bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Activist and the Ordinance
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

Soon after losing her sister to breast cancer at age 42, activist Suzie Canales discovered that their childhood neighborhood in Corpus Christi, Texas, was adjacent to two oil waste dumps later used as municipal garbage landfills. When she further learned that this area had been designated “reserved for Mexicans” in the 1940s by city officials, she formed Citizens for Environmental Justice, which rallies on behalf of fenceline communities along the city’s waste dumps and refineries. In this chapter, the author visits these communities (which border Citgo, Valero, Flint Hills, and a crumbling ASARCO/Encycle site) and records accounts of the environmental racism experienced by the residents who live among these Superfund sites. Ultimately, Canales takes EPA chief Lisa Jackson to task at the 2010 White House Forum on Environmental Justice in Washington, DC.
The Bonder and the Dealer
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

A chance meeting with a bail bond agent turned French restaurateur in Falfurrias, Texas, turns the author onto the drug economy in South Texas. After an overview of Mexico’s Drug War, which claimed at least 60,000 lives during the presidency of Felipe Calderon, the author investigates the case of a local drug runner who got caught rolling bags of cocaine into the breakfast tacos he sold out of his taqueria in South Texas. She also expands on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s concept of “the danger of a single story.”
The Agents
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

The author spends a day at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint in Falfurrias, Texas. Located 90 miles north of the border, it is one of the busiest checkpoints in the U.S., with about 275,000 pounds of narcotics seized annually. She interviews several border patrol agents about their work as she observes the lines of traffic swerving through surveillance cameras, K-9 patrol, and roadside interrogations. Next, the author travels to the home of visual artist Celeste De Luna. Though her work seems to epitomize dissent, De Luna complicates her images by revealing that her husband is himself an immigrant (from El Salvador) yet works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Chokepoint
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

The year 2012 broke all records when tiny Brooks County in South Texas recovered the bodies of 129 undocumented immigrants found somewhere along its 942 square miles of ranches and roads. Lead investigator Danny Davila invites the author on the recovery of the 35th body found that year: a woman who had been abandoned by her coyote and left to die three days earlier. Her official cause of death, however, was listed as “hiking through ranch illegally.” In this chapter, the author expands on the history and consequence of U.S. immigration policy.
The War
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the history and modern-day ramifications of the so-called “Casino War” at Akwesasne. In the mid-1980s, some free-wheeling Mohawks who’d made a mint trading tobacco started opening up casinos without the consent of any government, tribal or federal. Their opponents (who came to be known as “the Antis”) protested that casinos would not only increase drug-trafficking, prostitution, corruption, and overall lawlessness at Akwesasne but also weaken Mohawk identity by bringing so many outsiders into their community. The casino-owners and their supporters (who branded themselves “the Warriors”) countered that the tribe would grow so rich from gambling, they could fund cultural institutions like language schools and museums that would help preserve their identity. Both sides considered their line of thought “traditional” and the truest way to sovereignty. From the late 1980s through spring of 1990, they battled with increasing ferocity that included street barricades and checkpoints, car chases, fire bombings, the forced evacuation of over half the Nation, and—before New York state troopers finally marched in—bloodshed. After re-establishing control, the tribal government shuttered all of the casinos and in 1999 opened the “official” one today known as the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino. A quarter century later, however, tensions still linger.
The Activist and the Obelisk
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

This chapter delves into the environmental assault on Akwesasne as well as the tribe’s resistance. In the 1950s, Canada and the United States started building the St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of canals, locks, and channels that enabled ships to launch in the Great Lakes and sail clear to the Atlantic Ocean. One of its many regional side projects entailed a massive hydroelectric dam that straddled the international borderline. Its construction drowned out six villages and virtually all of the area’s beaver hutches, displacing some 6,500 people—many of whom were Mohawk—and decimating the trapping industry. The dam also lured businesses into the area, including General Motors, Reynolds Metals, and the Aluminum Company of America, all three of which opened factories on the outskirts of Akwesasne and slowly began to poison the area’s air and rivers. The Environmental Protection Agency has done little to help, and many Mohawks resent them for it. The author interviews activists who have taken matters into their own hands with direct action against the corporations—and have been sued as a result.
The Movement
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

At the end of 2012, the biggest indigenous rights movements in Canada’s history erupted. Known as Idle No More, it was triggered by legislation to eliminate key protections for water, fish, Aboriginal land, and native sovereignty. On January 5, 2013, six Cree youth left their remote village of Whapmagoostui, Quebec on the shores of Hudson Bay and started snowshoeing across Canada in the name of peace. Hundreds joined them for “The Journey of Nishiyuu,” or the Journey of the People. The author and her Cree/Metis friend Bob drive out to greet the youth on Victoria Island in Ottawa, Canada, and follow along on their march toward Parliament, where a rally is held.
The Words That Come Before All Else
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

