bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Defining Loyalty in an Age of Emancipation
Authors: Mathisen Erik
Published: January 2019

Beginning at the start of the war, the growth of the American state worked in tandem with concerns about the threats to that state’s survival from disloyal persons, all of which generated a rapid expansion of state power. By the middle of the Civil War, ideas about loyalty had coalesced around a new plan for the occupied South, a plan in which white southerners, shorn of their citizenship, would become colonial subjects of the American state. At the same time, the doctrine of emancipation created opportunities and challenges for African Americans, who grabbed the idea of loyalty as a key to their inclusion in the republic. Looking at how freedpeople both encouraged and challenged U.S. policy as soldiers and laborers, the chapter examines how officials came to realize that any future for the United States in the Confederate South lay in providing some measure of protection for loyal African Americans, in contrast to white southerners, whose loyalty was suspect.
Introduction
Authors: Mehta Samira K.
Published: January 2019

The introduction outlines broad themes of the book and provides a chapter summary.
Blended or Transcended
Authors: Mehta Samira K.
Published: January 2019

Chapter 2 argues that, with a couple of exceptions, popular depictions of interfaith families in the 1970s saw interfaith marriage as a social good, as long as it provided a path for assimilation to secular Protestant norms.
They Sure Will Be of Minority Groups
Authors: Mehta Samira K.
Published: January 2019

Interfaith families that are also interracial are less able to seamlessly fit into “mainstream” American Jewish life, which is dominated by Ashkenazi culture and racially coded as white. On the one hand, this can make interactions in Jewish communities more challenging. On the other, these families are often given more freedom and flexibility for including traditions from the Christian side of the family than their white interfaith counterparts.
Chrismukkah
Authors: Mehta Samira K.
Published: January 2019

Chapter 5 claims that in the 1990s, when the concepts of multiculturalism and optional ethnicity provided a new, multicultural model of interfaith family life, in which consumer culture and the stripping of theological content from Christian and Jewish practice allowed them to be combined in a myriad of ways. The depictions of this mode of combination appeared in children’s literature, coffee-table books, greeting cards, and an area of other forms of popular culture and turned on the assumption of an increasingly secular population.
For the Sake of the Children
Authors: Mehta Samira K.
Published: January 2019

The conclusion addresses the ultimate question posed by the debates about interfaith marriage: what about the kids? It draws from the range of religious identities with which adult children of interfaith marriage identify. Specifically, it articulates how those children understand their blended religious heritages and how their experiences do and do not likely predict the experiences of children growing up in such homes today.
Race-ing Innocence
Authors: Agyepong Tera Eva
Published: January 2019

This chapter elucidates the community milieu in which the nascent juvenile justice system operated. Racialized notions of childhood, Progressive uplift, and the politics of child welfare primed black children to be marked as delinquents even before they formally stepped foot inside Cook County Juvenile Court. The vast majority of public and private agencies for poor, abused, neglected, or abandoned children excluded black children because of their race, even as they readily accepted white and European immigrant children. This dearth of institutional resources for black children was exacerbated by the Great Migration. Chicago’s black community adapted to these realities by doing their own “child-saving” and inserting themselves into a juvenile justice system that began to play a defining role in shaping the trajectory of many black children’s lives.
Boundaries of Innocence
Authors: Agyepong Tera Eva
Published: January 2019

This chapter discusses the way the juvenile court and its ancillary institutions—the Juvenile Detention Canter, Chicago Parental School, and Institute for Juvenile Research—handled black children’s cases. It also delineates the impact the disproportionate number of black children in juvenile court and an artificial inflation of the number of delinquent black children had on the evolution of juvenile justice law. The sympathetic public sentiment that made the Progressive juvenile justice movement viable had begun to wane by the 1930s. As a result, juvenile justice laws began to be more punitive, and the rehabilitative ideal began to be dismantled.
Constructing a Black Female Delinquent
Authors: Agyepong Tera Eva
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the state’s flagship institution for delinquent girls. It reveals the way intersecting notions of race, gender, and sexuality shaped reformers’ and practitioners’ implementation of juvenile justice. African American girls at the Illinois Training School were blamed for the interracial sexual relationships staff members and professionals abhorred and were considered the most violent girls in the institution. They also became subject to a race specific and gendered construction of female delinquency in the institution. Unlike the image of a fixable, inherently innocent delinquent that spurred the child-saving movement, black girls were cast as inherently deviant, unfixable, and dangerous delinquent whose negative influences could contaminate other children in the institution.
Flight, Fright, and Freedom
Authors: Agyepong Tera Eva
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines how demographic changes at the Illinois Training School for Boys at St. Charles were linked to a punitive turn in institutional policies and state juvenile confinement laws. When the number of African American boys at St. Charles increased over time as a result of migration and discrimination in charity institutions for children in Chicago, the institution’s staff members, state legislators, and residents in the surrounding communities refined their notion in discourse and in practice of what kind of boy St. Charles was intended to house. This hysteria eventually led the Illinois state legislature to mandate that the first maximum security prison for children in the history of the state be built for the “dangerous type of boy” whom the larger public believed was no longer suited for St. Charles.
Epilogue
Authors: Agyepong Tera Eva
Published: January 2019

