bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Tales of Two Families, 1793–1800
Authors: Livesay Daniel
Published: May 2018

This chapter charts the experiences of mixed-race migrants competing with legitimate relatives in Britain. In particular, it examines a number of inheritance lawsuits between Jamaicans of color in Britain and their white relatives over a shared colonial estate. It contends that constrictions in the definition and legal standing of kinship at the turn to the nineteenth century suddenly made mixed-race Jamaicans improper members of extended, Atlantic families. Increasing discomfort with mixed-race family members is also demonstrated in sentimental fiction at the time. The chapter assesses a large number of novels and fictional tracts in the last decade of the eighteenth century that included migrants of color as key characters in their stories. The inclusion of such characters was employed to excoriate the illegitimacy, marginal position, and racial divergence of mixed-race people in Britain. Finally, the chapter traces the experiences of the mothers of color left in Jamaica and the ways they attempted to advocate for their children across the Atlantic.
Conclusion
Authors: Livesay Daniel
Published: May 2018

The conclusion reiterates the core argument of the book. It contends that mixed-race Jamaicans who left for Britain were critical to the debates around race and slavery in the Anglo-Atlantic world. In particular, their experiences show the ways family relationships influenced racial standing in the long eighteenth century. When definitions of family were loose, elites of color could successfully integrate in the British Empire. When definitions of family constricted, it became much more difficult to avoid being lumped into discriminated categories around Africanness. Overall, the conclusion reasserts that racial ideologies and prejudices were more complex than previously thought, both in the nakedly abusive society of Jamaica as well as the seemingly more tolerant location of Britain.
The Herds Shot Round the World
Authors: Woods Rebecca J. H.
Published: May 2018

As Britain industrialized in the early nineteenth century, animal breeders faced the need to convert livestock into products while maintaining the distinctive character of their breeds. Thus they transformed cattle and sheep adapted to regional environments into bulky, quick-fattening beasts. Exploring the environmental and economic ramifications of imperial expansion on colonial environments and production practices, Rebecca J. H. Woods traces how global physiological and ecological diversity eroded under the technological, economic, and cultural system that grew up around the production of livestock by the British Empire. Attending to the relationship between type and place and what it means to call a particular breed of livestock “native,” Woods highlights the inherent tension between consumer expectations in the metropole and the ecological reality at the periphery. Based on extensive archival work in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia, this study illuminates the connections between the biological consequences and the politics of imperialism. In tracing both the national origins and imperial expansion of British breeds, Woods uncovers the processes that laid the foundation for our livestock industry today.
The First Breed of Cattle
Authors: Woods Rebecca J. H.
Published: May 2018

Chapter 3 interrogates the concept of a “native” breed within the context of pedigree cattle breeding in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. It centers on Hereford cattle, which began their career as a hardy regional breed of varied appearance. As cattle breeders increasingly turned towards recorded pedigrees as guarantees of value, and pure-breeding (mating closely-related animals to narrow a genotype) became the became the desired goal, if not always the practical norm, within the industry, Hereford cattle increasingly failed to measure up against “improved” varieties like the Shorthorn breed. “Nativeness” initially operated as a proxy for purity in the case of Hereford cattle, as the close connection between type and place worked in favour of the breed, but over time, breeders turned to other measures. Phenotypic uniformity became paramount at mid-century by which time all Herefords displayed red coats and white faces, and its “native” character began to expand beyond its original region to take on national trappings in conjunction with a growing national taste for British beef.
A Universal Type
Authors: Woods Rebecca J. H.
Published: May 2018

This chapter addresses the wholesale exportation of Hereford cattle to North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand in the 1870s as part of a concerted effort to feed Britons with “British” meat bred and raised abroad, and returned to the metropole as frozen meat. In their enthusiasm to profit from foreign demand for British stock, Hereford breeders allowed their (quasi-)colonial competitors to establish their own reservoirs of the breed’s genetic potential. After American breeders severed ties with their British counterparts over the lack of stringency in English pedigrees, these two branches of the bovine family tree developed in isolation. While English Herefords increasingly gained status as a national breed, shedding their regional association with the county of Hereford for a perceived Britishness, Herefords in America became a new, quasi-colonial “native” breed, much like New Zealand’s Corriedale breed of sheep.
Religion as Critique
Authors: Ahmad Irfan
Published: May 2018