The author ends her journey at Akwesasne with a visit to the Longhouse, where she participates in a Strawberry Ceremony celebrating the arrival of summer. There, she learns about the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen, the Thanksgiving Address that is given before all events of consequence throughout the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois Confederacy. In it, all the forces that construct the universe are individually thanked, from the berries to the fish to the birds to the moon.
The United States of In-between
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

The author concludes her exploration of the U.S. borderlands with a meditation on the concept of borderlines. They don’t just delineate countries. Political parties are highly adept at redrawing the lines of congressional districts with a legal magic that—at the ballot box—brings about “miracles” on par with La Virgen de Guadalupe (only nowhere near as hopeful). For a borderline is an injustice. It is a time-held method of partitioning the planet for the benefit of the elite. Fortunately, there are legions of activists, artists, and faith keepers out there, petitioning on humanity’s behalf, but they need serious reinforcement. For the greatest lesson in nepantla is that many borderlines needn’t exist at all.
The Double Dealers in Bohemian New Orleans
Authors: Levin Joanna
Published: January 2018

This chapter chronicles New Orleans as the first Southern city widely associated with bohemianism, where the Creole heritage and the French Quarter provided one of the likeliest stand-ins for the original homeland of bohemia--the Parisian Latin Quarter--in the nation. Bohemianism flourished in the New Orleans of the 1920s, taking root in a series of local institutions, including the modernist literary journal the Double Dealer. The journal carefully navigated bohemian-bourgeois tension, the modern and the traditional, the conservative and the progressive. Featuring such writers as Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, the New Orleans bohemia that existed on and off the pages of the Double Dealer provided a liminal territory, alternately challenging and reinforcing dominant ideologies and mediating a series of social and cultural divides. The lively, engaging, and frustrating "talk, talk, talk" (in Faulkner's words) that circulated between Double Dealer publications and the extended dialogues featured in Faulkner's roman à clef, his apprentice novel Mosquitoes (1927), reveal the gendered, racial, socioeconomic, regional, national, and temporal fault lines at the base of this Southern bohemia.
Countercultural Structures of Contemporary Global South Poetry
Authors: Turner Daniel Cross
Published: January 2018

This essay heeds the fractal reckonings of countermemory—disparate strains of collective memory that resist totalizing models of official historiography—in an array of contemporary poets of the hemispheric South, who are highly attuned to the southern bohemian ethos: Yusef Komunyakaa, Derek Walcott, Brenda Marie Osbey, Kwame Dawes, as well as reggae icon Bob Marley. These poets share a sense of the Gulf and Atlantic cultures as open to transnational, cross-ethnic flows through black diasporic histories streamed along permeable coastlines. The analysis points up the progressive creativity fostered by a hippikat (Wolof “open-eyed”) poetics, one that resets our connection to place from an ecological vantage even as it expands preexisting academic accounts of the field. Drawing from Ras Michael Brown’s recent history of the African Atlantic, the essay shows how contemporary southern poetry shifts us past previous conceptions of “southernness” and into the explicitly transregional, transcultural ethos of current global southern studies.
Down Home and Out
Authors: Cantrell Jaime
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines poetry and fiction of Southern lesbian writers using the lens of food. Drawing on the works of Dorothy Allison, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Doris Davenport, the author explores how Southern lesbian writers transform the obvious, making lesbian eroticism and desire manifest through the vehicle of Southern food. These and other Southern writers have not only been at the center of important debates about feminism and identity, but also have created a sense of unity and sociality through a love of food and region.
Acting Out
Authors: Hale Grace Elizabeth
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the sonic landscapes of Athens, Georgia, which was an epicenter for cutting edge music from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, leading the way for college rock and other independent music scenes. The transformation of this small Southern college town into a new kind of bohemia and nationally and internationally recognized site of alternative culture is covered through the lens of several important Athens bands. These include the B-52’s, Pylon, and R.E.M. The chapter also examines related elements of the emerging scene, such as drag and pop art.
Bohemian Groves, Grooves, Gardens, and Guns
Authors: Bingham Shawn Chandler
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the hybrid world of Southern magazines Garden and Gun and Oxford American, with particular attention to the ways that these two magazines employ elements of bohemia while also incorporating bourgeois lifestyles. The two magazines are compared, particularly with regard to the ways they address Southern identity, including the consumption and critical analysis of this identity. In exploring the ways these magazines portray two different bohemias and two different Souths, the author explores how they are remaking and questioning Southern myths. Southern creativity is explored as both a product and authentic experience.
Afterword
Authors: Freeman Lindsey A.
Published: January 2018