This chapter gives a brief overview of the impact Illinois’ turn to a punitive form of juvenile justice system had in the decade after the study. This discussion is focused on administrators at the Training School for Girls at Geneva, the Training School for Boys at St. Charles, and the new maximum security prison for boys at the State Reformatory at Sheridan, and their more explicit embrace of new punitive policies in the institution. It also describes the increasingly disproportionate rate at which black children were committed to these institutions. The epilogue ends by tying together the book’s historical narrative and summarizing the ways intersecting notions of childhood, race, gender, and sexuality undergirded juvenile justice practice in Illinois.
Introduction
Authors: Knapp Courtney Elizabeth
Published: January 2019

This chapter introduces the reader to ‘diasporic placemaking’ as an alternative conceptual frame for understanding the cultural and socio-spatial politics of planning and development in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It also describes current demographic and housing trends to demonstrate how the racialized stratification influences the city’s housing, economic, and placemaking infrastructures. An overview of the book chapters are also provided.
Settling Chattanooga
Authors: Knapp Courtney Elizabeth
Published: January 2019

Chapter 1 charts the historical relationship between Native dispossession and early city planning and development in downtown Chattanooga, to understand more deeply the complex relationship that many contemporary Chattanoogans have with the legacies of Cherokee dispossession that took place within their hometown’s borders. The chapter focuses on the construction of historical narratives of people and place during the pre-removal and Removal periods, and argues that a paternalistic, yet quasi-reverent and nostalgic, popular framing of Native culture and removal has profoundly impacted how many people today relate to, and represent, Chattanooga’s early history. Tracing the genealogy of race, property, and Native removal in the context of early city-building prepares the ground for later discussions of contemporary Native American placemaking activities along the Tennessee riverfront.
Rooting a Black Diaspora in Downtown Chattanooga
Authors: Knapp Courtney Elizabeth
Published: January 2019

Chapter 2 explores the rooting of Chattanooga’s Black communities through the late nineteenth century. Black labor and placemaking have been central to urbanization and economic expansion in Chattanooga since before the modern arrival of white settlers. Despite these substantial contributions, Black city-building has never been treated with the same level of admiration as exhibited toward the Cherokee. Nor have the centuries-long legacies of exploitation, violence, and marginalization been treated with the same levels of remorse or repentance. The chapter traces popular discourses of urban progress to illustrate how Black urban placemaking and community development were portrayed historically as antithetical to progressive urban cosmopolitanism.
Chattanooga Homecoming
Authors: Knapp Courtney Elizabeth
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores the politics of public participation in the context of Chattanooga’s 35-year, citizen-driven return to the Tennessee riverfront. Though the city has won numerous awards for its citizen-driven planning initiatives, the success of early revitalization programs such as Chattanooga Venture and the Vision 2000 process remains contested.
From Rabble-Rousing to SPARCing Community Transformation
Authors: Knapp Courtney Elizabeth
Published: January 2019

This chapter describes the evolution of Chattanooga Organized for Action as they transitioned from a popular protest group into a 501-C3 non-profit who initiates, supports and connects place-based social justice movements across downtown Chattanooga. It also discusses two components of a participatory action research initiative related to this research project: the Sustaining People and Reclaiming Communities (SPARC) Initiative and the Planning Free School of Chattanooga. Both were experimental community planning processes, designed to offer alternatives to mainstream citizen engagement and capacity building in the city.
Conclusion
Authors: Knapp Courtney Elizabeth
Published: January 2019

The conclusion synthesizes the major lessons of the book into three categories: 1) how diasporic placemaking contributes to planning theory and practice; 2) how urban planners, planning educators, and others interested in these issues can better support diasporic placemaking through their personal work; and 3) the role of participatory action research in supporting these previous two goals.
Introduction
Authors: Franklin Sara B.
Published: January 2019

For me, it all began with a page of a magazine. It was January 2008. I was frozen deep in a Boston winter, paging through the issue of Gourmet that had just arrived in my mailbox and dreaming of new things pushing up through sun-warmed earth and the bite of something—anything—green on my tongue, to shock me out of the dull gray of short, dark northeastern days. Instead of a taste, though, it was a question that awoke me—“How did Southern food come into being?”—and a simple refrain—“Southern is . …” The piece was titled “What Is Southern?” and the author was Edna Lewis, an apparently esteemed cook and food writer I’d never heard of from a region—the American South—of which I knew nothing....
Lunch with Miss Lewis
Authors: Madison Deborah
Published: January 2019

