bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Providential State and the Legitimizing Fellowship of “Company”
Authors: Haskell Alexander B.
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores a new strategy for defending the Virginia project that emerged in the early seventeenth century as a male king, James I, ascended the English throne and as England's powerful secretary of state Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, sought to overcome the dishonor attached to Elizabethan sovereign engagements overseas through a robust vision of state-led colonization. Eager to usher in an era of vigorous English sovereignty under a fit male ruler but discouraged by James's uneasiness in challenging Spanish title across the Atlantic, Salisbury became the energetic prime mover behind the Virginia Company. Intended to embody the English body politic and thereby endow the colonizing venture with a legitimacy derived more from the public than the king, the company was from the outset a controversial entity that leaned on a rich literature of the providential state to argue for Virginia's commonwealth status. After Salisbury's death, the company would become vulnerable to the machinations of James's new treasurer, Lionel Cranfield, first earl of Middlesex, who would seek to reinvent the Virginia Company as a mere trading company whose function was less to found a viable American kingdom than to ensure a steady flow of revenue to royal coffers.
Framing a New Public
Authors: Haskell Alexander B.
Published: January 2018

This chapter relates the politics of commonwealth formation in Virginia as James's reign came to an end and his successor, Charles I, made clear that he, too, preferred for Virginia to function as a commercial outpost and generator of royal revenues rather than an integral kingdom. Against the backdrop of the political tensions and religious divisions of the Thirty Years War, the colony's supporters in both England and Virginia adopted a new justificatory approach that centered on the providential importance of the planter. Defining Virginia as a polity that rested on the reciprocal bond between king and planters, writers like Captain John Smith, Samuel Purchas, and Captain John Bargrave treated the mutual obligations of planters and king as forming a public, or shared body of resources and institutions, that should be seen as sacred and inviolable. When, in 1635, Charles and his treasurers' persistent efforts to impose a tobacco contract on the colony reached a crisis point, local politicians like the councillor Samuel Mathews led an uprising against Governor Sir John Harvey that symbolized the idea of Virginia as a commonwealth that sat rightly under God only insofar as the wills of king and planters were conjoined.
Epilogue
Authors: Haskell Alexander B.
Published: January 2018

The epilogue glances forward to the imperial crisis of the 1760s when colonial politicians like the Virginian burgess Richard Bland sought to reconstruct the circumstances by which the Renaissance empire gave rise to colonies like Virginia that took for granted their substantive civil integrity in relation to the state. Bland was sufficiently a product of the Enlightenment era and its own embrace of the Hobbesian theory of state sovereignty that he struggled to understand fully how such colonial commonwealths came into being. Yet, he grasped much about the Christian humanist logic on which Virginians had defined their polity, and he had no doubt that the British American empire's current constitutional arrangements were incomprehensible except in relation to English colonization's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century beginnings.
Resilience of Southern Identity
Authors: Cooper Christopher A. , Knotts H. Gibbs
Published: January 2018

The American South has experienced remarkable change over the past half century. Black voter registration has increased, the region’s politics have shifted from one-party Democratic to the near-domination of the Republican Party, and in-migration has increased its population. At the same time, many outward signs of regional distinctiveness have faded--chain restaurants have replaced mom-and-pop diners, and the interstate highway system connects the region to the rest of the country. Given all of these changes, many have argued that southern identity is fading. But here, Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts show how these changes have allowed for new types of southern identity to emerge. For some, identification with the South has become more about a connection to the region’s folkways or to place than about policy or ideology. For others, the contemporary South is all of those things at once--a place where many modern-day southerners navigate the region’s confusing and omnipresent history.
Regardless of how individuals see the South, this study argues that the region’s drastic political, racial, and cultural changes have not lessened the importance of southern identity but have played a key role in keeping regional identification relevant in the twenty-first century.
Introduction
Authors: Cooper Christopher A. , Knotts H. Gibbs
Published: January 2018

Scholars and observers of the South have long predicted that southern identity would soon go the way of the dodo bird. In this chapter we discuss the reasons for this prediction and lay out the central argument of this book: despite the physical manifestations of modernization, people still find a reason to connect to the South and to identify as southerners.
Conceptual Traffic
Authors: Mucher Christen
Published: January 2018

This essay argues that rhetorical and material gaps have limited scholars’ ability to see the connections between Atlantic slavery and the War of 1812, and it outlines these limits as created by contemporary conceptual changes in the meaning of trade, ideologies of neutrality and “free trade,” as well as current-day nation-centered historiography and the problem of missing archival records. By turning to French shipping records, the essay outlines the difficulty of documenting contraband and illicit activities, and draws connections between neutrality disagreements, early nineteenth century U.S.-French commerce, slavery, and the War of 1812. The essay suggests that a better understanding of wartime trade agreements and the related issue of neutrality, more careful attention to the conceptual disaggregation of foreign from internal slave trade, and an awareness of the gaps in the archive are all necessary to challenge and amend the heretofore-isolated narratives of the Atlantic slave trade and the War of 1812.
For the Love of Glory
Authors: Hale Matthew Rainbow
Published: January 2018

