a feminized paradise. Foregrounding a Native feminist critique of colonialism, Krystilez’s performances generate cultural nationalism through the embrace of hegemonic forms of masculinity. This chapter also discusses the creation of Hawaiian performance spaces and digital networks.
Conclusion
Authors: Teves Stephanie Nohelani
Published: January 2019

The Conclusion calls for a reconsideration of what it means to expression Hawaiian indigeneity and how aloha is felt and exchanged within Hawaiian spaces. Engaging recent efforts to “create” a Hawaiian governing entity, Teves discusses the contradictory feelings that arise when belonging is administered by an arm of the federal government. Reminding readers that belonging is contingent and messy, as is all articulations of indigeneity and Hawaiian life today.
Introduction
Authors: Sleeper-Smith Susan
Published: January 2019

Indigenous people along the tributary rivers of the Ohio River created a functioning society that responded to their needs and was shaped by their cultural traditions. Indians engaged in rational and deliberate social action. Following contact with Europeans, the economic structure of the Ohio River region changed. The evolution of an Indian-controlled fur trade led to prosperity rather than decline. A complex, agrarian landscape created in great part by Indian women supported and sustained a village world where women controlled the food supply, processed furs, and influenced the fur trade exchange process. This prosperous village world was undermined in the 1780s and 1790s by the terrorizing and plunder of Indian villages, which disrupted agrarianism and the fur trade. Federal support for frontier violence and the kidnapping of Indian women threatened to undermine this world but simultaneously encouraged Indians to ban together in a Pan-Indian Confederacy and inflict two disastrous defeats on U.S. armed forces. The success of Indian resistance gave President Washington a reason to overcome public resistance against the creation of a large, standing army. Victory over Indigenous people finally took place at the Battle of at Fallen Timbers in 1794. However, this defeat did not signal demise, and western movement was only fully secured following the War of 1812.
The Agrarian Village World of the Ohio Valley Indians
Authors: Sleeper-Smith Susan
Published: January 2019

Explores Indian women’s involvement in environmentally shaping the agrarian landscape of the almost-thousand-mile-long Ohio River valley. Women planted their crops in riverway bottomlands and produced a surplus food supply that encouraged trade with nearby and distant villages. An extensive trading network preceded European arrival. Extensive cornfields, bountiful vegetable gardens, and fruit orchards characterized Indian villages along the Ohio’s tributary rivers. Indigenous women developed a stable, continuous cropping system that maintained the organic matter in the soils by not plowing, and this provided long-range village stability. Environmental abundance in the Ohio River valley sustained high population levels. Rivers and streams teemed with more than a hundred varieties of fish; lakes abounded with wildlife and 250 species of mussels. Villages were strategically located within landscape niches that ensured sedentism and increased village size. These niches, or openings, provided access to adjacent, fertile fields, rich wetlands with nutritional plants, and forests that supplied meat and furs. Numerous bison, elk, and deer herds populated the region. Wetlands food sources were breadbaskets, and even small wetland patches produced high yields of food resources.
The Evolution of the Indian Fur Trade
Authors: Sleeper-Smith Susan
Published: January 2019

Green Bay was an early center of a precontact Indian trading network that stretched throughout the western Great Lakes. In the mid-seventeenth century, large numbers of Indian households were drawn to Green Bay from the Ohio River valley to trade with recently arrived French traders. Many Ohio Indians, especially the Miami, sent households to Green Bay to secure access to the manufactured trade goods available from the French. Movement was often voluntary, and not all Indians were driven west to seek refuge from the Iroquois. A brisk beaver trade led to an oversupply of furs in French warehouses, and Versailles reacted by closing the western trade. Without access to European goods, Indians returned to the Ohio River valley, where they began trading with the English and rapidly assumed control of the fur trade. For more than twenty years, the French trade remained closed, and the numerous Frenchmen who remained took up residence in Indian households, often marrying Indian women “in the manner of the country.” The fur trade ban encouraged Indian resettlement in the Ohio River valley, where Indians had access to highly desirable furs in the Black Swamp, The ban on the western trade refocused the fur trade to a region little explored by the French and controlled by Indians.
Plunder and Massacre
Authors: Sleeper-Smith Susan
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the impact on Indian villages following George Rogers Clark’s seizure of Fort Vincennes from the British in 1779. Clark modeled how he expected his militia followers to deal with Indians. Rather than negotiate with them, Clark scorned, intimidated, brutalized, and killed Native people. He encouraged his men to loot prosperous Indian villages along the lower Wabash. Raiding and plundering thriving Indian communities became a profitable venture for Clark’s penniless militia and for the squatters who followed them onto Kentucky lands. Marauders made substantial profits from the Indian clothing, silver ornaments, and household goods stolen on these assaults. Auctions took place regularly along the Kentucky frontier as returning raiders sold the booty and then divided the profits among themselves. Indians who had signed peace treaties with the U.S. became easy targets. The frequent massacre of peaceful Indian leaders and their followers led to support for a Pan-Indian Confederacy. Determined to keep the Ohio River as the boundary line with U.S. lands, this confederacy dealt a humiliating defeat to the U.S. Army, led by General Harmar, and left President Washington resolved to seek revenge.
Aftermath
Authors: Sleeper-Smith Susan
Published: January 2019