Irfan Ahmad makes the far-reaching argument that potent systems and modes for self-critique as well as critique of others are inherent in Islam—indeed, critique is integral to its fundamental tenets and practices. Challenging common views of Islam as hostile to critical thinking, Ahmad delineates thriving traditions of critique in Islamic culture, focusing in large part on South Asian traditions. Ahmad interrogates Greek and German as well as French Enlightenment notions of reason and critique, and he notes how they are invoked in relation to “others,” including Muslims. To move away from the Enlightenment’s equation with reason and critique, the book turns to the axial age, an “age of criticism.” Like the Prophets Moses and Jesus, Muhammad was a critic-reformer. Drafting an alternative genealogy of critique in Islam, Ahmad reads religious teachings and texts, drawing on sources in Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, and English, and demonstrates how they serve as expressions of critique. Throughout, he depicts Islam as an agent, not an object, of critique. On a broader level, Ahmad expands the idea of critique itself. Drawing on his fieldwork among marketplace hawkers in Delhi and Aligarh, he construes critique anthropologically as a sociocultural activity in the everyday lives of ordinary Muslims, beyond the world of intellectuals. Religion as Critique allows space for new theoretical considerations of modernity and change, taking on such salient issues as nationhood, women’s equality, the state, culture, democracy, and secularism.
Virtus and Historical Writing
Authors: Balmaceda Catalina
Published: May 2018

This chapter briefly discusses the nature of historical writing in Rome, including its complex relationship with rhetoric and didactic purposes, and challenges some current views on these points. The central questions of this study are addressed: a) why was virtus so important to the Roman historians? and b) what role does political change play in the (re)definition of the concept of virtus and also in the development of its expression in practice? It also discusses how and why the Roman historians, who saw historiography as an account of the life and mores [cf. Livy, Praef. 9] of the Roman people through time, made morality a valid category for explaining their past, and why, therefore, the analysis of the concept of virtus through their narratives is a sound way of approaching Roman historical writing.
The Concept of Virtus
Authors: Balmaceda Catalina
Published: May 2018

Chapter 1 presents the concept of virtus in terms of its etymology and usage. It also provides comparisons with its Greek parallels andreia and arete, and a brief assessment of the influence of Greek philosophy on Roman thought, Stoicism in particular, regarding virtus. The two main meanings of virtus are explained through the concepts of virilis-virtus (courage) and humana-virtus (virtue) and show the particular connections between virtus and Roman politics. Cicero holds a particularly important place in this chapter, as the creator of a nomenclature and vocabulary that offer an adequate rationalization of the concept of virtus.
Virtus in Sallust
Authors: Balmaceda Catalina
Published: May 2018

Chapter 2 argues that through his historical works, Sallust emerges both as the advocate of an understanding of virtus that expanded the sense he had inherited of what it meant to be a good Roman and as the promoter of the idea of the contestability of virtus in the ideological struggles of the late republic. It also gives an assessment of Sallust’s profound influence on the moral language of Roman historiography and his analysis of political decline in relation to virtus. The section deals with virtus in both the prologues and discusses how the thematic variations between the two relate to the different historical narratives. Finally, through a close analysis of the corruption of logos in the text, it explores how Sallust’s creation of a ‘vocabulary of decline’ and the devaluation of language illustrate the moving boundaries of the moral and political behaviour of the main historical characters.
Queers during and after Prohibition
Authors: Capó Julio
Published: May 2018

Despite the visibility of a commoditized heterosexuality in the fairyland traced in the previous chapter, transnational and local forces further allowed queer folk to carve out spaces for themselves in Miami. By the 1920s, U.S. imperialism ensured that racialized sex tourism in Cuba and the Bahamas—particularly the former—became central to Miami’s own economic success. This chapter reveals two key phenomena in the development of queer cultures and networks: Miami’s entrenched relationship to the Caribbean during Prohibition, and the uneasy urban battles that ensued upon Prohibition’s repeal. Additional transnational tensions—including the rise of the aviation industry, Miami’s real estate bust and devastating hurricane, and the 1933 Cuban Revolution—nudged Miami toward becoming a “wide-open” city. This status allowed queers to carve out distinct spaces in the city, particularly during peak tourist season. Indeed, queers made the tourist economy work, staffing the service industry and functioning as physical representations of the fantasy and transgression urban boosters marketed, keenly designed as alternatives or supplements to what the Caribbean offered.
From the Outside In
Authors: Gillick Muriel R.
Published: May 2018

The interests of various groups--physicians, hospital administrators, drug companies, device manufacturers, and Medicare—affect the older patient’s experience in the office. Physicians avoid home visits in the interest of achieving work/life balance; hospitals buy medical practices to maximize admissions; drug companies use point-of-care marketing to sell pharmaceuticals; device manufacturers lobby physicians to order tests; and Medicare mandates medication reviews and after-visit summaries.
Entering the Palace of Technology
Authors: Gillick Muriel R.
Published: May 2018