Utilizing a political-cultural approach to the concept of glory, this essay offers not only a fresh account of American perceptions of Napoleon, but also a new perspective on democracy’s development in the United States. More specifically, an investigation of select Bonapartist phenomena—printed accounts of and reader responses to Napoleon; post-revolutionary soldiers’ and sailors’ actions, dress, and utterances; a John Wesley Jarvis painting; and gender roles and concepts—illuminates early American democracy’s romance with power as expressed in a new culture of war. This new culture held that martial values were superior to civilian ones and depicted warfare as a compelling forum for romantic self-expression and nationalist apotheosis. Those preoccupied with Napoleonic glory were motivated by the idea that extraordinary individuals and nations could make a spectacle of themselves and transcend even as they dramatically altered history. This self-important, exhibitionist streak induced many to indulge preposterous fantasies. Yet no matter how outlandish, no matter how implausible, these fantasies should be taken seriously. In their Napoleonic flights of fancy, a sizeable number of Americans betrayed a desire to overturn longstanding assumptions about democracy’s weakness by ruthlessly enforcing its standing at home and in the world. Dreams of incontrovertible democratic power, moreover, undergirded popular fascination with and an inclination to employ—even at the expense of genteel civility and morality—terrifying, neo-monarchical authority. Even though democracy is often seen as the antithesis of monarchy, it is in many ways its fulfilment and amplification, so that nothing is more democratic than bold, even cruel, assertions of autocratic-military power.
Domestic Fronts in the Era of 1812
Authors: Peterson Dawn
Published: January 2018

In 1811, while working as U.S. Indian Agent to the Choctaw nation, a white man named Silas Dinsmoor took guardianship of a ten- or eleven-year-old Choctaw boy named James McDonald. By examining the federal career and household arrangements of this government official and their convergence with the lives of James and his mother Molly McDonald, this essay highlights the central role that race, slavery, and kinship played in both imposing and resisting U.S. imperial rule. It begins by revisiting federal Indian policy and discourses concerning Indian “civilization” to consider the racialized and gendered kinship structures that supported U.S. territorial expansion. It then looks at how Dinsmoor specifically drew upon these same familial arrangements to push for U.S. settlement in the Choctaw nation on both a grand and intimate scale. Dinsmoor was initially invested in federal Indian policies and programs aimed at assimilating Choctaw people and their lands into the U.S. plantation economy by encouraging them to adopt U.S. kinship structures. However, in light of Choctaw responses to his controversial presence in their homelands, the Indian Agent became disillusioned with his work. Presented with an opportunity to “settle” Choctaw lands by establishing a plantation household of his own, Dinsmoor recalibrated his ambitions. Instead of trying to impose U.S. familial values on Choctaw people writ large, he began to acquire Choctaw lands for his own family’s gain, shoring up his claims to Choctaw lands and his sense of spatial mastery through the containment of black and Indian bodies within the space of his own “private” patriarchal household. The essay briefly concludes with the unexpected consequences of Dinsmoor’s actions. When Dinsmoor incorporated a Choctaw youth into his plantation home, he inadvertently supported Molly McDonald’s efforts to use both her son and racial slavery to bolster her own influence on lands coveted by the United States. In the end, Silas Dinsmoor and Molly McDonald’s actions reveal the yawning gap between imperial agendas and colonial realities as Native people found new ways to maintain control over their homelands.
The Wolf Is Come
Authors: Cutrer Thomas W.
Published: January 2018

Examines the history of the five so-called “Civilized Tribes”: their expulsion from their ancestral homelands in the southeastern United States, intertribal disagreements over alliances with North or South, formation of regiments for the Confederacy, and resultant intertribal warfare.
Drive Him Routed from Our Soil
Authors: Cutrer Thomas W.
Published: January 2018

Continues to examine the deteriorating situation for the Confederate forces in Arkansas during the summer of 1863, and, in particular, Sterling Price’s unsuccessful attempt to hold the state’s capital Frederick Steele’s drive up the Arkansas River.
No Nobler Death
Authors: Cutrer Thomas W.
Published: January 2018

Federal forces attempted to reverse early Confederate diplomatic and military successes in the Indian Territory, recruiting their own Native American forces and pushing south out of Kansas. Union troops and their Native American allies were able to reoccupy most of the Indian Territory, but not, as they had hoped, to invade Texas from the north. Intertribal warfare was particularly fierce, and the families of both sides suffered tremendously.
A Brisk and Brilliant Six Weeks’ Campaign
Authors: Cutrer Thomas W.
Published: January 2018