The final essay in The Bohemian South draws together the unity of the chapters while focusing on a central aspect of the bohemian South: its diversity. The author also addresses relevant, worthy themes and areas that the collection was unable to cover.
Gregory Bateson and the Spirit of 1967
Authors: Chaney Anthony
Published: January 2018

The introduction claims that ecological consciousness and its sensitivity to environmental crisis--called an apocalyptic encounter--is the foremost intellectual experience of the post-World War II period. Gregory Bateson's double-bind concept distilled ecological thought's challenge to modern perception and human instrumentality. Bateson's extension of the double-bind concept from the psychiatric clinic to human-environmental relations is proposed as a vehicle to better grasp the change ecological consciousness calls for. This argument is placed in two contexts: the broad context of modern disenchantment, and the narrower 1960s context of the debate over the nature of revolution. The first involves postmodern transformations broadly described as the cognitive revolution, complexity studies, and the science of interrelatedness. Bateson drew on science's traditions in natural history to build on the communication theory, information theory, and systems theory pioneered at the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. The second context involves Bateson's appearance at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London in 1967, where he introduced a counterculture audience to the greenhouse effect and the prospect of climate change. A historical examination of ecological consciousness is defended as a way to approach the emotional force field surrounding the topic of environmental deterioration and global warming.
The Hurly-Burly of Natural History
Authors: Chaney Anthony
Published: January 2018

This chapter investigates how double-bind theory was received by the psychiatric community with respect to contested views of the etiology and treatment of schizophrenia. A moral model of schizophrenia is contrasted with a medical model of an earlier, more rigorously defined dementia praecox. The treatment of schizophrenics in the United States, especially during and after the world wars, is described as pragmatic and eclectic. The double-bind theory's environmental, biological, interactive model of the disease was met with hope among clinicians and helped shape new treatments such as group therapy and family therapy. As the double-bind group continued its work, Gregory Bateson was conflicted with his research team over fundamental matters of science: he recommended an approach that focused on pattern and relationship; they, more conventionally, focused on substance and measurement. His collaboration with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann lead to the Natural History of an Interview research project. It also took Bateson further from clinical work and toward research with octopi and the editing of the journals of an early 19th-century schizophrenic, later published as Perceval's Narrative.
Signals from the Goal
Authors: Chaney Anthony
Published: January 2018

This chapter places Bateson's work with dolphins within a broader 1960s "dolphin mystique"--a cultural site where anxieties over modern science’s physical models went unresolved. Most associated with scientist John C. Lilly, the dolphin mystique had futurist, utilitarian, and romantic components, also found in a similar "outer space mystique." The chapter shows how Lilly's and Bateson's research goals differed through a further substantiation of the sources of Bateson's thought: the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (his theory of play, the concepts of positive feedback, negative feedback, servomechanisms, and the naturalization of teleology); and his father William Bateson and his career amid the ongoing conflict between Darwinist and Lamarckian theories of evolution. In Hawaii, Bateson expressed his isolation from potential peers and research frustrations in letters to old friend and Darwin granddaughter/scholar Nora Barlow. This isolation, however, allowed Bateson to articulate a justification for scientific inquiry that was neither utilitarian nor a value-neutral pursuit of truth, but an effort to establish an accurate depiction of the relationship between nature and the human self, which he called the riddle of the Sphinx.
The Good Son
Authors: Chaney Anthony
Published: January 2018

This chapter describes how Bateson’s efforts to connect with peers such as Konrad Lorenz and to make his thought assessable to a lay audience resulted in a breakthrough: the recognition of Mind as the central concept in the life sciences. This breakthrough also represents Bateson taking on his father William Bateson's scientific legacy. The chapter tells of the collapse of William Bateson's health and career in the aftermath of his son Martin's suicide. The chapter explicates the essay Bateson sent to Lorenz in the summer of 1966, "The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution." By proposing a "simulated Lamarckian inheritance," the essay served as a challenge to the modern synthesis as a fully adequate explanation of evolutionary change. Bateson believed the essay to rescue some of his father's disfavored ideas by using systems theory concepts to disturb conventional Darwinism. These events coincided in 1966 with a chance reading of an old Irish myth, "The Conversion of Tuan MacCairill." The story echoed ideas about descent in both On Aggression and The Sword in the Stone, and the coincidence marked an affirmation for Bateson of his thought.
Cuban Émigrés and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World
Authors: Muller Dalia Antonia
Published: January 2018