St. Clair’s defeat left Indians in control of the lands north of the Ohio River and interrupted the United States’ western movement. The president needed several years to reorganize, recruit, and intensively train a larger army that was capable of defeating the Pan-Indian Confederacy. Washington’s shift from confrontation to peace was political posturing, a way of playing it safe until a larger, well-trained army could ensure U.S. victory. Washington appointed Rufus Putnam to negotiate with Indians and to formulate a “peace policy.” To do so, Putnam released the Indian women from U.S. captivity and held a peace conference at Vincennes. The Vincennes treaty negotiations were unique because of the large number of Indian women who attended the conference. Women far outnumbered men. Despite their harsh year of imprisonment, these Indian women refused to cede any additional lands to the U.S. Orators reinforced their message, demanding that peace be secured by the U.S. and that the federal government ensure that the Ohio River remain the boundary line between the United States and Indian people. Speakers at this conference repeatedly linked women to the land, invoking the extreme grief, or “weeping,” associated with land loss.
Picturing Identity
Authors: Wong Hertha D. Sweet
Published: January 2019

In this book, Hertha D. Sweet Wong examines the intersection of writing and visual art in the autobiographical work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American writers and artists who employ a mix of written and visual forms of self-narration. Combining approaches from autobiography studies and visual studies, Wong argues that, in grappling with the breakdown of stable definitions of identity and unmediated representation, these writers-artists experiment with hybrid autobiography in image and text to break free of inherited visual-verbal regimes and revise painful histories. These works provide an interart focus for examining the possibilities of self-representation and self-narration, the boundaries of life writing, and the relationship between image and text. Wong considers eight writers-artists, including comic-book author Art Spiegelman; Faith Ringgold, known for her story quilts; and celebrated Indigenous writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Wong shows how her subjects formulate webs of intersubjectivity shaped by historical trauma, geography, race, and gender as they envision new possibilities of selfhood and fresh modes of self-narration in word and image.
Peter Najarian’s Illustrated Memoirs
Authors: Wong Hertha D. Sweet
Published: January 2019

This chapter discusses Peter Najarian’s illustrated memoirs, autobiographical narratives in book format that incorporate drawings, paintings, and photographs: Daughters of Memory, The Great American Loneliness, and The Artist and His Mother. The son of a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, Najarian filters the story of his Armenian American family and community through Western art and literature, depicting his legacy of transgenerational trauma. In his assemblage of texts and images, Najarian grapples with the complex issues of representation, memory, history, and subjectivity, forcing readers to look anew.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée
Authors: Wong Hertha D. Sweet
Published: January 2019

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee is an experimental visual autobiography in which she thematizes her parents’ experience of the Japanese Occupation of Korea, their immigration to the United States, as well as her own sense of being in perpetual exile and grappling with the transgenerational trauma that threatens to overwhelm her. This chapter argues that Dictee’s cinematic style arises from Cha’s work in experimental film, correspondence art, and conceptual art. It depicts Cha as a disembodied female voice struggling to visualize embodied speech on the page, all the while offering a self-reflexive commentary on the autobiographical process and her struggle to find a suitable conclusion to her narrative of trauma. Finally, the chapter discusses Dictee’s serial conclusions and Cha’s endlessly deferred return. Rather than narrate a romantic, nostalgic return, Cha visually and textually performs its impossibility in the pages of Dictee
Faith Ringgold’s Story Quilts
Authors: Wong Hertha D. Sweet
Published: January 2019