This chapter deals with Frederick Steele’s campaign in Arkansas in support of Nathaniel Banks’s failed Red River expedition, the murder of black prisoners of war at the battles of Poison Springs and Battle of Marks' Mills, the battle of Jenkins Ferry, and with Richard Taylor’s pursuit of Banks’s defeated army down the Red River.
Destroy Property and Recruit Men
Authors: Cutrer Thomas W.
Published: January 2018

This chapter deals with Maj. Gen. Sterling Price’s 1864 raid into Missouri. Intent upon raising recruits and supplies from the pro-secession counties along the Missouri River, Price, after failing to capture St. Louis, moved upstream, destroying Union lines of communication and gathering food, horses, and men. He was decisively defeated at the battle of Westport, Kansas, the largest engagement in the trans-Mississippi, and withdrew his shattered army into Texas and Arkansas.
Conclusion
Authors: Cutrer Thomas W.
Published: January 2018

The Civil War was neither won nor lost west of the Mississippi River. The immense geographical extent of the region made military success and territorial conquest essentially illusory. The trans-Mississippi was at the end of a long and tenuous line of supply, with the armies in the East taking the most and best of what limited matériel was available to the Confederacy. As Edmund Kirby Smith complained to Arkansas senator Robert Ward Johnson in January 1864, “The means and resources of the Government will be centered with the Armies of Tennessee and Virginia. We here will be left to struggle against immense odds, as best we may, with feeble resources at our command.”...
The Miracle Tree
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

At the suggestion of artist Santa Barraza, the author travels to Concepcion, Texas, to see a “miracle tree.” According to owner Estella Palacios Garcia, it is a Monte de Los Olivos from Jerusalem. Not only does it talk, it has a heartbeat and can heal the ailing. Thousands of pilgrims come from miles around to take solace in the tree, she says. This encounter turns into a meditation on spiritual mestizaje when Ms. Garcia also reveals that she has not been able to drink from her water well in 14 years. Neighboring gas wells have made her water supply so toxic, not even her miracle tree can purify it. This leads the author into an investigation of the environmental degradation of the borderlands.
The Wall
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

The most inane obstacle that undocumented immigrants face upon reaching U.S. soil is the 670-mile border wall that Congress erected after passing the 2006 Secure Border Fence Act. The author meditates on its architecture through her meetings with half a dozen visual artists. Conceptual artist Susan Harbage Page photographs and collects the objects immigrants leave behind during their border crossing. Artist and curator Mark Clark organizes “Art Against The Wall” exhibitions in which artists festoon the border wall with brilliantly colored canvases (until the Border Patrol takes them down). Rigoberto Gonzalez is an oil painter who recreates life-size images of narco-violence in the style of seventeenth-century Baroque masters. Santa Barraza paints a Virgen de Guadalupe in Kingsville every December. At the end of the chapter, the author witnesses the arrest of two undocumented immigrants less than a mile from the Rio Grande.
The River
Authors: Elizondo Griest Stephanie
Published: January 2018

In this chapter, the author attends a child’s pool party at the home of a famous Mohawk drug trafficker. Through her interviews with his wife as well as two other drug dealers, she learns about the dark side of the economy at Akwesasne, and compares it to the situation back in South Texas.
Southern Cinematic Slumming
Authors: Vernon Zackary
Published: January 2018

In this essay, the author argues that individuals both in and outside of the region are increasingly drawn to narratives about the “Rough South.” Such narratives tend to portray lower-class southerners from an insider perspective that appears tantalizingly “authentic” to educated, upper-middle-class, urban and suburban audiences. Based on a survey of recent southern films, Vernon contends that contemporary southerners are often so desperate to disavowal cultural homogenization that they participate in the filmic fetishization and commodification of a working-class South that seems to have retained a sense of cultural distinctiveness. Building upon the “poverty porn” debates that emerged in the wake of films like Slumdog Millionaire, Vernon asserts that if films unrealistically depict people in need as leading aesthetically satisfying lives, then they may ultimately run the risk of detracting from social justice efforts.
The Way to Waimanalo
Authors: Chaney Anthony
Published: January 2018

The narrative setting for this chapter is the new Oceanic Institute and its sister facility, Sea Life Park, in Waimanalo, Hawaii, in the early 1960s, where Bateson is studying the way dolphins communicate with each other. Among his colleagues – pioneers in dolphin training for public performance and ocean scientists with military contracts – Bateson was beloved but misunderstood. At issue was Bateson’s deep scorn for modern utilitarian science and B.F. Skinner behaviorism. The source of this scorn can be found in Bateson’s background: his youth in British naturalism and as the son of the founder of genetics William Bateson; his 1936 marriage to Margaret Mead, their work in Papau New Guinea and Bali, and their part, along with Ruth Benedict, in Boasian cultural relativism and the culture and personality school of anthropology; Bateson's anthropological morphology, learning theory, and concept of schismogenesis; and his black ops work with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II. In the aftermath of the war, the US government opened its doors to the social sciences to aid in its Cold War policies. Bateson’s marriage to Margaret Mead crumbled amidst his refusal to accompany her through these doors.
The Back End of the Probe
Authors: Chaney Anthony
Published: January 2018