Deborah Madison, food author and chef specializing in vegetarian cuisine, recalls her first and only encounter with “Miss Lewis” at a lunch with shared friends in Georgia. She pens her regrets of not pursuing a closer relationship with the woman, but shares the memory in vivid detail.
Paying Down Debts of Pleasure
Authors: Edge John T.
Published: January 2019

John T. Edge, longtime director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, links an unattributed image of Lewis featured on a postcard to the all too frequent omission of black labor from serious conversation about the culinary arts. He writes of his battle to protect and advocate for underprivileged food workers.
On Edna Lewis
Authors: Waters Alice
Published: January 2019

Alice Waters—chef, restaurateur, author, and activist—names The Taste of Country Cooking as a profound influence on the manner in which she runs her restaurant Chez Panisse.
Edna Lewis and the Black Roots of American Cooking
Authors: Lam Francis
Published: January 2019

Francis Lam, host of the public radio show The Splendid Table, shares his experience reporting on Lewis’s history and legacy for New York Times Magazine. He includes colorful details of Lewis’s life and works, while artfully portraying a woman who chose to look past life’s hardships and focus instead on its beauty.
Edna Lewis
Authors: Elias Megan
Published: January 2019

Author and academic Megan Elias praises Lewis’s role as a cultural teacher through a medium that everyone can enjoy—food. Elias provides a thorough analysis of the historical significance of Lewis’s life and works.
The African Virginian Roots of Edna Lewis
Authors: Twitty Michael W.
Published: January 2019

Michael Twitty—culinary historian, author, and blogger—traces the origins of Lewis through a detailed analysis of her home, familial history, and traditions. His essay illuminates Lewis’s path upward to being one of the most influential black female chefs in the world.
Edna Lewis and the Melancholia of Country Cooking
Authors: Kelting Lily
Published: January 2019

Lily Kelting, a postdoctoral fellow associated with food research, explores Lewis’s legacy as both a cultural icon and cultural historian. She examines the significance behind Lewis’s image immortalized as a stamp, recalls her own journey into the archives of Lewis as she worked on her dissertation, and reflects on the sensual prose that marks Lewis’s writing as uniquely her own. Finally, Kelting remarks on the duality of the sadness of Lewis’s passing and the enduring sense that she is “decidedly not gone”.
Looking for Edna
Authors: Clark Patricia E.
Published: January 2019

Associate professor Patricia Clark explores the implications and relationship between the “legions of anonymous black women who labor in the kitchens” and Lewis’s role as a legendary chef.
It’s Not All Fried Chicken and Greasy Greens
Authors: Bailey Mashama
Published: January 2019

Mashama Bailey, chef and partner of award-winning restaurant The Grey, recalls first discovering Lewis when searching for a professional chef role model to write about in culinary school. Bailey praises Lewis’s works as perfectly encapsulating everything she loves about southern cooking.
Their Ideas Do Live on for Us
Authors: West Kevin
Published: January 2019

Culinary author Kevin West reminisces on his discovery of Lewis while desperately searching for guidance on how to make strawberry jam. He explores the time-honored tradition of preserving food and the greater role that food can fulfill as a glue that holds families and communities together.
War at Our Own Doors
Authors: Greene A. Wilson
Published: January 2019

This chapter provides the geographic, operational, social, and economic background to the Petersburg Campaign. It introduces the commanders of the four armies involved in the campaign and outlines the conduct of the brutal fighting in May and early June that brought the Civil War to the outskirts of Richmond, the Confederate capital. The chapter also provides a brief history of the City of Petersburg, seventh largest metropolis in the Confederacy, and explains why it was such an important military target.
Our Hearts Were Filled with New Hope
Authors: Greene A. Wilson
Published: January 2019

This chapter chronicles the complex movement of the Union army from its Cold Harbor trenches outside of Richmond to and across the James River. Federal engineers constructed a massive pontoon bridge across the James to facilitate the army’s crossing, and the chapter explains the background of this impressive undertaking. The Confederate army quickly became aware of their enemy’s departure from Cold Harbor, but remained uncertain of General Grant’s intended destination. This provided the Northern forces the opportunity to capture Petersburg before General Lee could shift his troops to the south and reinforce the city’s undermanned defenses.
More Hard Fighting and Many More Lives Must Be Lost
Authors: Greene A. Wilson
Published: January 2019

This chapter describes the combat on June 16 and 17, 1864 around Petersburg. As fresh Union units arrived, they launched a series of uncoordinated assaults against the new Confederate defenses prepared overnight. The Rebels lost ground but managed in all cases to prevent the Yankees from achieving a decisive breakthrough. Meanwhile north of the Appomattox River on the Bermuda Hundred Peninsula, Benjamin Butler’s army breached the vital transportation links between Richmond and Petersburg. Reinforcements dispatched by Robert E. Lee caused Butler to withdraw his victorious troops and adopt a defensive position, thus squandering the chance to block fresh Southern brigades from reinforcing P.G.T. Beauregard’s beleaguered forces at Petersburg. The chapter also analyzes General Lee’s evolving decision to transfer his army from the Richmond defenses to Petersburg.
We Have Done All That It Is Possible for Men to Do and Must Be Resigned to the Result
Authors: Greene A. Wilson
Published: January 2019