African American artist Faith Ringgold’s oversized story quilts are painted and stitched image-text narratives on fabric intended to be hung on art gallery walls. In all her work she thematizes race and gender, part of her project to revise historical misrepresentations and generate more accurate depictions. This chapter discusses Ringgold’s various interventions in a long history of textual and visual domination, noting also Ringgold’s innovations: how quilt squares function simultaneously as individual images or texts and as part of the entire visual field. Each quilt square functions as a page, while a series of quilt squares can function also as a frame. The sets of relations between page and frame and between image and text are multiple and variable.
Introduction
Authors: Burke Kyle
Published: January 2019

The introduction opens with the story of John Singlaub, a retired US Army general who spearheaded covert campaigns to aid anticommunist freedom fighters in Asia, Africa, and Latin America the 1980s. Singlaub’s work serves as an entry point into the anticommunist international—a globe-spanning network of conservative and right-wing forces that worked in concert across the Cold War era. Drawing upon convictions that dated back to the 1950s, Singlaub and many others hoped to foment a worldwide anticommunist revolution, liberating humankind from the threat of totalitarianism. Breaking with conventional histories that portray these forces as backwards-looking reactionaries, this book argues that the Cold War Right was internationalist in its orientation and revolutionary in its aims.
Revolution and Counterrevolution
Authors: Burke Kyle
Published: January 2019

In the early 1970s, U.S. conservatives’ proliferating connections to kindred movements abroad proved difficult to manage. When an attempt to lead a new group called the World Anti-Communist League ended in disaster, Americans began to turn their back on the anticommunist international. It was too radical and too uncontrollable, some said. As Americans withdrew from the movement, new leaders emerged. In Latin America, much of which fell under the sway of authoritarian military dictatorships in the 1970s, right-wing civilians and state officials mobilized a network of security forces, private groups, mercenaries, and paramilitaries to purge their societies of suspected subversives and eliminate their opponents abroad. They would make the anticommunist international more lethal.
Covert Warriors for Hire
Authors: Burke Kyle
Published: January 2019

In the late 1970s, a new set of Americans took up the dream of a global anticommunist revolution. Many were high-ranking CIA and military officers who had been forced from their jobs by the Ford and Carter administrations in the wake of the Vietnam War. As Congress passed new laws constraining the United States’ clandestine services, these ex-soldiers and spies argued that the state’s deteriorating covert war-making abilities signaled a broader decline in U.S. power. To remedy that, retired covert warriors such as U.S. Army General John Singlaub, a thirty-year veteran of special operations, entered the world of conservative activism, which promised both steady pay and power in retirement. Working in the shadow of the state, they sought to revitalize a form of combat to which they had dedicated their lives. Some even started private military firms to fill in for the U.S. government. Meanwhile, hundreds of American men, mostly disgruntled Vietnam veterans, sought new lives as mercenaries, first in Southeast Asia and then in Rhodesia and Angola. In the late 1970s, these two camps of revanchist Americans—retired covert warriors and aspiring mercenaries—established patterns of paramilitarism that would transform the anticommunist international in the Reagan era.
Private Wars in Central America
Authors: Burke Kyle
Published: January 2019

Growing more confident, John Singlaub and other retired covert warriors launched a series of paramilitary campaigns in Central America in the 1980s. As the Reagan administration faced stiff resistance about its wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador from Congress and the American public, many on the right concluded that the private sector was best suited to channel money, weapons, supplies, and advisors to embattled paramilitary groups. Starting in 1981, Singlaub and his allies organized rallies, sponsored television and radio programs, and published books, pamphlets, and articles to raise millions of dollars in private donations from wealthy individuals and businesses, international groups, and grassroots organizations. Then they used these funds to establish private military aid programs that they hoped would not only fill in for the United States military and intelligence services but also do a better job for less money. This struggle against foreign enemies, made possible by will and weapons, simultaneously legitimized a growing paramilitary subculture in the United States. For it presented a vision of combat in which ordinary citizens took up arms to fight communism.
Rebels for the Cause
Authors: Burke Kyle
Published: January 2019