During the violent years of war marking Cuba’s final push for independence from Spain, over 3,000 Cuban émigrés, men and women, rich and poor, fled to Mexico. But more than a safe haven, Mexico was a key site from which the expatriates helped launch a mobile and politically active Cuban diaspora around the Gulf of Mexico. Offering a new transnational vantage on Cuba’s struggle for nationhood, this book traces the stories of three hundred of these Cuban émigrés and explores the impact of their lives of exile, service to the revolution and independence, and circum-Caribbean solidarities. While not large in number, the émigrés excelled at community building, and their effectiveness in disseminating their political views across borders intensified their influence and inspired strong nationalistic sentiments across Latin America. Revealing that émigrés’ efforts were key to a Cuban Revolutionary Party program for courting Mexican popular and diplomatic support, the book shows how the relationship also benefited Mexican causes. Cuban revolutionary aspirations resonated with Mexican students, journalists, and others alarmed by the violation of constitutional rights and the increasing conservatism of the Porfirio Díaz regime. Finally, this book follows the émigrés’ return to Cuba after the Spanish-American War, and shows how their lives in the new republic were ineluctably shaped by their sojourn in Mexico.
Epilogue
Authors: Muller Dalia Antonia
Published: January 2018

This concluding segment examines the legacies of Cuban-Mexican solidarities by tracing them forward through the Mexican Revolution. Focusing on the work of Cuban journalist and diplomat, Manuel Márquez Sterling, the chapter follows his life story from his earliest travels to Cuba as a boy in the 1880s to his appointment as the Cuban ambassador to Mexico in 1912. More than three decades of travel between Cuba and Mexico convinced Márquez Sterling that the two countries faced the same internal and external problems and must work together to find solutions to them. Yet, such collaboration seemed hard to generate and sustain. Thinking back to Latin America’s official indifference toward Cuban independence in the 1890s, Márquez Sterling, writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, placed his faith in Americanismo and championed the inter-Latin American popular transnational solidarities that defined it. People and not states, he reasoned, were the key to the transnational networks and connections that would inspire the cross-pollination of ideas and bring about social change.
Repression, Harassment, Intimidation
Authors: Parsons David L.
Published: January 2018

This chapter describes the various forms of resistance that coffeehouse activists faced from the towns and bases in which they built their projects. From physical attacks on coffeehouses from local vigilantes, to targeted legal campaigns from local law enforcement, to direct shutdowns and challenges from military officials, GI activism brought a wave of negative attention from a number of different social and institutional forces. This chapter shows how the towns and cities in which coffeehouses operated had significant socioeconomic interest in maintaining their historically beneficial relationships with the American military, and thus viewed coffeehouses and GI activism with a mix of skepticism, anger, and antagonism.
Millions Go Knocking
Authors: Windham Lane
Published: January 2018

This chapter features stories and examples of the people who led the 1970s union organizing efforts in the private sector, including women, African Americans, Southerners, young baby boomers, and immigrants. It spotlights workers from auto parts plants, university offices, banks, airlines, hospitals, clothing and textile plants, and the construction trades. It includes figures showing union voters by sector and in the South.
A Bad Moon on the Rise?
Authors: Barr-Melej Patrick
Published: January 2018

An amalgam of circumstances and phenomena, including intergenerational dissonance and the outright rebelliousness of many young people, the “youth question” of the 1960s and 1970s was a complex substantiation of a generation gap with period-specific ideational and behavioral qualities and transnational manifestations. In Chile, the period saw student movements, outbreaks of street violence, and widely shared consternation about perils threatening the nation’s social and cultural footings, with the era’s main combatants instrumentalizing the youth question to admonish rivals. This chapter situates the Chilean case in a transnational context marked by the political strife and youthful activism—especially that of 1968— to provide substrate for the book’s examination of Chile’s counterculture and reactions to it.
A Lot of Searching for the Magical
Authors: Barr-Melej Patrick
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines gender norms and sexuality, drug use, and music—important signifiers of identity, sociability, and agency. In popular parlance, “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” often prompts thoughts of hippies practicing free love while stoned and listening to Jimi Hendrix. A lot of that happened. But the adage also serves as a doorway into a broad range of sensibilities, innovations, and conflicts that lay bare cultural contestations—with generational overtones and sociopolitical implications—during Chile’s road to socialism then dictatorship. Sex, drugs, and rock music were part and parcel of a generation’s Zeitgeist, as many young people searched for things ethereal and new at a unique time in modern history.
Hippie Chilensis
Authors: Barr-Melej Patrick
Published: January 2018

Initiating the book’s closer reading of counterculture, this chapter looks at hippismo’s people, spaces, and expressions, spotlighting what hippies thought about their lives and the heterodoxy to which they contributed. It shows that while hippismo was of foreign origin, its Chilean practitioners made it theirs in everyday and pronounced ways. The chapter also maps hippie hangouts in and outside Greater Santiago, including the usual haunts of both affluent and working-class criollo hippies, as well as small-scale experiments in collectivism and communitarianism. Class is of particular importance in this discussion, as hippismo had the capacity to blur its inherent distinctions. Yet class remained a potent determinant of sociability that complicated young people’s generational identity, just as generation complicated class.
Contesting Hippismo
Authors: Barr-Melej Patrick
Published: January 2018