In this chapter, Allen Ginsberg's reaction to Gregory Bateson and the greenhouse effect is revisited and amplified as an instance of apocalyptic encounter, a central experience of the ecological consciousness and the prospect of ecocatastrophe. That amplification includes the creation of his much-anthologized poem, "Wales Visitation." The trajectory of Bateson's career as a scientist, writer, and public intellectual after 1967 is sketched. This includes a well-documented conference he facilitated in 1968 and the publication of Steps to an Ecology of Mind in 1972. The year following the events described in this book--1968--is widely recognized as a turning point toward increasing violence and backlash, and the rapid collapse of the liberal consensus that had seen the United States through the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. The epilogue invites the reader to regard that turning point in terms of the emergent ecological consciousness the book has placed in context. The epilogue, too, leaves Bateson at a turning point. In contrast to the other principle figures at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, whose public influence peaked in 1967, Bateson's time as a public intellectual had just begun.
Introduction
Authors: Muller Dalia Antonia
Published: January 2018

This chapter establishes the argument of the book and summarizes the author’s contributions to Cuban and Mexican historiography, as well as to the emergent field of transnational studies. It introduces a new geographical framework, that of the Gulf World, and argues that adopting this framework can give us a new vantage point on Cuban Independence itself and on the impact of Cuban independence beyond the borders of the island of Cuba. Finally, it establishes this book as a work of social, political, intellectual, diplomatic and transnational history.
Cuban Communities in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico
Authors: Muller Dalia Antonia
Published: January 2018

This chapter closely examines the development of Cuban migrant communities in three Mexican cities: Veracruz, Merida, Mexico City and compares them to Cuban communities established in the United States. Examining migratory patterns, economy, politics, race, culture and interstate and cross regional connections, this chapter posits that shifting our focus away from the United States and centering on Mexico allows us to truly appreciate the breadth and scope of the nineteenth-century Cuban Diaspora.
Knocking on Labor's Door
Authors: Windham Lane
Published: January 2018

The power of unions in workers’ lives and in the American political system has declined dramatically since the 1970s. In recent years, many have argued that the crisis took root when unions stopped reaching out to workers and workers turned away from unions. But here Lane Windham tells a different story. Highlighting the integral, often-overlooked contributions of women, people of color, young workers, and southerners, Windham reveals how in the 1970s workers combined old working-class tools--like unions and labor law--with legislative gains from the civil and women’s rights movements to help shore up their prospects. Through close-up studies of workers' campaigns in shipbuilding, textiles, retail, and service, Windham overturns widely held myths about labor’s decline, showing instead how employers united to manipulate weak labor law and quash a new wave of worker organizing. Recounting how employees attempted to unionize against overwhelming opposition from bosses and corporations, Knocking on Labor's Door dramatically refashions the narrative of labor and politics during a crucial decade and remaps the recent history of the American workplace. Windham's story inspires both hope and indignation, and will become a must-read in labor, civil rights, and women’s history.
The Dilemma of the Narrow Door
Authors: Windham Lane
Published: January 2018

This chapter describes how union organizing developed as the gateway through which workers had to enter before they could fully access the most secure tier of the nation’s employer-centered social welfare system - - collective bargaining. It recounts how labor law’s protections for union organizing weakened, and so increasingly narrowed that entryway. This chapter covers the 1930s through the 1980s.
Out of the Southern Frying Pan, into the Global Fire
Authors: Windham Lane
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores two union elections among textile workers at Cannon Mills in Kannapolis, North Carolina (near Charlotte) in 1974 and 1985. This chapter puts union organizing into dialogue with shifting textile trade policy and with the impacts of gains from the civil rights movement on textile employment. It shows how employers manipulated a globalizing economy to suppress workers’ union organizing efforts.
Siloism, the Self, and Total Revolution
Authors: Barr-Melej Patrick
Published: January 2018

This chapter shifts the book’s line of sight away from hippismo and toward the esoteric counterculture of Siloism and the group of Chilean Siloists called Poder Joven (Young Power). The chapter unpacks Siloism’s call for young people to focus their youthful energy inward, peer deeply into their own psyches, experience fully the connection between mind and body, and realize socialismo libertario, or libertarian socialism. Such undertakings would effectively transform the individual, his or her immediate surroundings, and the world. These and other aspects of Siloist thought and practice raised quite a ruckus among those pledged to protect culture and public morality, thus motivating authorities to repress what many identified as Poder Joven’s depravity.
The Palomita and Her Nest
Authors: Barr-Melej Patrick
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on the novel Palomita Blanca (Little White Dove) by Enrique Lafourcade. This best-selling novel in Chilean history, tells of counterculture, class, love, and heartache, with hippismo and Siloism making their marks in the lives of the story’s two young protagonists. Published in 1971, Palomita Blanca reflects the combination of lucid observation, misreading, and media-roused hogwash that characterized much of mainstream responses to both the youth question and counterculture. It is, of course, a work of literature, with all the leeway that grants. But the novel’s reach, including its extensive use in secondary schools, has done much to shape how more recent generations in Chile have come to understand the late sixties and early seventies.
Epilogue
Authors: Barr-Melej Patrick
Published: January 2018