This chapter details the heavy fighting that occurred on June 18, 1864 near Petersburg. General Beauregard had withdrawn a second time during the night of June 17-18 and created a new defensive position styled the Harris Line, named after the engineer officer who developed it. Union commander George G. Meade attempted unsuccessfully to orchestrate a coordinated attack against the Harris Line. As during the previous two days, individual corps and divisions assaulted, leading to another series of frustrating and bloody failures. The 1st Maine Heavy Artillery suffered the largest single loss sustained by any regiment during the entire war during one of those attacks and the well-known Colonel Joshua Chamberlain sustained a serious wound during another charge. Robert E. Lee, at last aware of the presence of Grant’s entire force at Petersburg, rapidly shifted the Army of Northern Virginia to reinforce Beauregard. At the end of the day, the Union Ninth Corps came close to breaching the Confederate line, but by sunset the First Petersburg Offensive concluded with the Confederates still in possession of Petersburg.
Our Work Here Progresses Slowly
Authors: Greene A. Wilson
Published: January 2019

This chapter provides analysis of the First Petersburg Offensive and describes subsequent military events around Petersburg, including the Union infantry initiative styled the Second Petersburg Offensive, conducted June 20-24. This operation sought to move west and encircle Petersburg, in the process controlling two of the key railroads upon which the Confederates depended for supplies. The Second and Sixth Corps of the Army of the Potomac bore responsibility for the mission. The Second Corps met with defeat on June 22 and Confederate attacks compelled the Sixth Corps to fall back on June 23. These actions are sometimes called the Battle of Jerusalem Plank Road. The Unionists did manage to establish a bridgehead on the north side of the James at Deep Bottom in a separate operation. Abraham Lincoln made his first visit to the Petersburg front during this period.
We Were Fortunate to Get Back at All
Authors: Greene A. Wilson
Published: January 2019

This chapter deals with cavalry operations in June 1864, particularly the Union’s Wilson-Kautz Raid, June 22-30. Planned in conjunction with infantry advances as a part of Grant’s Second Petersburg Offensive, this mounted initiative targeted three of the railroads that led into Richmond and Petersburg. Destroying those transportation links would cripple Robert E. Lee’s logistics and perhaps compel the Confederates to leave the safety of their fortifications. Meanwhile, the rest of the Union cavalry under the direct command of Philip Sheridan, moved to join the army around Petersburg. Sheridan bore responsibility for escorting a huge wagon train full of supplies across the James River from the former Union base at White House Landing on the Pamunkey River. This endeavor led to a spirited cavalry fight at Samaria Church on June 24. In an unrelated action, the Confederates made a disjointed and decidedly unsuccessful attack along City Point Road on June 24 in an attempt to restore their original lines.
The Most Disagreeable Human Habitation Left upon This Sin-Stricken Earth
Authors: Greene A. Wilson
Published: January 2019

After a brief analysis of the Wilson-Kautz Raid, this chapter describes the impact of the first six weeks of the Petersburg Campaign on the city’s residents. Relentless Federal artillery bombardment forced many citizens out of their homes, wreaking havoc on the town’s built environment. Shortages at the markets created hardship as did runaway inflation that impoverished all but the wealthiest citizens. The presence of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers, many of whom occupied the city’s several military hospitals, presented both problems and opportunities for civilians. Crime increased, much of it perpetrated by the troops, but the residents managed to maintain an active social life wherein young Confederate officers courted Petersburg’s eligible belles. Despite these hardships, most Petersburg residents remained steadfast supporters of the Confederate war effort, demonstrating remarkable resilience in the face of immense challenges experienced by few Southerners during the war.
This Day Was the Jubilee of Fiends in Human Shape, and without Souls
Authors: Greene A. Wilson
Published: January 2019

The Battle of the Crater remains the best-known episode of the entire Petersburg Campaign. This chapter describes the Union attacks at this engagement, beginning with the explosion of their mine that left a huge crater where a key Confederate fort had stood. The blast briefly opened a window of opportunity for the capture of Petersburg as several hundred Confederate defenders were killed and others fled in terror. The Union army’s failure to exploit that opportunity stemmed from a variety of factors: altered tactical plans, confused orders, poor leadership, the rapid recovery of the stunned Southern defenders, and the sheer magnitude of the blast itself. The narrative outlines the details of the Union assaults, the response of the Confederate high command to the crisis, and the steps taken by adjacent grayclad troops to confine the damage. When fresh Confederate forces arrived, the stage was set for some of the most horrific personal combat ever to stain the North American continent.
May We Forever Stand
Authors: Perry Imani
Published: January 2019