This chapter details the highly politicized moral panic that exploded onto the scene in response to hippismo—beginning with the public outcry over Piedra Roja—and emphasized such matters as sexual liberation and the use of marijuana as countercultural menaces to the Chilean family and nation. The chapter argues that as morality politics exposed mainstream values shared by leftists, centrists, and rightists alike, these groups also exploited such anxiety to score political and cultural points against their adversaries as the body politic polarized further.
City in a Garden
Authors: Busch Andrew M.
Published: January 2018

The natural beauty of Austin, Texas, has always been central to the city’s identity. From the beginning, city leaders, residents, planners, and employers consistently imagined Austin as a natural place, highlighting the region’s environmental attributes as they marketed the city and planned for its growth. Yet, as Austin modernized and attracted an educated and skilled labor force, the demand to preserve its natural spaces was used to justify economic and racial segregation. This effort to create and maintain a “city in a garden” perpetuated uneven social and economic power relationships throughout the twentieth century.
In telling Austin’s story, Andrew M. Busch invites readers to consider the wider implications of environmentally friendly urban development. While Austin’s mainstream environmental record is impressive, its minority groups continue to live on the economic, social, and geographic margins of the city. By demonstrating how the city’s midcentury modernization and progressive movement sustained racial oppression, restriction, and uneven development in the decades that followed, Busch reveals the darker ramifications of Austin’s green growth.
Introduction
Authors: Busch Andrew M.
Published: January 2018

In the “new economy” we have to make sure we do not create unintended results.

—Austin mayor Kirk Watson, quoted in Rosenblum, “Mayor Offers Strategy”

In the twenty-first century, Austin, Texas, has become a model of dynamic, sustainable urban development. While most American cities declined under the weight of the Great Recession, Austin flourished. A litany of sources, such as ...
A Distinct Color Line Mutually Conceded
Authors: Busch Andrew M.
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at racial geography in Austin prior to World War One. It argues that natural and manmade hazards defined the city’s geography. Minorities lived in areas that were more dangerous, dirtier, and more crowded than whites. They were forced to live among refuse and progressive reformers accepted that their lifestyles were to blame for their condition. As such, minorities were also much less healthy than whites.
Industry without Smokestacks
Authors: Busch Andrew M.
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at Austin’s emergent tech industry in the 1950s and 1960s and the role that the University of Texas at Austin played in that grow. It argues that the city promoted a natural landscape and environmental amenities aimed at attracting knowledge workers and non-industrial businesses. A close relationship between city leaders and university leaders emerged, personified in J. Neils Thompson who directed a university research facility and also served on the chamber of commerce. Tracor emerged as Austin’s first nationally-recognized spinoff company. The city and region grew dramatically.
Technopolis
Authors: Busch Andrew M.
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at Austin’s economic and demographic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s. The University of Texas, and especially Dean of the Graduate School of Business George Kozmetsky, were central to this growth. The city, state, and university worked together entrepreneurially to generate growth in the high tech industry. The most important event was the decision of federally-sponsored research consortium Microelectronics and Computer Corporation to locate in Austin in 1983. Many other tech companies came to Austin as well, leading to dramatic growth. This growth, however, reshaped the city physically and became the impetus for a more robust and widespread environmental movement in the city.
Of Toxic Tours and What Makes Austin, Austin
Authors: Busch Andrew M.
Published: January 2018

This chapter compares the mainstream (mostly white) environmental movement and the subaltern (mostly minority) environmental movement in Austin in the 1980s and 199s. It argues that, while each group responded to similar issues like sense of place, health, community cohesion, and development, disparate histories led to very different conceptions of what constituted the environment for different the different groups. While whites tended to imagine the environment as something outside human society that humans sometimes used, minorities tended to imagine the environment as something that humans were squarely inside of and often as something that was a factor in discrimination. While both movements were largely successful in their own rights, they rarely found common ground.
Introduction
Authors: Dworkin Ira
Published: January 2018

This introduction uses the popular James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson song “Congo Love Song” to consider the way that African American popular culture—in this instance a wildly successful vaudeville song—were integral parts of a larger culture of African American transnational engagement with the Congo. The song was written and first performed in 1903 at the height of an African American campaign against King Leopold II of Belgium’s colonial regime. The political significance of the song is further highlighted by the career of James Weldon Johnson, who was not only a songwriter, but also a novelist, journalist, lawyer, educator, diplomat, and political activist with the NAACP. His longer career trajectory points to the ways that the Congo is deeply embedded with a wide range of African American cultural and political engagements.
George Washington Williams’s Stern Duty of History
Authors: Dworkin Ira
Published: January 2018