The epilogue briefly pushes the book’s discussion forward in time, into 1974, when countercultural youths faced very different conditions put upon them by a military regime whose leaders were familiar with anticounterculture discourses, especially those of the Allende years. Upon the military coup (led by General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte) that ended Allende’s presidency and democracy in September 1973, matters turned from troublesome to dismal for many hippies (including Jorge Gómez), Siloists, and countercultural youths in general as the dictatorship forcefully imposed its notion about youth, discipline, and culture.
A Mighty Bulwark against the Blind and Raging Forces of Nature
Authors: Busch Andrew M.
Published: January 2018

This chapter describes Austin’s natural features and hazards, concentrating on the Colorado River system. It then investigates how Austin’s early twentieth century business and political leaders struggled to fund dams to make the river safer and to profit from it via hydroelectricity, recreation, and water supply. Finally, it demonstrates how early environmental improvements benefited whites but not other groups.
The Playground of the Southwest
Authors: Busch Andrew M.
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores how abundant water because central to Austin’s identity, social life, and economy after World War Two. The dam system impounding the Colorado River allowed for business people and politicians to remake the region. New suburban areas were developed along the watershed. Tourism increased markedly and a robust economy emerged focusing on water-based recreation. By the 1960s the region began to promote its water via Aquafest, an annual celebration of the area’s water resources and local cultural attributes.
Literary Cultures
Authors: Dworkin Ira
Published: January 2018

This chapter traces the influence of travelers like William and Lucy Gantt Sheppard on more conventionally fictionalized literary work by authors like Hopkins who never traveled to Africa themselves. Her novel Of One Blood, which was first serialized in the influential Colored American Magazine, where she was an editor, is indicative of the way that broadly internationalist culture circulating around the Congo, and other geopolitical spaces, was grounded in the black press. This chapter argues that connections between Of One Blood and the missionary careers of the Sheppards illuminate the transatlantic routes that have contributed to the development of African American literature and culture, further challenging common generalizations that, in the early twentieth century, modern Africa was unknown to African Americans. Early twentieth century American representations of Africa, such as Of One Blood, were informed by intellectual networks of writers and activists that were nurtured through the black press as well as literary societies, civic organizations, HBCUs, and religious institutions.
Near the Congo
Authors: Dworkin Ira
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the ways that the poet’s seminal work “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” engages a discrete geopolitical space rather than a generic African continent. While the poem names four rivers on three continents, references such as “I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep” are typically read as romantic. Although the poem’s political allusions may not be apparent to readers in the twenty-first century, at the time of its writing, the Belgian Congo was less than a generation removed from a massive international human rights campaign in which African Americans played a central role. Given the extensive coverage of the Congo in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, which first published “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” contemporary readers of Hughes could not have avoided recognizing the Congo as a categorically political trope, which is instrumental in Hughes’s work from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s to the 1960s.
Religion of Chiropractic
Authors: Folk Holly
Published: January 2018

Chiropractic is the most common form of alternative medicine in the United States today, but its origins stretch back to the popular healing subcultures of the nineteenth century. This book focuses on two of chiropractic's earliest founders, Daniel David (D. D.) Palmer and his son, Joshua Bartlett (B. J.) Palmer, who established the Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa in 1897. It traces the history of ideas behind early chiropractic theory, as developed by the Palmers and their contemporaries and rivals. This book argues that a great deal of alternative medicine can be apprehended through two themes: vitalism and populism, and that the protean positioning of chiropractic as a scientific practice and a holistic alternative allows it to appeal to health consumers desires. The Palmers' system depicted chiropractic as a conduit for both material and spiritualized versions of a “vital principle,” reflecting popular contemporary therapies and 19th -century metaphysical beliefs, including the idea that the spine was home to occult forces that regulated bodily health. Chiropractic illustrates how the ideological and therapeutic aspects of health care are intertwined. In the Progressive Era, as the relationship between science and religion took on an urgent, increasingly competitive tinge, many remarkable people, including the Palmers, undertook highly personal reinterpretations of their physical and spiritual worlds. In this context, this book reframes alternative medicine as a type of populist intellectual culture in which ideologies about the body comprise an appealing form of cultural resistance. This legacy continues in the Straight Chiropractic movement.
The First Adjustment
Authors: Folk Holly
Published: January 2018