Singing and fighting for freedom have been inseparable in African American history. May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, tells an essential yet understudied part of that story. Lift Every Voice and Sing, penned by James Weldon Johnson and composed by his brother Rosamond in 1900, was embraced as an anthem that captured the story and the aspirations of Black Americans almost immediately. This book shares the story of that song, as it traveled from South to North, from churches to schools, and from civil rights to Black power, and beyond. Because it is an anthem, the story of this song is also a social and cultural history. Readers will learn of the institutions and organizations, as well as the lessons and the emotions shared by those who sang together. Drawing on a wide array of materials including: letters, newspaper articles, essays, poems, novels, school curricula, speeches and the programs of hundreds of organizations, readers have a window into the robust social, cultural and political world that African Americans organized in the face of an unequal society, and how that world produced people who were capable of transforming the nation and world.
Let There Be Light and the Military Talking Picture
Authors: Kahana Jonathan , Tsika Noah
Published: January 2019

In “Let There Be Light and the Military Talking Picture,” Jonathan Kahana and Noah Tsika analyze John Huston’s Let There Be Light in its military-historical context. They argue that the traumatized speech of returning WWII veterans, documented by the “military talking picture,” is the foundation for a mode of documentary filmmaking that is characterized by its evocative elisions and gaps. The stammering, mumbling, and silence that characterize Huston’s traumatized veterans establish both traumatic memory, evasive and partial, and reenactment, which builds narrative from these absences, as foundational to documentary filmmaking after WWII.
I Saw It!
Authors: Wexler Laura
Published: January 2019

Laura Wexler’s “‘I Saw It!’: The Photographic Witness of Barefoot Gen,” argues that Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa uses the “art of re-drawing” to challenge and rework aerial photographs taken by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. In doing so, Nakazawa contests the documentary practices of the U.S. military, and, more broadly, their power to produce and regulate knowledge. Claiming the perpetrator’s perspective as his own, Nakazawa employs the formal flexibility of documentary manga to counter the military’s mechanical objectivity, empower his own witnessing, and produce new forms of documentary truth.
Participatory Documentary
Authors: Hale Grace Elizabeth
Published: January 2019

In “Participatory Documentary: Recording the Sound of Equality in the Southern Civil Rights Movement,” Grace Hale examines the work of noted New Left documentary makers Guy and Candie Carawan, who recorded documentary albums of mass meetings and protest actions during the southern civil rights movement. The production of these albums, Hale argues, which render the voices of African Americans denied official political representation in a segregated society, enacted a mode of participatory documentary, prefiguring the world to which its participants aspired.
City of Second Sight
Authors: Clark Justin T.
Published: January 2019

In the decades before the U.S. Civil War, the city of Boston evolved from a dilapidated, haphazardly planned, and architecturally stagnant provincial town into a booming and visually impressive metropolis. In an effort to remake Boston into the "Athens of America," neighborhoods were leveled, streets straightened, and an ambitious set of architectural ordinances enacted. However, even as residents reveled in a vibrant new landscape of landmark buildings, art galleries, parks, and bustling streets, the social and sensory upheaval of city life also gave rise to a widespread fascination with the unseen. Focusing his analysis between 1820 and 1860, Justin T. Clark traces how the effort to impose moral and social order on the city also inspired many—from Transcendentalists to clairvoyants and amateur artists—to seek out more ethereal visions of the infinite and ideal beyond the gilded paintings and glimmering storefronts. By elucidating the reciprocal influence of two of the most important developments in nineteenth-century American culture—the spectacular city and visionary culture—Clark demonstrates how the nineteenth-century city is not only the birthplace of modern spectacle but also a battleground for the freedom and autonomy of the spectator.
Discovering the Blind
Authors: Clark Justin T.
Published: January 2019

In the 1820s, liberal Protestant reformers encouraged popular sympathy for those denied the miracle of vision. Establishing the nation’s first school for the blind, the Perkins School, in 1829, Unitarian reformers hoped to not only help the disabled, but to instill greater respect among the sighted for the moral and mental resource of vision. Yet the following decade, as visual didacticism proved a poor match for the deepening urban crisis and the rise of popular spectacle, reformers found a new role for the blind as exemplars of urban transcendence, capable of navigating the city without vision while avoiding its sensual lures. Even so, a number of Perkins’ students found work as autobiographers and clairvoyants, undermining the sensationalist psychology that underlay visual didacticism.
Epilogue
Authors: Clark Justin T.
Published: January 2019

By the end of the antebellum period, Bostonians’ habit of idealizing the urban landscape was yielding to the new transatlantic fashion of realism. Rather than idealize the city, realist writers and artists such as Winslow Homer documented it in detached and comprehensive detail. The declining commitment to a collective and idealized way of seeing can be read in a variety of domains, including art criticism, psychology, and even ophthalmology. The epilogue explains the rise of realism in Boston in terms of the development of middle class cultural institutions, suburbanization and geographic stratification. Less concerned with how Bostonians saw, a new generation of reformers and censors (such as the Watch and Ward Society) became exclusively preoccupied with what Bostonians saw.
American Honor
Authors: Smith Craig Bruce
Published: January 2019