This chapter begins at Hampton Institute in 1889 where Williams traveled after meeting in Belgium with King Leopold II. Williams, whose interest in the Congo predates the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, went to Hampton to enlist African American students to travel with him to Africa, which framed his Congo trip within a tradition of ongoing African American interest in Africa. Williams’s initial optimism for the Congo quickly soured, and he wrote a series of open letters--to Leopold, U.S. President Benjamin Harrison, and railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington--that inspired opposition to Leopold’s regime that continued well after Williams’s untimely death in 1891. An examination of Williams’s struggles to develop and define a relationship to the Belgian empire against the backdrop of the history of the transatlantic slave trade reveals an African American connection to Africa that is grounded in a global political landscape of emancipation and anti-imperialism.
Booker T. Washington’s African at Home
Authors: Dworkin Ira
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines Washington’s service as Vice President of the Congo Reform Association (CRA) as a means of considering more broadly the relationship of HBCUs to Africa. Although Washington never traveled to Africa, he was directly influenced by Sheppard, his former Hampton student. As the founding principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Washington, the most prominent African American leader of his day, brings the Congo into relief as an important nexus for developing ideas about race, ideology, and empire in American culture in ways that are visible in everything from his famous 1895 address at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition to his influential collaboration with sociologist Robert E. Park. Washington’s professional mobility can help scholars expand Gilroy’s conception of the “Black Atlantic” to include HBCUs as critical contact zones for emerging understandings of a dynamic U.S. relationship with Africa.
Missionary Cultures
Authors: Dworkin Ira
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the work of APCM missionary Edmiston, a Fisk University graduate and skilled linguist, who in the first decades of the twentieth century controversially wrote the first dictionary and grammar of the Bushong (Bakuba) language. Shortly after her fellow Fisk alumni Du Bois used African American spirituals as signposts for his groundbreaking tour through U.S. history and culture in The Souls of Black Folk, she also contributed to the APCM’s effort to translate religious hymns into Tshiluba by adding African American spirituals such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to the Presbyterian hymnal. The translations by Edmiston and her colleagues insured that Tshiluba developed not only as the language of the colonial state, but also as a language that was shaped by the sacred texts of postbellum African American culture.
Another Black Magazine with a Lumumba Poem
Authors: Dworkin Ira
Published: January 2018

This chapter charts the influence of independent Congo’s first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba on the poetry and culture of the Black Arts movement. Although Lumumba was assassinated less than seven months after independence, he lives on as an iconic figure in the poetry that emerged during and after the Black Arts movement. Poems like “lumumba LIVES!” by Ted Joans, “Festivals & Funerals” by Jayne Cortez, and “Lumumba Blues” by Raymond Patterson are part of a genre of elegiac meditation on the Congo in post-1960 African American literature that asks how to speak in the face of haunting silences and how to imagine new political possibilities through literary engagements. These writings employ decidedly African American musical conventions to construct an elegiac discourse that ultimately locates the Congo as a central figure in modern African American poetics. These formal dynamics allow for political crises in the Congo and martyred African leaders like Lumumba to be interpellated as American subjects.
Conclusion
Authors: Dworkin Ira
Published: January 2018

The conclusion notes the ways that Malcolm X’s criticism of U.S. policy in the Congo, which he finds consistent with a larger disregard for the lives of Black people, globally conceived, is echoed in the words and actions of Black Lives Matter activists, who organized following the murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and the failure to prosecute his killer. Sanford is a town founded by Henry Shelton Sanford, who represented the United States at the Berlin Conference and worked as a lobbyist for King Leopold II, which helped to fund his Florida empire. This chapter notes that Sanford was directly at odds with George Washington Williams during their lifetime and up until their deaths, which suggests that the Congo appears as an integral part of the landscape of U.S. racial violence and that African American critics of colonialism have always been willing to use their voices to say so.
From Vital Magnetism to Vertebral Vitalism
Authors: Folk Holly
Published: January 2018

The third chapter presents the steps by which early chiropractic became an organized system of health care: the elaboration of chiropractic theories, the establishment of training institutes like the Palmer School of Chiropractic (P.S.C.) in Davenport, Iowa, and the making of a collective consciousness for the profession. Though their relationship was fraught with hostility, D. D. Palmer had considerable help from his son, B. J. Palmer, in developing chiropractic, which they had to distinguish from systems like osteopathy, with which it often was confused. Spinal therapeutics were a major part of 19th century health culture, but not originally central to chiropractic treatment or the First Chiropractic Theory. After the Santa Barbara Incident, the Palmers adopted the neurocentric logic of Progressive Era popular physiology, where maintaining the health of the nervous system through care of the spine was prioritized in the Second Chiropractic Theory.
The World of Chiropractic
Authors: Folk Holly
Published: January 2018