In the mid-1980s, John Singlaub and those around him tried to globalize the covert war campaigns they had launched in Central America. By 1985, he and others were working to support paramilitary forces in not only Nicaragua and El Salvador but also Afghanistan, Angola, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Speaking in a language of masculinity and brotherhood, they linked these disparate conflicts into a joint struggle that promised a final triumph over the Soviet Union by dragging it into a series of unwinnable wars. As Reagan entered his second term, retired covert warriors and a legion of conservative activists strove to make that plan into a reality. They traveled to Afghanistan, Angola, and Southeast Asia to meet with rebels in the field. They solicited donations from individuals, businesses, churches, and international groups to lobby Congress. They utilized a variety of media outlets to valorize the world’s freedom fighters in U.S. political culture. And they tried to give rebel groups whatever weapons and supplies they could. Combined, all of this activity constituted a relatively unpublicized, private, and multinational paramilitary operation.
Conclusion
Authors: Burke Kyle
Published: January 2019

The Iran-Contra scandal halted much of these paramilitary campaigns in the late 1980s. That was because it required many of the most important actors, John Singlaub among them, to spend much of their time testifying in Congress and preparing legal defenses, rather than working overseas. Within a few years, the collapse of the Soviet Union made the anticommunist international obsolete. Still, the ideas and impulses that had animated it lived on. Those legacies were most evident in the rise of the private military firms abroad and the radicalization of the right-wing paramilitaries at home.
A Whole Lot of Blame to Go Around
Authors: Carmichael Peter S.
Published: January 2019

Placing the battle of Five Forks in the larger context of Robert E. Lee’s plans for a spring campaign, Carmichael concludes that while Pickett and Fitz Lee deserve much of the blame for the calamity at Five Forks, the Confederate loss was not entirely their fault. Robert E. Lee’s loss of operational control of the right flank coupled with his poorly worded orders to hold the Forks “at all hazards” – a boggy terrain, which rendered it nearly impossible to move man or horse – likewise contributed to the defeat. “Operational oversight from Lee’s headquarters could have brought attention to this issue and likely averted disaster, though not defeat,” Carmichael explains. Yet by the early twentieth century, the Lost Cause had worked to absolve Robert E. Lee of blame for any shortcomings – including Five Forks. Responsibility for the routing would fall squarely on the shoulders of his subordinates.
Lucky Inspiration
Authors: Hsieh Wayne Wei-Siang
Published: January 2019

This essay explores how Philip Sheridan's operations during the Appomattox campaign represented the culmination of an evolutionary process of the Union cavalry arm in the East from 1861 though the spring of 1865. Sheridan's aggressive style of command and gradual maturation proved central to its success. There were other senior cavalry officers in the Army of the Potomac who might have commanded the Cavalry Corps in 1864 including Alfred Pleasonton or David McMurtie Gregg. But Sheridan’s ascendancy and his leadership style ultimately restored a measure of fluidity to military operations in Virginia that had evaporated in the Overland Campaign. With an independent command in the Shenandoah Valley during the fall of 1864, Sheridan had deployed infantry in conjunction with the cavalry units, many of which carried Spencer repeating carbines – a tactic that would prove key as Federal forces pursued Lee’s army the following spring.
Lee, Breckinridge, and Campbell
Authors: Davis William C.
Published: January 2019

In the late winter of 1865, the newly appointed Confederate Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge believed that the war was lost, reunion all but inevitable, and with Lee’s endorsement the Confederate Congress might press Jefferson Davis to sue for peace. For months prior to Appomattox, Lee, Breckinridge, and Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell strategized on how the Confederacy might avoid an absolute military subjugation. As late as April 2, Breckinridge and Campbell were devising a new peace strategy, and on April 7 Lee and the secretary of war discussed how they might yet avoid outright surrender. Highlighting the interplay between the military and political goals of the war, Davis’s essay places Lee’s exchanges with Grant between April 7 and 9 into context: if Lee could stall as long as possible and perhaps convince the Union general to agree to an armistice, perhaps the Confederacy might yet survive intact or at the very least the Union would be forced to make significant concessions.
The Last Hour of the Slaveholders’ Rebellion
Authors: Varon Elizabeth R.
Published: January 2019

The essay elucidates how that belief took shape in the moment of Union victory, and the myriad ways it found expression in the postwar era. Varon demonstrates that the enshrinement of Appomattox as a “freedom day” rested on three interconnected claims: that the Union army’s victory over Lee dramatized the manly heroism and agency of African American soldiers; that the surrender brought many slaves their first consciousness and experience of liberation; and that the magnanimous terms of surrender which Grant offered Lee symbolized the promise of racial reconciliation between whites and blacks. Lee’s surrender figured as a prominent symbol in the bitter and protracted debates over race, reconstruction and reunion.
New Spain
Authors: Quintero Saravia Gonzalo M.
Published: January 2019