Hospitals are both potentially life-saving and dangerous. For vulnerable older people, the hospital poses the risk of developing acute confusion, adverse drug reactions, falls, and loss of independence. It is a technologically-intensive, unfamiliar environment that is often disorienting to elderly patients.
Introduction
Authors: Grant Nicholas
Published: May 2018

This chapter provides an overview of racial politics in the United States and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. It traces how African Americans and black South Africans have historically configured their struggles as being interconnected, while documenting how anticommunism limited opportunities for transnational black activism between both countries during the early Cold War.
South Africa, the United States, and the Racial Politics of the Cold War
Authors: Grant Nicholas
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the relationship between anticommunism and transnational black activism. The racial politics of the United States and South Africa became even more closely interconnected during the early Cold War. The political, economic and military ties that were established between the U.S. and South African governments at this moment dramatically reshaped how African Americans and black South Africans engaged in one another struggles. As the apartheid state positioned themselves as a key bulwark against the spread of communism in Southern Africa, black activists on both sides of the Atlantic mobilized to challenge this relationship.
Motherhood, Anti-Apartheid, and Pan-African Politics
Authors: Grant Nicholas
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines how the gendered language of motherhood informed black international connections between South Africa and the United States. It argues that global black motherhood – defined as a form of transnational maternalist politics based around the shared experiences of black women in white supremacist societies – shaped racial politics on both sides of the Atlantic. It demonstrates how black women in the United States and South Africa transformed the domestic sphere into a site where citizenship claims could be made. By privileging their position within the home, as primary caregivers for the black family, they worked to stress the political significance of black motherhood in the global fight against white supremacy.
The National Council of Negro Women and Apartheid
Authors: Grant Nicholas
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the anti-apartheid politics of the Washington-based National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Outlining the organization’s broader commitment to black international politics, it shows how its leadership worked with the State Department as it ought to expand its international activities in this era. As such, the chapter demonstrates how black liberals adapted to the climate of the Cold War when attempting to challenge colonialism overseas. Finally, by tracing the involvement of the NCNW with the African Children’s Feeding Scheme initiative, the chapter documents how highly gendered representations of the African family worked to promote a diasporic consciousness among African Americans. During the 1950s, images of the oppressed African mother, the poor and malnourished African child, and the African family in need of protection were deliberately employed as gendered motifs around which black women could build international alliances.
Tales of Conversion and Call
Authors: Hayes John
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores two interrelated oral forms: conversion and call narratives. It establishes that they were cultural productions of the New South era, and that they wove elements of African and European religious tradition together to craft a distinct understanding of Christianity’s place in the world—either as an initiate enters into it, or as a religious authority proclaims it. The speakers, dates, and geographic scope of these narratives are traced, and then a close analysis of the oral forms highlights their characteristic features. The vision articulated in the narratives is shown to be very different from the dominant religious culture, where religious authority was professionalized and Christianity was associated with the safe stability of the home. In sharp contrast, the narratives imagine the wildness and liminality of Christianity.
The Brawn of the Black Mecca and the Black New South
Authors: Hobson Maurice J.
Published: May 2018

Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of a feisty black lawyer named Maynard Holbrook Jackson Jr., who became Atlanta’s first black Vice-Mayor and subsequently Atlanta’s first black mayor. Jackson’s mayoral tenure marked the first of its kind in terms of black big city leadership and bolstered the black Mecca image.
Jackson’s emergence was the fruition of caste and class within black Atlanta. He was a fifth generation Georgian, born into two of Atlanta’s prominent black families. As the grandson of prominent black Atlantans Andrew Jackson and John Wesley Dobbs, Jackson graduated Morehouse College at age 18 and went on to receive legal training in Durham, North Carolina. Jackson cut his teeth as a champion for the people and made headlines as the people’s politician with his quixotic 1968 run for the U.S. Senate against Senator Herman Talmadge.
Jackson’s first term as mayor of Atlanta was full of political success. However, during his second term as mayor, many of his working class and poor black constituency felt as if he sacrificed them to play politics.
The Sorrow of a City
Authors: Hobson Maurice J.
Published: May 2018