The American Revolution was not only a revolution for liberty and freedom, it was also a revolution of ethics, reshaping what colonial Americans understood as “honor” and “virtue.” As Craig Bruce Smith demonstrates, these concepts were crucial aspects of Revolutionary Americans’ ideological break from Europe and shared by all ranks of society. Focusing his study primarily on prominent Americans who came of age before and during the Revolution—notably John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington—Smith shows how a colonial ethical transformation caused and became inseparable from the American Revolution, creating an ethical ideology that still remains. By also interweaving individuals and groups that have historically been excluded from the discussion of honor—such as female thinkers, women patriots, slaves, and free African Americans—Smith makes a broad and significant argument about how the Revolutionary era witnessed a fundamental shift in ethical ideas. This thoughtful work sheds new light on a forgotten cause of the Revolution and on the ideological foundation of the United States.
What Are Honor, Virtue, and Ethics and How Did They Influence the American Revolution?
Authors: Smith Craig Bruce
Published: January 2019

The introduction frames the ethical concepts of honor and virtue historically and historiographically, while examining the influence of these ideas on the modern world. It contends that honor and virtue, as they existed in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, still exists, but are now commonly understood as ethics. It also tracks the changing definitions over several centuries. The introduction establishes the framework that shows how the American Revolution was caused by a shift in ethical principles during the colonial era.
A Matter of Honor and a Test of Virtue
Authors: Smith Craig Bruce
Published: January 2019

This chapter traces the period from the end of the French and Indian War to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It analyzes the formation of a communal sense of self before and during the Revolution, based on recognition of British slights to Americans’ personal honor. The origins of the American Revolution are thus cast as a defense of honor on the part of the patriots. This chapter illustrates how ethical changes that occurred during the colonial period directly led to the American Revolution. The central theme is the progression of American honor, virtue, and ethics from simply a direct British offspring to something that is more individualized under the context of a nascent proto-nationalism. This chapter contends that the patriots viewed the American Revolution as a matter of honor and a test of virtue. Men like Washington felt that British policy had attacked their honor, and they were forced to react. America would win or lose based upon maintaining its virtue. It also offers new causes of the war. The chapter shows that the coming of the Revolution was understood by the patriots as more of an ethical question than a question of taxation or sovereignty.
Expanding Ethics
Authors: Smith Craig Bruce
Published: January 2019

From the aftermath of Yorktown through the rise of political parties in the early republic, this chapter shows that legislation and policy (from the Treaty of Paris to the Constitution to attempts at abolitionism) were based on these new concepts of honor and virtue. It also shows the institutionalizing of egalitarian honor in schools, organizations (like the Society of the Cincinnati), occupations, and politics. It charts the development of business ethics in the form of professional honor for lawyers, doctors, and even job applicants. Most importantly, this chapter engages the new conceptions of honor that developed during the early republic, including the rise to prominence of Franklin’s ascending honor (which in part was adapted into the notion of republican womanhood) and Thomas Jefferson’s version that made honor entirely internal and akin to modern ethics. The chapter examines how these new ideals impacted all classes of society including women and African Americans. While most citizens agreed that honor and virtue were defining elements, they differed greatly on how these concepts related to governance, policy (especially the French Revolution), and society. Contestations over the interpretation of national and personal honor would in turn spark in-fighting, dissention, and revival belief systems, highlighted by the development of political parties.
The Counterrevolution in American Ethics
Authors: Smith Craig Bruce
Published: January 2019

Escorting the reader through the turn of the nineteenth century to the War of 1812, this chapter uses dueling (especially the Hamilton-Burr duel) and tensions between political parties as a lens to examine conflicting definitions of national honor and the temporary decline of personal honor. However, it also illustrates the revival of personal honor in the sons of the Revolutionary generation at the dawn of the War of 1812, especially as exhibited through reactions to British impressments and the Chesapeake-Leopard Affair. This chapter presents a counterrevolution in ethics that was contested between the Revolutionary generation (with specific focus on Adams and Jefferson’s conception of natural aristocracy) and their descendents. The nature of this conflict exhibits the continually evolving concepts of ethics, honor, and virtue. But the resistance to a return to an older form of honor illustrates the continuation of the Revolution’s ideals.
March 16, 1824
Authors: Smith Craig Bruce
Published: January 2019