This chapter follows Bernardo de Gálvez’s first sojourn in America where he followed his uncle who was posted to the viceroyalty of New Spain (mainly today’s Mexico, Southwest of the United States and part of Central America) as visitador general (visitor general) in charge of conducting an inspection of all the branches of colonial administration as part of the so-called bourbon reforms. When his uncle fell seriously ill, Bernardo de Gálvez assumed his position as lieutenant, and afterwards as captain of the Presidiales, the American-born soldiers, fighting the Apaches who were conducting raids against Spanish settlements. Instead of succumbing to the warmongering attitudes prevalent in the region, he studied the Apaches’ culture, including their motivations for their attacks, concluding that a new Indian policy was needed in order to pacify the region. His report appeared under the title of Account and reflections on the current war against the Apache Indians in the provinces of New Spain is a mayor source for the Apaches’ culture and situation during the second-half of the eighteenth century.
Arrival in Louisiana and Preparations for War
Authors: Quintero Saravia Gonzalo M.
Published: January 2019

Bernardo de Gálvez arrived to New Orleans at the end of 1776 and took office on January 1 of the following year. With the British colonies in open revolt, Spain needed to prepare for what it seemed to be unavoidable: another chapter in the centuries-old confrontation against Britain in the Americas. The Paris Treaty of 1763, which ended the Seven Years’ War, had transferred Louisiana from France to Spain, but shortly afterwards the former French colonists rebelled against their new rulers, therefore Bernardo de Gálvez’s first priority was to ensure their loyalty in order to prepare the province for war. With a combination of concessions to the rich planters and merchants with the tightening of the Spanish colonial administration control over the province, Gálvez was able to implement several reforms that increased Louisiana’s economy and its military preparedness for war. Following the precedents of the French and British relations with the Indian nations in North America, Gálvez introduced profound changes to the traditional Spanish “Indian policy”.
Bernardo de Gálvez Takes the Initiative
Authors: Quintero Saravia Gonzalo M.
Published: January 2019

When Spain declared war to Britain on June 21, 1779, the Spanish empire had been already supporting the American patriots for several years. Money and supplies were channelled both through Gardoqui & Sons, a Spanish firm with long standing commercial ties with Boston, and New Orleans from where they went up the Mississippi and then by land to George Washington’s Continental Army in the East. In order to prevent a British attack against Spanish Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez launched a pre-emptive strike against the ill-prepared and little defended British outposts of Fort Manchac (September 7, 1779) and Baton Rouge (September 21, 1779) that quickly surrendered. The next objective, Mobile, had stronger defenses so reinforcements were needed from Cuba. The high command on the island, however doubted both the operation, and the commander. More so, on January 1780, the Spanish forces that sailed from New Orleans were mostly wrecked by a storm. Despite this setback, Gálvez continued his march towards Mobile and after the arrival of the long-awaited reinforcements and supplies from Havana he was able to start the siege by late February 1780. On March 13, the Spanish artillery was able to breach Fort Charlotte’s walls and the British garrison surrendered.
Objectives
Authors: Quintero Saravia Gonzalo M.
Published: January 2019

The next Franco-Spanish objective was Jamaica. The biggest and richest of the sugar islands, a crucial resource for the British Treasury with a white population completely loyal to the Crown. The joint forces for the invasion were to be gathered in Guarico, today’s Haiti, but the complex preparations and coordination between the two allies kept delaying their departure. When a French fleet under the command of the Count de Grasse was on its way to the rendezvous with the Spanish forces, it was defeated by Admiral Sir George Rodney (Battle of the Saints, April 1782), and the invasion had to be postponed. In the end, an armistice was agreed before the planned attack took place. Bernardo de Gálvez returned and his family travelled for the first time to Spain in September 1783. In Madrid he was frequently consulted on North American affairs and while he waited for his next assignment he became interested in the military applications of hot-air balloons, to the point of conducting an experiment recorded in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. In late 1785, Gálvez was appointed Cuba’s Governor, but with the death of his father, who was New Spain’s viceroy, he was appointed as his successor.
The Times Ahead Are Fearful
Authors: Coggeshall John M.
Published: January 2019