The first chapter relates the story of the discovery of chiropractic by D. D. Palmer in the mid-1890s, and discusses the meaning of the history of their profession to chiropractors. It traces the history of ideas behind early chiropractic theory and introduces two main themes as important to the emergence of alternative medicine in the nineteenth century: vitalism and populism. Vitalist ideas run the spectrum from mostly rooted in science to highly theological. D. D. Palmer understood chiropractic as a science, but he incorporated metaphysical spiritual ideas to create Chiropractic Philosophy. This chapter also proposes chiropractic as part of an American cultural tradition of popular physiology, that rejects elite medical authorities and claims the right to choose one’s health care as an essential democratic right. D. D. Palmer was suspicious of higher education and elite knowledge, which he emulated and rejected in creating chiropractic. Palmer’s writing shows him to be a populist intellectual of a type distinctive to the Progressive Era.
The Look I Want to Know Better
Authors: Kutulas Judy
Published: January 2018

Youth becomes the defining force in fashion starting in the 1960s. This chapter looks at younger and older men’s adoption of a traditional womanly attitude toward fashion where clothing becomes a signifier or who one is. Stylish older men followed the British peacock look in the late 1960s. Younger men resisted fashion until the idea of hip consumerism emerged, enabling what they regarded as a holistic and authentic approach to style.
Conclusions
Authors: Kutulas Judy
Published: January 2018

The conclusion argues that American society went from a pre-1960s hierarchical structure with white, middle-class men at the top to one that enabled individuals to define who they wanted to be, what they wanted to do, and how they wanted to love. The new attitude was both exhilarating and scary, but definitely present by the end of the 1970s.
Introduction
Authors: Minchin Timothy J.
Published: January 2018

The introduction explains how the history of the AFL-CIO has been neglected, especially in the period since 1979, when Lane Kirkland took over from George Meany as president. What has been written - on fragmented parts of the AFL-CIO’s history - has usually been very hostile, particularly in terms of criticizing the AFL-CIO’s support for U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, its bureaucratization, and its patchy civil rights record. I explain that my aim is to write a balanced history that recognizes the AFL-CIO’s achievements and its limitations, and focuses largely on domestic affairs. The book draws on newly-available archive sources, particularly unprocessed parts of the AFL-CIO Papers, and more than sixty oral history interviews conducted by the author. The introduction highlights the AFL-CIO’s ongoing relevance as the only mass membership, national organization fighting for working people in Washington. The AFL-CIO has performed this role – as the “People’s Lobby” - since it was established in 1955. The AFL-CIO speaks for all Americans who work, and - despite a media interest in union decline - in 2011 it still had more than 12 million members.
From Solidarity to Defeat
Authors: Minchin Timothy J.
Published: January 2018

The chapter explores the difficult period between Solidarity Day and the 1984 presidential election. Facing a hostile political climate and an ongoing economic recession, the AFL-CIO tried to continue fighting back. In 1982, 1983, and 1984, Kirkland organized Solidarity Day II, III, and IV, and all were large marches. There were some significant internal reforms, as Kirkland oversaw the continued diversification of the Executive Council. Other changes strove to improve the AFL-CIO’s image in the media and to increase communication with members. Kirkland also launched a major organizing campaign in Houston, a brave effort in hostile territory. Continuing to see itself as a “People’s Lobby,” the Federation had some success in defending important social programs, particularly Social Security. Overall, however, Kirkland’s reforms did not go far enough, and union density declined at a rapid rate in these years. President Reagan also won re-election easily in 1984, placing the AFL-CIO and its members further under fire.
Saying No to the Status Quo
Authors: Minchin Timothy J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the 1995 race for the AFL-CIO presidency, which witnessed the first contested election in the Federation’s forty-year history. These were extraordinary and divisive events, and the chapter brings them to life through access to interviews with key participants, including both Tom Donahue and John Sweeney, who faced off for the presidency after Lane Kirkland was challenged by the Sweeney-led reformers and resigned. New written records are also mined here, including the AFL-CIO’s Papers and Donahue’s private papers. Sweeney ultimately proved victorious, winning by promising to commit far more resources to organizing, to overhaul the Federation’s political program, and to connect the AFL-CIO more clearly to grassroots workers, particularly women and racial minorities. While acrimonious and divisive, the 1995 race launched a new era in the Federation’s history.
Dying City
Authors: Tochterman Brian
Published: January 2018

In this eye-opening cultural history, Brian Tochterman examines competing narratives that shaped post–World War II New York City. As a sense of crisis rose in American cities during the 1960s and 1970s, a period defined by suburban growth and deindustrialization, no city was viewed as in its death throes more than New York. Feeding this narrative of the dying city was a wide range of representations in film, literature, and the popular press--representations that ironically would not have been produced if not for a city full of productive possibilities as well as challenges. Tochterman reveals how elite culture producers, planners and theorists, and elected officials drew on and perpetuated the fear of death to press for a new urban vision. It was this narrative of New York as the dying city, Tochterman argues, that contributed to a burgeoning and broad anti-urban political culture hostile to state intervention on behalf of cities and citizens. Ultimately, the author shows that New York’s decline--and the decline of American cities in general--was in part a self-fulfilling prophecy bolstered by urban fear and the new political culture nourished by it.
Without Vision the People Perish
Authors: Bedasse Monique A.
Published: January 2018