Chapter Three focuses on the tumultuous episode where Atlanta’s most vulnerable citizens, primarily poor black children, were being hunted and murdered. To clarify this, chapter three explores the experience of the victims’ families through oral interviews, the FBI papers, and archival research to show how the popular political sentiment of Atlanta’s black working classes and poor towards Atlanta’s black City Hall was one of distrust that thwarts the black Mecca image. Crucial to understanding the Atlanta Child Murders again notes that the prism of race was not the only lens to better understanding this convoluted community, but that class stratification within black Atlanta(s) are lucid.
The Atlanta Child Murders provide a unique counter-narrative on class to Atlanta’s black Mecca status, as victims who were poor black youth were labeled and dismissed as “hustlers and runaways” in effect suggesting that they deserved what happened to them. Chapter three accounts for the experiences of the Committee to Stop Children’s Murder (STOP Committee) and the Techwood Bat Patrol, organizations formed by some of Atlanta’s black working class and poor as they deemed it necessary to organize against the murderers because to them, Jackson was too busy bolstering the black Mecca image while sacrificing Atlanta’s poor to play politics.
This chapter grapples with the idea that at this time, Atlanta’s black political leadership was already working with Atlanta’s white business elite to host the 1988 Democratic National Convention and the 1996 Olympic Games. As a result, it was widely believed by a large segment of the public that Atlanta’s black City Administration downplayed the murders to show that social and economic progress had been made in the South and thus promoting a “city too busy to hate.” Just as important, many in black Atlanta felt that Williams was not the killer and that another killer remained on the loose.
Afterword
Authors: Hobson Maurice J.
Published: May 2018

Atlanta, Georgia, witnessed both the greatest successes and greatest failures with regard to blacks in the United States. A Deep South city, Atlanta was marked by the sordid racial history of the American South with its riots and rebellions, yet was transformed into the South’s newest world-class international city by the late twentieth century....
The Argument against Exit
Authors: Kirkpatrick Jennet
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines Plato’s Crito to explore the political challenges of leaving one’s homeland. When the dialogue opens Socrates is facing a death sentence for high political crimes and he has every reason to flee Athens. His friend Crito tries to persuade Socrates of the virtues of escape, freedom, and self preservation. These arguments are challenged by the Laws of Athens, who are personified by Socrates and make a case against a faithless break with the polity. The chapter argues that this debate illuminates a more general ambivalence that migrants may experience: the push to go, the pull to stay, and the sense of internal conflict that can accompany the prospect of departing. Read in this way, the dialogue enriches an understanding of the meaning and consequences of an exit for the individual.
Expressive Exit
Authors: Kirkpatrick Jennet
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores the work of Henry David Thoreau, a figure who celebrates the benefits of extracting oneself from political life. It argues that Thoreau’s writings about exit reveal the possibility of a expressive exit, that is, a departure that is political in and of itself. For Thoreau, leaving a political community had the potential to illuminate the iniquitous, evil political agreements and institutions at its core. Thoreau was centrally concerned with the American institution of slavery; therefore, he frequently linked leaving with abolitionism in his writings. But his writings provide a more general understanding of the potentially disruptive effects of leaving in an expressive and ostentatious way, one that draws public attention to the exit itself and its connection with moral injustice.
Exodus
Authors: Kirkpatrick Jennet
Published: May 2018

The concluding chapter uses the Exodus narrative to exemplify three main findings of the book. First, Exodus provides an early example of an attached exit. The Israelites leave Egypt, but they are also commanded to remember their oppression and the plight of those who remain in bondage. Second, the Israelites enacted an oppositional, resistant exit that was a direct challenge to the dominant political authority. The narrative reveals the connections between exit and political opposition. Third, exits are not necessarily the end of politics or the end of political community. For the Israelites, the flight out of Egypt begins a politically creative time in which they become a political people. Leaving can spark political innovation and experimentation; it can be the beginning of politics, not its end.
Introduction
Authors: Kranson Rachel
Published: May 2018

In a 1954 article for Commentary magazine, Sylvia Rothchild, writing under the pseudonym Evelyn Rossman, expressed her dissatisfaction with synagogue services in postwar America. “If the service reminded me of the little shul [synagogue] my father went to, I was sad because I remembered how shabby and poor it was,” she complained. “If I found a wealthy Conservative or Reform temple I sat there like a stranger thinking how insincere and hypocritical it all was. Weren’t all good Jews supposed to be poor?”...
What Now Supports Jewish Liberalism?
Authors: Kranson Rachel
Published: May 2018

In the years after World War II, many liberal and left-leaning Jewish leaders expressed concern that American Jews would adopt conservative political values as the result of their economic rise. While there is little evidence to prove that Jewish upward mobility led directly to conservative political values, this fear of a rightward political shift continued to circulate. To the left-leaning leaders of postwar American Jews, this move toward Jewish conservatism – a shift that they saw as an inevitable consequence of Jewish upward mobility -- represented a betrayal of “authentic” Jewish values that were forged out of historical Jewish experiences of social and economic marginality.
What Kind of Job Is That for a Nice Jewish Boy?
Authors: Kranson Rachel
Published: May 2018