This chapter documents the founding of Liberia and its flourishing during the late 19th century. Discussion includes the names of the founders, the methods of acquiring land, and the reasons for the location and name. Soapstone Baptist Church and Soapstone School are established. African American population expands into the hundreds, but then begins a slow decline under the more restrictive Jim Crow segregation laws in the late nineteenth century. Family stories and local historical sources provide personalized information.
Because Hatred Is All It Was
Authors: Coggeshall John M.
Published: January 2019

This chapter describes the critical turning point of the Liberia community: the burning by arson of the old Soapstone Baptist Church and its reconstruction during the height of desegregation in South Carolina. By using eyewitness accounts, resident memories, and newspaper descriptions, the story of the church burning and the community’s rallying of white and black support is documented. Within a year, the church is rebuilt, primarily through the efforts of a now-deceased matriarch. Her role as a community “othermother” (informal leader) is also discussed.
This Is My Home
Authors: Coggeshall John M.
Published: January 2019

This chapter brings the story of Liberia into the present. Drawing on memories of current residents, the chapter describes efforts to preserve and present the community’s history to visitors. For example, the original community cemetery is re-discovered, cleared, protected, and interpreted. Newer homes provide refuge for returning relatives or aging kin. Some racist sentiments remain, but overwhelmingly Liberia’s remaining residents fit comfortably into a rural Upstate South Carolina landscape.
It’s Sacred Ground
Authors: Coggeshall John M.
Published: January 2019

This chapter uses the example of Liberia’s returning population to offer a wider examination of the relationship between Appalachian residents and their family land. Using an anthropological lens, the chapter outlines the cultural process by which land becomes a member of one’s family. Specifically, the process entails ownership of family land, occupancy of family land, memories of that land, the merging of land and people through time, and finally the anthropomorphizing of land. The chapter ends with an Epilogue linking enslaved ancestors from the Oolenoy Valley with descendants still living in Liberia, and the sweep of history over the same landscape.
Who Is Enslaved?
Authors: Hartog Hendrik
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the question of how to know or identify someone as free or enslaved, particularly in a legal culture where enslaved peoples represent an increasingly small percentage of the number of African Americans. It uses a variety of cases: one about arson, another about a free black ship captain, and a series of cases that elaborated on a legal presumption that all black people were presumptively enslaved until otherwise demonstrated. The cases occurred between 1820 and 1840
Introduction
Authors: Balachandran Orihuela Sharada
Published: January 2019

The introduction tackles the place of piracy in the creation of the U.S. nation-state and more expansive conceptions of citizenship. Piracy is not simply an act of robbery against an individual man or institution, but rather a behavior that contests the very legitimacy and integrity of the state. And yet, as historical and cultural studies of piracy show, piracy is also a behavior that is capable of creating novel forms of community. It is a behavior that those with little to no claims to protections from the state turn to in order to ensure economic and social survival through property ownership. After all, property has always been integral in the creation of citizenship and has played a pivotal role in the development of normative conceptions of U.S. citizenship and national belonging that reverberate across the Americas. By making property accessible to those individuals altogether excluded from the category of the citizen, dispossessed persons’ expressions of property ownership structurally upset and ultimately unsettle the state’s dispensation of property and citizenship. In sum, dispossessed persons’ ownership of property is always a form of piracy in that it troubles the legitimacy, integrity, and power of the dispossessive nation-state.
America’s Blackbeard
Authors: Balachandran Orihuela Sharada
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the ways early nineteenth century authors framed piracy as an instrument of state growth, anti-colonial resistance, as well as a rationale for imperial expansion and intervention in the Americas in William Gilmore Simms’s The Yemassee (1835), John Brougham’s 1857 play Columbus, El Filibustero!, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover: A Tale (1829) and The Water Witch; or, The Skimmer of the Seas (1830), as well as El Filibustero: Novela Historica (1864), written by Yucatec author Eligio Ancona. In a climate of rapid national expansion, nineteenth century authors used the pirate as a central character to plot national(ist) narratives. Given piracy’s relationship to both state-building and anti-colonial enterprises, as well as piracy’s capacity to both facilitate and threaten property ownership, piracy helps us understand the radical and repressive regimes of American power. The historical novels examined in this chapter are interested in the shadowy origins of the American nation-state, as much as they are with the potentially conflicted present and future of these nation-states.