This chapter begins in Jamaica where Rastafarians formulated the philosophy that sent them in search of Africa. It demonstrates Rastafari’s internal complexity by examining all facets of the worldview: from religious imaginaries and rituals to political commitments and strategies. It then goes on to situate the Rastas who went to Tanzania amid this plurality with a view to explaining who these particular Rastafarians were.
Tanzania
Authors: Bedasse Monique A.
Published: January 2018

This chapter sets the pan-African context in which the repatriation occurs. In particular, it explains the rise of Tanzania as a safe haven for African freedom fighters and radical diasporic Africans in the 1960s and 1970s, connecting the repatriation to wider diasporic engagement with Tanzania in this period. It places ujamaa within the context of other African socialisms of the day and highlights the role of pan-Africanism in the making of Tanzania’s modern history.
Introduction
Authors: Gussow Adam
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues that the connection between the devil and the blues is much more extensive than prevailing popular mythologies, which tend to focus narrowly on the phrase "the devil's music" and Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads. The whitening of the blues audience is partly responsible for this development; so, too, are Afrocentric understandings of Johnson that substitute Legba for the European devil and reinforce the popular overvaluation of the crossroads location, drawing attention away from black social worlds where so many devil blues recordings are set. The devil imagined by African American blues people served a range of functions; he was "just" the devil—the opponent warned about in the Bible—but he was also a figure of useable power for some bluesmen, an agent of vengeance who could "get" a wayward lover, and a symbol of the white man.
Heaven & Hell Parties
Authors: Gussow Adam
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the origins and meaning of the phrase "the devil's music," paying particular attention to the way in which black southern blues performers, male and female, contest the term. Africa, through the mechanism of the slave trade and the condemnation of instrumental music by Islamic clerics, offers one possible origin for devil's music concept. The prelude to the demonization of the blues and its representative instrument, the steel-stringed guitar, is the evangelization of the slaves and the demonization of the fiddle during the second Great Revival. As blues emerged in the Mississippi Delta early in the Twentieth Century, blues musicians like John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, and the Mississippi Sheiks, along with an irreverent "young modern" generation of black youth, mocked the hypocrisy of black ministers and spurned the religious certainties of their parents and the church.
I’m Going to Marry the Devil’s Daughter
Authors: Gussow Adam
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the way in which the blues lyric tradition uses the devil as a figure for the southern white man and hell as a figure for the miseries of the Jim Crow South. The white slave master and slave patroller show up, in coded form, in the antebellum spirituals; this tradition was reconfigured after Emancipation to reflect the new realities of the sharecropper's and bluesman's world, one presided over by the white bossman, sheriff, and prison farm warden. Bluesmen acted the devil, one might say, in order to evade and supplant the (white) devil and live more freely in the Jim Crow South over which he presided. Big Bill Broonzy, Peetie Wheatstraw, Lightnin' Hopkins, Champion Jack Dupree, and others recorded songs in which they signified on this mean white devil; Wheatstraw and Broonzy imaged themselves as his son-in-law: the black man making love to the white devil's daughter.
Selling It at the Crossroads
Authors: Gussow Adam
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the mythology of "selling your soul at the crossroads" that has surrounded guitarist Robert Johnson and dominated contemporary conversations about the devil and the blues. Offering a new theory about Johnson's attitudinal debt to his mentor, Ike Zimmerman, it argues that Johnson, far from being haunted by evil, was a master ironist who viewed crossroads mythology skeptically and instrumentally: a way of attracting lovers and increasing his prestige. The film Crossroads (1986), an interracial buddy flick focused on the adventures of Johnson's peer Willie Brown and a young white blues student, Eugene Martone, reinvigorated the Johnson legend and stimulated Mississippi's nascent blues tourism business. The 1999 installation of a guitar-topped monument at "the crossroads" in Clarksdale, Mississippi certified the Johnson legend; this chapter investigates the deep history of that intersection and explores the meanings that tourists and guides have projected onto multiple crossroads locations in the Mississippi Delta.
The Oriental Menace Comes to the South
Authors: Hinnershitz Stephanie
Published: January 2018

This chapter follows Chinese and Japanese who migrated from the West Coast to the South following the Civil War through the early twentieth century. Both Chinese and Japanese laborers and farmers sought economic opportunities and reprieve in Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas from growing anti-Asian hysteria. However, when they arrived in the South, the reality failed to live up to their expectations. Although small in number, the very presence of Chinese and Japanese in the South triggered a fear among southerners of a yellow invasion of their territory. In response, southerners’ distaste for Asian settlers later gave way to legislators passing laws and amending constitutions to prohibit aliens ineligible for citizenship (Asians) from owning property in their states.
Post-1965 Changes in Asian America
Authors: Hinnershitz Stephanie
Published: January 2018