Chapter seven focuses on the later 20th century, and considers how the U.S. experience bears on the profession as chiropractic grows internationally in the new millennium. Chiropractic has prospered due to Americans’ enthusiasm for holism and desire to control their own health care. Though relatively well positioned, chiropractic faces new versions of longstanding challenges, such as factionalism in the profession. This chapter returns to the question of spirituality to show how metaphysics may bear on chiropractic as it takes root in other countries. Some chiropractors, including the Palmers, have maintained connections with Western esotericism, especially to Rosicrucian orders. The chapter also considers the role of chiropractors in extreme political and social movements, including white nationalism, and argues their participation is an effect of the populist mindset cultivated within alternative medicine. The chapter presents an overview of the early international dissemination of chiropractic. Globalization offers opportunities for the chiropractic profession, but it must overcome a wide range of reactions from within receiving cultures.
You’re Gonna Make It After All
Authors: Kutulas Judy
Published: January 2018

The TV program, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, modelled new ways of being, not just for young, single working women, but for everybody who worked. The series taught a new workplace etiquette premised on the equality of male and female workers. Mary also formed an informal sisterhood with her neighbour Rhoda. Perhaps most importantly, the series suggested that “family” could be co-workers and friends as well as biological family.
Kirkland Fights Back
Authors: Minchin Timothy J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on “Solidarity Day,” the largest U.S. labor march ever held, and one of the largest marches in all of American history. Held on September 19, 1981, Solidarity Day was organized by the AFL-CIO as a protest against President Reagan’s budget and tax cuts, as well as his claims to speak for working Americans. According to the National Park Service, 260,000 people attended Solidarity Day, more than the number that had turned out for either the iconic March on Washington in 1963 or the Vietnam War Moratorium in 1969. Many reports, moreover, suggested that around 400,000 people had taken part. Closely monitoring events, the Reagan administration estimated that no fewer than 250 organizations had taken part, including 100 unions and a variety of civil rights, religious, and civic groups. Drawing on new archival records and interviews with participants, this chapter provides the first detailed analysis of Solidarity Day. The march showed that Lane Kirkland could fight back and mobilize the AFL-CIO’s mass membership. Sustaining the march’s momentum in the longer-term, however, would be a challenge, especially given the broader conservative political climate.
Defending What We Have
Authors: Minchin Timothy J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores Reagan’s second term, a very difficult time that was, in many ways, as dreadful as the AFL-CIO had feared. During these years, there was no let-up in the Federation’s decline. Between 1979 and 1989, union density fell sharply, from 24.1 percent of the work force to just 16.8 percent. Almost every other measure of union strength, including the number of strikes and the number of NLRB representation elections, also plummeted. Organized labor, summarized one labor relations expert, had endured a “terrible time” under Reagan. There were some positives, including a recovering economy (which helped organizing), and increased unity within the AFL-CIO. In 1986, labor also played an important role in helping the Democrats to regain control of the U.S. Senate. The AFL-CIO also fought successfully to preserve progressive legislation that benefitted millions of Americans, including Social Security and OSHA. Overall, however, it remained very much “under fire.”
Big Visions and Big Hopes
Authors: Minchin Timothy J.
Published: January 2018

ThIs chapter examines the early Sweeney years, a remarkable time full of optimism for the AFL-CIO, and for many of America’s working people. Sweeney launched a wide range of reforms, putting an increased emphasis on organizing, political mobilization, and grassroots work, and forging new bonds with unions in other countries. He also introduced unprecedented diversity into the AFL-CIO, appointing more female staffers than ever before, and reaching out to female and minority workers. Sweeney’s efforts secured results; in 1998, for example, union membership increased by 101,000 over the previous year, a notable turnaround. The optimism was still evident at the end of 1999, when the AFL-CIO joined with environmentalists and engaged in mass demonstrations at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Two events – the contested 2000 presidential election and 9/11 – acted as turning points, initiating a domestic climate that was much more hostile to the AFL-CIO.
Our Job Has Never Been Harder
Authors: Minchin Timothy J.
Published: January 2018

During the presidency of George W. Bush, the national political climate turned to the right in a way that hurt the AFL-CIO, and working Americans more generally. Constrained by internal and external resistance, as well as the rapid decline of the manufacturing sector, organizing stalled. A major campaign to secure labor law reform again fell short, while health care reform never got off the ground. Disappointment fed dissension in the ranks. In 2005 Andy Stern took almost 40 percent of the AFL-CIO’s members into Change to Win, a rival federation. This was the biggest schism in organized labor since the 1930s, and it generated plenty of negative publicity. Despite all the problems, the Federation retained a lot of political power, especially during national elections. In 2006, the AFL-CIO played a crucial role as the Democrats regained control of the House and Senate and won a majority of the governorships and state legislatures. In 2008, the Federation launched an unprecedented campaign to help the Democrats regain the presidency, convincing many white members to put aside their racial fears and vote for Barack Obama. These events confirmed that the AFL-CIO was still an important progressive force in American life.
Boss Lady
Authors: Sparks Edith
Published: January 2018