In the 1950s and early 1960s, American Jews wrestled with new models of masculinity that their new economic position enabled. For many American Jewish novelists, intellectuals, and clergy of the 1950s and early 1960s, the communal pressure on Jewish men to become middle-class breadwinners betrayed older, more Jewishly-authentic, notions of appropriate masculinity. Their writing promoted alternative, Jewish masculine ideals such as the impoverished scholar and the self-sacrificing soldier, crafting a profoundly gendered critique of Jewish upward mobility.
Epilogue
Authors: Lim Julian
Published: May 2018

In November 1993, the editors of Time magazine devoted an entire issue to the dramatic transformations in American society following the 1965 passage of the Hart-Cellar Act, which had finally abolished the national origin quotas introduced in the 1920s and opened the way for increased immigration from Asia and Latin America. Turning their attention to what they dubbed as “America’s Immigrant Challenge,” the contributors to the issue responded to the visible changes in “the very complexion of the country, the endless and fascinating profusion of peoples, cultures, languages and attitudes that make up the great national pool … constantly fed by new streams of immigrants.”...
Rivalries and Alliances
Authors: Malavasic Alice Elizabeth
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses the ideological evolution and political ascendancy of John C Calhoun as the author of nullification and leader of southern sectionalism in the United States Congress between 1821 and 1844. It also discusses Calhoun’s influence on the early Congressional careers of Robert M.T. Hunter and James Murray Mason of Virginia.
Kansas
Authors: Malavasic Alice Elizabeth
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses the internecine warfare that erupts in Kansas after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act known as Bleeding Kansas. It focuses David Rice Atchison’s leadership of proslavery forces on the ground in Kansas while the remaining members of the Mess lead the senate fight for passage of Kansas’ proslavery constitution. The chapter concludes with the caning of Charles Sumner and the northern democracy’s devastating loses in the 1856 elections.
Raza Sí, Migra No
Authors: Patiño Jimmy
Published: May 2018

As immigration from Mexico to the United States grew through the 1970s and 1980s, the Border Patrol, police, and other state agents exerted increasing violence against ethnic Mexicans in San Diego’s volatile border region. In response, many San Diego activists rallied around the leadership of the small-scale print shop owner Herman Baca in the Chicano movement to empower Mexican Americans through Chicano self-determination. The combination of increasing repression and Chicano activism gradually produced a new conception of ethnic and racial community that included both established Mexican Americans and new Mexican immigrants. Here, Jimmy Patiño narrates the rise of this Chicano/Mexicano consciousness and the dawning awareness that Mexican Americans and Mexicans would have to work together to fight border enforcement policies that subjected Latinos of all statuses to legal violence.
By placing the Chicano and Latino civil rights struggle on explicitly transnational terrain, Patiño fundamentally reorients the understanding of the Chicano movement. Ultimately, Patiño tells the story of how Chicano/Mexicano politics articulated an “abolitionist” position on immigration--going beyond the agreed upon assumptions shared by liberals and conservatives alike that deportations are inherent to any solutions to the still burgeoning immigration debate.
The Sheriff Must Be Obsessed with Racism!
Authors: Patiño Jimmy
Published: May 2018

Chapter 6 explores how Herman Baca and San Diego Chicano/Mexicano created the Committee on Chicano Rights (CCR) in 1976. These activists fought the San Diego Sherriff’s Department issued order for taxi cab drivers, under penalty of citation and fines, to report any of their clientele who they “feel” might be undocumented to their offices for apprehension in 1972. The San Diego Police Department, under the administration of San Diego Mayor (and future California governor) Pete Wilson, followed suit in 1973 by assuming the responsibility of determining resident’s legal status and apprehending the undocumented to assist the U.S. Border Patrol. This culminated in the founding of the CCR through the struggle on behalf of the family of a Puerto Rican barrio youth, Luis “Tato” Rivera, killed by a National City police officer.
From Tropicality to Biodiversity
Authors: Raby Megan
Published: May 2018