On March 16, 1824, former major general Andrew Jackson was invited to the White House to receive the Congressional Gold Medal from President James Monroe in a ceremony filled with “pomp and parade.” The medal was a long overdue reward for his service at the Battle of New Orleans, but it also signalled a formal and public recognition of Jackson’s character. This narrative epilogue will explore how Andrew Jackson came to define a new generation of individuals who sought to make their own path in the world and move from beyond the shadow of their Revolutionary ancestors and their ideals. This section will illustrate how Jackson embodied a nineteenth-century American culture whereby honor became linked with glory and ambition was no longer a vice.
Maneuvering for the Movement
Authors: Tuuri Rebecca
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores the first three decades of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). In 1935, educator, clubwoman, and politician Mary McLeod Bethune founded the NCNW as an organization of black women's organizations to create a united lobbying voice. By utilizing a strategy of broker politics, the NCNW opened up professional opportunities for black women and lobbied for civil rights legislation. NCNW women also enforced strict standards of respectability as they sought such power. While the NCNW claimed to speak on behalf of all black women, a majority of its membership came from black sororities. This college-based membership, as well as the council's focus on black professionalization, meant that many working class women viewed the organization as elitist and uninterested in their concerns. However, beginning in the mid 1950s and continuing through the 1960s, the NCNW became more significantly involved in civil rights and the needs of the poor.
High Heels on the Ground
Authors: Tuuri Rebecca
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the first summer of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW)-sponsored civil rights organization Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS). WIMS brought down forty-eight black and white, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic women from northern and Midwestern cities to personally witness and provide support for the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, sponsored by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). WIMS relied on a behind-the-scenes approach that did not publicly challenge segregation, but sought to quietly reason with local women to support civil rights activists fighting for voting rights and desegregation of schools, businesses, and other facilities. Although the strategy of personal witness proved limited, WIMS helped connect NCNW to local black activists in Mississippi who advocated for more direct action protests and planted the seeds for a later change of NCNW's direction.
We Have, Happily, Gone beyond the Chitchat over Tea Cups Stage
Authors: Tuuri Rebecca
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the second and third years of Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS), an interracial, interfaith civil rights organization sponsored by the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). In the summer of 1965, around fifty black and white, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic women returned to Mississippi to help with Head Start, the newly formed War on Poverty program. Despite increased activist calls for more participation and leadership from the grassroots and poor, WIMS continued to promote its elite pedigree by highlighting its members' expertise in teaching, social work, librarianship, and child development. In 1966, WIMS began to shift its focus to bridge building in the North, promoting the liberal strategy of interracial and interfaith conversations as a method to create personal change and combat racial discrimination. However, by 1966, WIMS leaders began to realize the limitations of such a strategy when they were rebuffed in both Mississippi and Boston.
Mississippi, Who Has Been the Taillight, Can Now Be the Headlight
Authors: Tuuri Rebecca
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores the National Council of Negro Women's (NCNW) international work, focusing especially on NCNW's postwar work for human rights and its later formation of an international division in the 1970s. In 1973 Congress passed the Percy Amendment to the U.S. Foreign Service Act that pushed the U.S. government to ensure that women were beneficiaries of international development projects. In this climate, NCNW won $1.7 million dollars in funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) between 1975 and 1985. The U.S. government saw the women of the NCNW, as a black American women-led nonprofit organization, as the "natural allies" of women of African descent worldwide. With this money, the NCNW first hosted a concurrent conference for women of African descent at the International Women's Year conference in Mexico City, established an international division, and tried to create international poverty programming like it had in Mississippi.
Pearls and a Political Ecology of Empire, 1498–1541
Authors: Warsh Molly A.
Published: January 2019

This chapter traces how the Caribbean fisheries were embedded in global Iberian merchant networks that spanned the Atlantic and stretched into the Indian Ocean and beyond, connecting traders, laborers, and religious missionaries from the Americas to Asia. In the first four decades of the Venezuelan pearl-fishing settlements’ existence (their most lucrative ones), residents put forth their vision of an emerging American political economy, one which had a living ecology at its heart. The expertise of Warao, Guaquerí, and Arawak communities profoundly shaped vernacular practices of wealth husbandry along the Pearl Coast. So, too, did the skills of enslaved West Africans and indigenous peoples from around the Caribbean basin, all of whom labored in increasing numbers and various capacities alongside the motley assortment of European who came to settle, trade, and conduct slave-raiding in the region.
“Even The Black Women Wear Strands of Pearls”
Authors: Warsh Molly A.
Published: January 2019

This chapter considers the enduring significance of the Caribbean pearl-fishing settlements in the second half of the sixteenth century. In the wake of a devastating tsunami in 1541, the Pearl Coast never again reached the pearl-producing heights of the 1520s and 1530s, yet its complex political economy demanded constant crown attention and recognition of the centrality of black pearl divers to the region’s identity, as evidenced by the royal coat of arms granted to Margarita Island in 1600. This era coincided with the political merger of Portugal and Spain, a contentious political union with profound repercussions for the rules governing the movement of people and products within and beyond Iberian realms. Pearls and pearl fishing, meanwhile, continued to evoke maritime wealth and power beyond Spain, explored in art by painters charged with conveying the wonders of a world in transformation. As royal chroniclers reflected on the early history of the American pearl fisheries with an eye to assessing the errors and accomplishments of the past, crown officials sought to improve their management of these unruly settlements. Meanwhile, enslaved laborers in Venezuela and diplomats in England and Italy continued to use pearls to navigate the changing parameters of their lives.
Family and Faith, 1790–1828
Authors: Hewitt Nancy A.
Published: January 2019