Mid-twentieth-century women could be “bosses” and “ladies” but this required them to effectively navigate inherent tensions between these two labels, to seize opportunities wherever they found them and sometimes to embrace stereotypical and status quo ideas to support their business success. Boss Lady tells this story, examining the history of three female entrepreneurs who established companies in the 1930s, sold them to major corporations in the 1960s/70s and became some of the first female board members in the country’s largest companies. Tillie Lewis, founder of Flotill Products in Stockton, California, Olive Ann Beech co-founder of Beech Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas, and Margaret Rudkin founder of Pepperidge Farm in Fairfield, Connecticut became the first women on the boards of the Ogden Corporation, Raytheon and Campbell’s Soup. These female leaders began their ascent to the top of the business world before women enjoyed widespread access to higher education, credit discrimination protections or federal incentives for business ownership. And they did so in the manufacturing sector which historically has drawn few female entrepreneurs because of its high barriers to entry. How they charted paths to success by leveraging their networks, capitalizing on relations with government, conforming to conventional labor management strategies, manipulating commonly-held gender ideas to their advantage, and asserting and advocating for themselves is the focus of the book. Restoring this earlier generation of female business leaders to the history of corporate America illustrates what it took for women to be successful in a man’s world in an era of obstacles.
Introduction
Authors: Sparks Edith
Published: January 2018

To become a “boss lady” in the middle of the twentieth century was to fly in the face of a popular set of ideas about the proper roles for men and women in the business world. The term “office girl” used to describe one in three working women in the U.S. in the 1960s infantilized women at precisely the moment when a small but impactful group of female executives, including Tillie Lewis, Olive Ann Beech and Margaret Rudkin, rose to the upper echelons of the business world. In contrast to the legions of female clerical workers, women who led businesses in the middle of the twentieth century were transgressors whose very presence seemed a threat to those anxious to preserve men’s power. Navigating a business world that viewed them as fundamentally different because they were women was a key challenge. To succeed they needed to find a path into a professional world deeply ingrained with male privilege and steeped in rigid gender conventions that shaped both obstacles and opportunities.
Constructing Entrepreneurial Pathways
Authors: Sparks Edith
Published: January 2018

Tillie Lewis, Olive Ann Beech and Margaret Rudkin all provide examples of how successful mid-twentieth-century female entrepreneurs in large-scale manufacturing companies carved out a place for themselves at the top of the American business world by leveraging their relationships with the men in their personal and professional lives. The goal here is to understand the way in which this generation of women hampered by marriage bars, professionally crippling domestic expectations and lack of access to higher education, made the most of their relationships with male family members to plot their paths into business leadership and ownership. Access to social capital was particularly key for women breaking into the male-dominated manufacturing fields Lewis, Beech and Rudkin occupied, and male family members provided that connection. Privilege paved the way toward entrepreneurship and leadership for all three women too—another corollary of the ties they forged and leveraged through marriage.
Conclusion
Authors: Sparks Edith
Published: January 2018

Writing Lewis, Beech and Rudkin into the “canon of business leaders” forces us to reconceptualize the 1930s-70s as a context for business entrepreneurship and leadership and also how we think about business success. All three founded, managed and sold their businesses during a time period when gender fundamentally shaped both their opportunities and threats, and thus their “nose” for business needed to be attuned to their gendered context. They needed to be able to navigate these gender-specific opportunities and threats along with those shaped by more general contextual factors in order to be successful. We need to consider this in order to understand women’s leadership during this period. Thus, adding Lewis, Beech and Rudkin and a gendered analysis of how they started successful big businesses in the mid-twentieth century delimits the story of entrepreneurship and makes it more useful to us today, in particular for women trying to learn how to navigate gender in business and other professional contexts in the twenty-first century.
Introduction
Authors: Tochterman Brian
Published: January 2018

In July 1975, with the threat of bankruptcy looming, the New York Times asked eighteen “urban experts,” mostly prominent economists, social scientists, and theorists, “What should be done to solve New York City’s dilemma?”1 Since 1969 the city had lost nearly 500,000 jobs, and twice as many middle-class taxpayers had left New York in the decade prior. The city’s woes were indicative of broader trends, as the national economy foundered as a result of geopolitical conflict with countries in Southeast and Middle East Asia, deindustrialization, and the fitful transition to a postindustrial order at home. In this context, New York’s generous social democracy, structured around inclusive unionized public employment and equal access to public services, struggled to survive. In the spring of 1975, as Saigon fell, New York effectively defaulted on its debts, unable to pay its bills and with nary a willing lender....