Consciousness of tropical biodiversity exploded onto the scene in the 1980s following the 1986 National Forum on BioDiversity. Biodiversity was not a new concept to biologists, however. U.S. scientists’ engagement with life in the tropics already stretched back a century. During this time, scientists had struggled with questions of the biological differences of the tropics—especially its richness in species—and at the same time entangled themselves in U.S. corporate and government efforts to exploit tropical resources. American Tropics argues that both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern biodiversity discourse had significant precedents in biologists’ involvement in U.S. encounters with the tropical world over the course of the twentieth century, centered on the circum­Caribbean region. This book argues that the ideas, attitudes, and institutions forged at field sites in the colonies and neocolonies of the circum­Caribbean are crucial for understanding the emergence of this new paradigm in biology and conservation at the end of the century. Long before the BioDiversity Forum extended such ideas to the globe, U.S. biologists had begun both to articulate fundamental biological questions raised by the diversity of tropical life and to argue for its potential as a natural resource.
Jungle Island
Authors: Raby Megan
Published: May 2018

Tropical stations drew hundreds of U.S. biologists, few of whom would have attempted a rigorous tropical expedition on their own. In the 1920s through 1940s, Barro Colorado Island (BCI) in particular became a model tropical forest. Chapter 3 demonstrates how the station’s location on an island nature reserve within the Panama Canal Zone enabled unprecedented control over space and scientific labor. BCI was transformed into a scientific site by the removal of Panamanian settlers and through descriptions of the site as undisturbed and representative of tropical nature. It was maintained for science by the labor of Panamanian workers and through the development of a host of new techniques and technologies for the prolonged observation of tropical life. There, biologists were able to develop practices to monitor and census living tropical organisms as part of a complex, dynamic ecological community. BCI became increasingly accessible and observable—but only in certain ways and only to certain classes of people.
A Global Resource
Authors: Raby Megan
Published: May 2018

The 1960s and 1970s saw a wave of highly influential publications on problems of the distribution and ecological controls on species diversity, which drew heavily on data from key tropical field sites. Yet, at this same moment U.S. scientists’ future in the tropics was thrown into question. Revolution swept Cuba and protests erupted in Panama against the U.S. occupation of the Canal Zone. U.S. tropical biologists confronted the loss of access to their most important tropical stations. They responded by realigning themselves, creating professional organizations, and taking new steps toward international collaboration. As chapter 5 explains, they also recast their justifications for the support of basic research. Tropical research was not merely in the U.S. national interest, they began to argue; understanding the biological diversity of the tropics was essential for sustainable global development.
Postcolonial Ecology
Authors: Raby Megan
Published: May 2018

American Tropics closes with an examination of the postcolonial situation of tropical research in the circum­Caribbean. Today, the institutions that are the most important and heavily used by U.S. biologists for tropical research and teaching are located in independent republics: the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) in Costa Rica and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI)—since the 1979 dissolution of the Canal Zone—in Panama. Key players in the move to bring “biodiversity” to the public stage in the 1980s were tropical biologists who had deep connections to OTS and STRI during the previous two decades of transition. The emergence of the modern biodiversity discourse, this book argues, is a direct product of the intellectual and political ferment of tropical biology during that revolutionary period. The significance of that moment, in turn, can be understood only in the context of the full twentieth century and its mixed legacies for tropical biology—the development of place­based research practices and a long­standing dependence on institutions supported by U.S. corporations and government agencies.
Introduction
Authors: Rymph Catherine E.
Published: May 2018

The introduction describes aspects of the state of foster care today, noting that child welfare professionals in the early twentieth century had been optimistic that they could create a much better system than what has emerged. The introduction also surveys relevant work by historians that has addressed the history of inequality in the welfare state and the history of adoption, remarking that foster care is significant to both subjects but has not been systematically studied by historians.
The New Deal, Family Security, and the Emergence of a Public Child Welfare System
Authors: Rymph Catherine E.
Published: May 2018

This chapter addresses the significance of the New Deal to the development of publicly funded foster care and its relationship to the nascent welfare state. The chapter includes many first-hand accounts of parents turning to foster care because they could not provide both economic support and nurturing care to their children. The chapter argues that the onset of the Great Depression marked a setback for the delivery of child welfare services. However, the promise of a more rational system of federal welfare provision through passage of the Social Security Act and other New Deal programs raised hopes that economic insecurity for families could be so drastically reduced as to eliminate (or at least diminish) the role of poverty in separating children from their families. In addition, Title V of the Social Security Act also provided funds to develop state-level public child welfare services, which helped spur the creation of a child welfare infrastructure.
Conclusion
Authors: Rymph Catherine E.
Published: May 2018

The conclusion briefly summarizes some of the developments in foster care in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, including the rise of the permanency movement, the passage of the 1980 Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act, and the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act, each of which shaped the development of foster care, particularly in the areas of subsidized adoption and easier paths to Termination of Parental Rights (TPR). The conclusion also argues that society’s reluctance to adequately support low income birth mothers and low paid foster mothers is part of a broader ambivalence about careworkers in general.
The Gendering of the Cultural Revolution, 1919–1934
Authors: Smith Stephanie J.
Published: May 2018