Amy Kirby Post’s life as a social activist was rooted in the Quaker farm community in which she was raised. Born in 1802 in Jericho, New York, Amy Kirby was surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all of them birthright members of the Society of Friends. Friends embraced a diverse range of views, but the local Jericho and Westbury Friends Meetings were noted for their peace and antislavery testimonies. Elias Hicks led antislavery efforts in the area and insisted that individuals act according to their “inner light” rather than the Quaker Discipline or even the Bible. Friends’ separate women’s meetings and acknowledgement of women ministers provided Amy with a strong sense of female independence. Yet she also learned about the fragility of family ties and of life itself. Her closest sister Hannah married Isaac Post and moved to central New York in 1823; Amy’s fiancé died in 1825; and two years later Hannah died far from home. Hannah’s death occurred just as the Society of Friends split into Hicksite and Orthodox branches. While twenty-five-year-old Amy was certain about her spiritual commitment to the Hicksites, in most other ways, her future felt deeply unsettled.
Worldly Associations, 1836–1841
Authors: Hewitt Nancy A.
Published: January 2019

Rochester’s boomtown atmosphere attracted a diverse population and allowed Isaac Post to open an apothecary shop to support his still growing family. As importantly, the Posts engaged new groups of activists even as they immersed themselves in Hicksite debates over abolition, Indian rights, women’s rights, and the appropriateness of Friends participating in worldly (that is, cross-denominational) social movements. Locally, antislavery efforts were led by local blacks and by white evangelicals. Amy signed her first antislavery petition in 1837; and she and Isaac attended antislavery conventions where national leaders spoke. In 1840, they joined evangelical, Hicksite and Orthodox Friends in founding the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society (WNYASS). The WNYASS, auxiliary to the American Anti-Slavery Society, was interracial and mixed-sex. In January 1842, William Lloyd Garrison spoke at its annual convention and stayed with the Posts. That February, Amy helped organize a worldly antislavery fair. The funds were intended to help fugitives seeking refuge in Canada, suggesting that she and Isaac were also involved in the underground railroad. Clearly Amy Post’s activist worlds were expanding, complicating her relationship to the Hicksite meeting and opening up new possibilities for transforming society.
Abolitionist Bonds, 1842–1847
Authors: Hewitt Nancy A.
Published: January 2019

By 1842, Quakers played leading roles in the Western New York Anti-Slavery (WNYASS). When Abby Kelley, Frederick Douglass, and Erasmus Hudson stopped in Rochester and spoke at African Bethel Church, the Posts joined the interracial audience and hosted Douglass at their home. Over the next five years, Amy and Isaac deepened their commitment to abolition and their role in the underground railroad while continuing to advocate women’s rights and Indian rights. Both became officers in the WNYASS, though Amy participated in more behind-the-scenes efforts, such as organizing fundraising fairs and hosting visiting lecturers. Her family obligations influenced this choice as she gave birth to a daughter in 1840 and a son in 1847. However, she now had household help and the aid of her sister Sarah. Still, the continuing economic panic threatened to unravel the Posts’ life. They were forced to rent out their house in 1844, the same year in which their young daughter died. The following year, they joined other radical Quakers who withdrew from the Hicksite Meeting as it increasingly sanctioned those who participated in worldly activism. That decision was inspired in part by their growing friendships with black and white activists, including Kelley, Garrison, William Wells Brown, and especially Frederick Douglass.
Shifting Alliances, 1849–1853
Authors: Hewitt Nancy A.
Published: January 2019

In 1849, Harriet Jacobs joined Posts’ household after Nell returned to Boston, and Sojourner Truth befriended Amy in 1851. The Posts invited black and white friends to their home, and Amy helped organize an interracial dinner during a WNYASS convention. Still aiding a flood of fugitive slaves, the Posts became increasingly involved in woman’s rights, spiritualism, temperance, and the Congregational Friends. Susan B. Anthony settled in Rochester in 1849 and joined Amy in woman’s rights and temperance efforts. As Isaac became absorbed in spiritualism, Amy travelled to antislavery and woman’s rights conventions, visited William Nell in Boston, and toured fugitive communities in Canada. While honing her skills as a conductor across movements, Post also confronted her limits. In 1849 Julia Griffiths arrived from Scotland to aid Douglass’s work. More attracted to political abolitionism and affluent supporters than to radical activists, Griffiths nonetheless hoped to gain Post’s support. Instead, as Douglass grew closer to Griffiths, he became more critical of Post. The gulf widened when Griffiths organized the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and Douglass embraced political abolitionism. Still, Post remained close with Nell, Jacobs, and Truth, who shared her spiritualist and women’s rights views as well as her radical abolitionism.