After World War II and through the 1960s, Asian Americans began a transformative process, from being the “yellow peril” to becoming the model minority, and Asian Americans in the South experienced, to some degree, the same transformation. The war and its mottos of fighting for freedom and democracy at home and abroad affected the way Americans viewed their own hypocrisy toward minorities in the United States. African Americans were the largest minority group to use the aims of the war to demand attention to their plight with Jim Crow, prompting the growth of a nationwide civil rights movement, but Americans also came to view the century-old forms of legal discrimination against Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in a new light. Not only did Congress repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 (making it legal for some Chinese to naturalize and allowing a small number of Chinese immigrants to enter the United States), but Filipino Americans and Indian Americans received similar treatment during and after World War II. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act (or the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952), although designed to protect American security during the early Cold War by prohibiting and deporting subversive aliens, also made it possible for Asian immigrants of all ethnicities to become American citizens (while the number of Asians admitted to the United States did not drastically increase). Americans also viewed the ability of Japanese Americans to overcome the massive civil rights violations of wartime imprisonment and achieve economic and educational success as a model for all minorities to follow. Asian Americans came through the fires of World War II and proved that they were loyal Americans and deserving of equal treatment and respect, and while more subtle and sometimes not so subtle forms of racism and discrimination ...
Getting Down to Business in Dixie
Authors: Hinnershitz Stephanie
Published: January 2018

During the 1980s and the 1990s, the South experienced another demographic change as an increasing number of Indian immigrants and their families relocated to southern states for business opportunities. Indian-owned hotels and motels became a growing phenomenon as migrants took advantage of affordable operating costs across the South. While many Indians maintained successful businesses, this success did not come without a price. Many southerners resented another possible “Asian invasion” of “un-American” outsiders set on making profits by driving Americans out of business. As a result, Indian hoteliers created an advocacy group—the Asian American Hotel Owners Association in 1989. This chapter argues that the experiences of Indians with business discrimination are an indication of the complex “post-racial” history of the South.
Archives of Dispossession
Authors: Roybal Karen R.
Published: January 2018

One method of American territory expansion in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands was the denial of property rights to Mexican landowners, which led to dispossession. Many historical accounts overlook this colonial impact on Indigenous and Mexican peoples, and existing studies that do tackle this subject tend to privilege the male experience. Here, Karen R. Roybal recenters the focus of dispossession on women, arguing that gender, sometimes more than race, dictated legal concepts of property ownership and individual autonomy. Drawing on a diverse source base—legal land records, personal letters, and literature—Roybal locates voices of Mexican American women in the Southwest to show how they fought against the erasure of their rights, both as women and as landowners. Woven throughout Roybal’s analysis are these women’s testimonios—their stories focusing on inheritance, property rights, and shifts in power. Roybal positions these testimonios as an alternate archive that illustrates the myriad ways in which multiple layers of dispossession—and the changes of property ownership in Mexican law—affected the formation of Mexicana identity.
Jovita Gonzalez Stakes a Claim in Tejas History
Authors: Roybal Karen R.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the short story, "Shades of the Tenth Muses," the novel, Caballero: A Historical Novel, and a master's thesis – each narrative written by Tejana folklorist and author, Jovita González – to reveal how she contributed to an alternative archive about the Texas/Mexico borderlands. As a member of the Texas folklore society, González participated alongside what were considered prominent Texas folklorists and historians (mainly Anglo males) of the twentieth century, in an effort to (re)tell her own version of Tejano history. The chapter argues that González uses her literary and academic work to create an alternative archive about gender and race relations along the Texas/Mexico border in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work contributes to an ever-growing body of Chicana/o work that recuperates Mexicana/o cultural memory.
Mrs. Clara Poole
Authors: Taylor Ula Yvette
Published: January 2018

This chapter introduces Clara and Elijah Poole and their early exposure to W.D. Fard and the Allah Temple of Islam. Fard’s home grown Islamic teachings critique Jim Crow America during the Great Depression. Why Clara and Elijah Poole were receptive to Fard’s racial analysis anchors the chapter.
Building a Movement, Fighting the Devil
Authors: Taylor Ula Yvette
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the core of W.D. Fard’s Islamic teachings. Fard’s religious instruction blends Christianity and Black Nationalism in an effort to build a Black Islamic movement. Often critiqued as a “cult” by Detroit authorities, Fard’s converts were harassed by the city’s police and jailed. Clara and Elijah’s dedication to Fard’s movement are evidenced by the changing of their surname to Mohammad and the publication of letters in the Baltimore Afro-American.