Chapter 2 analyzes the complex and often contradictory gendered positions of women artists associated with Mexico’s Communist Party during the first decades of the twentieth century. This chapter first examines the Mexican Communist Party’s official stance toward women from 1919 to the 1940s, and the changing global and national political framework in which the PCM operated. Next, this chapter highlights the artistic and political contributions of Tina Modotti, while recognizing her ambivalent position within postrevolutionary society. This chapter argues that even as state representatives grew increasingly concerned with Modotti’s communist leanings, Mexican officials nonetheless co-opted Modotti’s image in several ways. Not only did her photographs help to shape an “authentic” Mexican identity, but her very presence provided a cautionary morality tale to all women concerning the consequences of having “questionable” morals and even worse, of adhering to communist principles.
Your Coming Is Not for Trade, but to Invade My People and Possess My Country
Authors: Asch Chris Myers , Musgrove George Derek
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the first contact between the Nacostine tribe and European explorers and settlers in the area that would become the capital of the United States. The cumulative effects of war, disease, and subjugation decimated the Native Americans of the upper Potomac. Thousands lived in the river valley in 1608, but by 1708 just a few hundred remained – beaten, scattered, and subject to the English Crown. On their abandoned lands, the colonists created a plantation society. The few Native Americans who remained watched in anguish as their hunting grounds and corn fields were transformed by European indentured servants and enslaved Africans into tobacco farms; their trade routes made links in a trans-Atlantic commerce joining the Chesapeake to New England and beyond to Europe. The area that would become nation’s capital was cleared through wars of conquest and settled with coerced labor on stolen land.
Of Slaving Blacks and Democratic Whites
Authors: Asch Chris Myers , Musgrove George Derek
Published: May 2018

This chapter describes the founding of Washington, D.C., as the capital of the United States. The area that became Washington was a fully functioning slave society, and the city that grew atop those fields incorporated slavery into every aspect of life. From its inception Washington embodied the contradiction endemic to America itself, the paradoxical juxtaposition of freedom and slavery that bedeviled the nation and ultimately led to the Civil War. Enslaved people worked on public construction projects, they were bought and sold within sight of the Capitol, they drove the hacks that crisscrossed the city, and they waited on the men who ran the nation. Early Washington was a Southern city that was immersed in slavery and benefited immensely from it. Another contradiction embedded into the fabric of the city was that its citizens lacked democracy’s basic unit of currency: the right to vote. The city became a political colony, a district whose fate rested not with the local people who called it home but with the national political leaders who resided there temporarily.
Emancipate, Enfranchise, Educate
Authors: Asch Chris Myers , Musgrove George Derek
Published: May 2018

This chapter describes a time of tremendous upheaval and transformation in the city. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Washington was a “Yankee City” on the leading edge of racial change in America. Thousands of former slaves migrated to D.C., joining white Radicals and educated black leaders to drive an ambitious experiment in biracial democracy. Because Congress wielded exclusive control over the city, Washington became a testing ground for Reconstruction legislation, including freedmen’s relief, black men’s suffrage, and public education. Black men won the right to vote, black leaders won elected office citywide, black workers gained access to public and private sector jobs, black schools became national models, and city officials passed sweeping antidiscrimination laws. The nation’s capital, once a Southern bastion of slavery and the slave trade, was at the forefront of racial and political change.
Segregation Does Not Die Gradually of Itself
Authors: Asch Chris Myers , Musgrove George Derek
Published: May 2018

This chapter describes the post-World War II civil rights movement in Washington. The years between the end of World War II in 1945 and the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Bolling v. Sharpe were the most decisive period in the city’s history since the 1860s. Suddenly, it seemed, segregation in the nation’s capital collapsed, half a decade or more before similar changes happened elsewhere in the South. But segregation in the city had not died gradually of itself – it was killed by the concerted efforts of an interracial group of activists, parents, lawyers, writers, federal workers, and others committed to an egalitarian capital. These civil rights advocates seized upon Washington’s changing political, economic, and demographic context to push federal authorities to support racial change. By the end of the 1950s, the institutions of public life in Washington – schools, hotels, restaurants, theaters, recreation facilities, government agencies, unions, professional associations – were no longer racially segregated.
Perfect for Washington
Authors: Asch Chris Myers , Musgrove George Derek
Published: May 2018

This chapter opens with the sense of hope, optimism, and possibility that many D.C. residents shared in the early years of Mayor Marion Barry’s administration. Black activists and their allies who entered local government in the late 1970s changed the very nature of city government, decoupling it from the federal bureaucracy and making it more representative of the city’s diverse population. They also redistributed wealth, building a large black working and middle class through public jobs and city contracts. Yet the man whom many District residents entrusted with their hopes ultimately let them down. Barry cozied up to big developers and used public programs to buy political allegiance, while several of his aides and friends took advantage of the disorganized bureaucracy and city contracting system to pad their wallets. Barry’s failures made the very people that he had worked his entire political career to help more susceptible to the crack epidemic. As violence soared and city services deteriorated, the residents most in need suffered most of all, and D.C. teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.
That Must Not Be True of Tomorrow
Authors: Asch Chris Myers , Musgrove George Derek
Published: May 2018

The past has been a mint

Of blood and sorrow.

That must not be

True of tomorrow.

—LANGSTON HUGHES, “History,” 1934

The original Busboys and Poets sits at the corner of Fourteenth and V Streets NW, just a block north of the epicenter of the 1968 riots. A combination restaurant, bookstore, lounge, and theater, Busboys took its name from Langston Hughes, the one-time busboy at D.C.’s Wardman Hotel who gained international renown as a poet (albeit one who denounced the snobbery of D.C.’s black upper class). After it opened in 2005, it became an immediate commercial and cultural success, attracting young, hip Washingtonians who swarmed the surrounding Shaw neighborhood in the twenty-first century....
I Wonder if I Cannot Make Application for an Appointment Too
Authors: Ziparo Jessica
Published: May 2018

Chapter One explores how women came to work for the federal government. During the early years of the Civil War, different supervisors, scattered across various executive departments, created individualized and ad hoc policies regarding female employees based on their immediate labor needs, budget constraints, and personal views on the wisdom of female federal employment. The demographic information in application letters, employee files, and department ledgers, show that women across the country and the socioeconomic spectrum responded to the opportunity of civil service work in overwhelming numbers. The federal government hired African American women as manual laborers and clerks, though in far fewer numbers than it hired white women. Women’s letters reveal that they yearned for intellectually demanding and high-paying jobs in a land of limited options for female employment.
Telling Her Story to a Man
Authors: Ziparo Jessica
Published: May 2018

Chapter 2 examines how women applied for federal positions and details the criteria department heads used for selection. In general, supervisors were paternalistic, choosing female applicants who presented themselves as dependent and helpless over applicants who displayed independence and ambition. Supervisors gave jobs to women who had powerful men to advocate on their behalf, who appeared needy, and who were applying because some tragedy, often the Civil War, had removed their male support. While many women and their recommenders adhered to this narrative of dependence, women’s actions during the application process—including self-advocacy, working other jobs to stay afloat, and keeping abreast of developments in the departments—revealed significant independence and ambition. Julia Wilbur’s experience in obtaining a job in the Patent Office is detailed.
The Picked Prostitutes of the Land
Authors: Ziparo Jessica
Published: May 2018

Chapter 5 explores how conceptions of women’s sexuality complicated and threatened female employment. The national rumor mongering about female federal employees burst forth in newspapers from Maine to Hawaii after a scandal in the Treasury Department in 1864. That year, an investigation into fraud and counterfeiting in the department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing morphed into a salacious sex scandal that absorbed the country, even in the midst of a particularly bloody portion of the Civil War. The ramifications of that scandal plagued female federal employees for decades to come. By laboring as public servants in a mixed-sex workspace, female clerks were uniquely accessible to male attention and sexual harassment. While women were individually deprived of basic political rights, as a class their “respectability” became an exploitable political tool in the press and in Congress. Depicting female federal employees as either depraved prostitutes or noble widows complicated women’s entrance into the federal workforce by obscuring their identity as employees. Although supervisors were pleased with their new female employees and praised them in annual reports to Congress, the negative, national conversation happening in newspapers after the scandal threatened the experiment of female federal employment.
Epilogue
Authors: Ziparo Jessica
Published: May 2018

The Epilogue details the plight of the Spinner Memorial Association to have a statue of General Francis Elias Spinner erected on the grounds of the Treasury Department. Three early female federal employees formed the Association to raise money to commission the statue to honor Spinner's decision to bring women into the Treasury Department. Repeatedly, the women were denied permission to place the statue at the Treasury. The saga of the Spinner statue is compared to women’s entrance into the federal workforce. It is argued that early female federal employees were labor feminists who did important work by serving as visible and constant reminders to politicians and the country that women were valuable workers, who were capable of intellectually challenging labor. In setting this example, early female federal employees began to dismantle some of the economic and cultural restraints that limited the opportunities of nineteenth-century middle-class white women.