bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
You Run into All Sorts of Things
Authors: Yarger Lisa
Published: September 2017

Lovie talks about prenatal screening and how she only ever took on a woman expected to have a low-risk delivery. She also discusses trying to avoid first-time mothers, as they weren’t “nature-measured.” Lovie describes how she handled problem situations on the job, including a woman outside of Washington who developed convulsions due to extremely high blood pressure with the onset of labor. She also tells the story of transferring one woman from Aurora to the hospital due to an antepartum hemorrhage. The chapter concludes with her discussing the variety of ways a baby can been born breech, and how she handled a number of breech births, including one particularly memorable one in Campbells Creek. She also discusses how her training with Margaret Myles would come back to her in problem situations.
Still Waiting
Authors: Yarger Lisa
Published: September 2017

The narrator enjoys a goose egg for breakfast and makes rubbery peanut brittle while Lovie reminisces about the dynamics of her marriage. This chapter explores how Lovie could never be persuaded to remarry despite her belief that the man should be head of the household. The narrator gets stir-crazy and begins to think she and Lovie will never hear from Joy. Lovie's youngest daughter, Missy Shelton Sutton, drops in and recounts Lovie's behavior when she (Missy) had her first baby. The story of the accident that left Lovie's younger son Wesley Shelton in a wheelchair also unfolds in this chapter.
The Call
Authors: Yarger Lisa
Published: September 2017

A middle-of-the-night call finally summons Lovie and the narrator to the birth of Joy and Kenny’s fourth child. The narrator drives Lovie to Joy and Kenny's house in Pantego, where it becomes clear that Lovie is not only completely in control of the situation, but that she is also doing some things for the narrator’s benefit and the benefit of posterity. A sleepless night passes. Interspersed throughout the chapter are first-person accounts by Lovie as she reflects on past deliveries, her practice and habits, and her philosophy of birth and midwifery.
Labor
Authors: Yarger Lisa
Published: September 2017

Joy grows impatient with the progress of her labor. While Lovie watches over Joy like a mother hen, Kenny invites the narrator to gather eggs from his chickens. Lovie shares her view of the midwife's role at a home birth and explains why Joy's labor is taking some time. As in the previous chapter, this chapter includes first-person accounts by Lovie: in this case, reflections on how labor tends to proceed for a woman who has several small children, and how Lovie supports a woman though labor. Joy tries to explain to the narrator what a contraction feels like. Joy confides her fear that the baby could be breech, and Lovie asks her if she’s ever had an episiotomy.
Pushing
Authors: Yarger Lisa
Published: September 2017

In this chapter Lovie explains what a woman can expect during the pushing phase. Joy requests a prayer, which Lovie leads. Joy labors on her back and also in the left lateral position, a position Lovie learned to deliver in in Scotland. Lovie maintains her calm while Joy expresses increasing concern about the difficulty of her labor compared to her previous three. After about three hours of pushing, the baby's head finally emerges, with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck.
Birth
Authors: Yarger Lisa
Published: September 2017

Joy and Kenny's son Eli is born. Lovie examines the placenta for missing pieces. Lovie narrates her role in the postpartum stage and directs Joy, Kenny and the narrator in their roles. Lovie examines, washes and weighs the baby. According to Lovie's baby scale, Eli weighs 7.5 pounds, but Joy and Kenny confide later to the narrator that he weighed 10 lbs, 14 oz, and that all of Lovie's clients knew her scales were off.
Epilogue
Authors: Yarger Lisa
Published: September 2017

The narrator reflects on her initial attraction to Lovie and her desire to fix Lovie in time, as an unchanging character. The narrator also contemplates the role Lovie played at a particularly challenging period of the narrator’s life. The epilogue chronicles the contact between Lovie and the narrator after the latter’s move to Munich up until Lovie’s death in 2013. The narrator explores the advantages and disadvantages of the book having taken so long to complete, with a particular focus on Lovie’s tendency to perform her role as midwife and Yarger’s frequent inability to recognize the significance of Lovie’s performances. The epilogue also explores possible conflicts between Lovie and the narrator’s agendas and discusses Michael Frisch’s concept of a shared authority. The epilogue also provides more context for Lovie and Yarger’s earlier disagreement about biracial babies; the narrator concludes that she is not the non-racist white person she thought herself previously, that she, too, carries racist patterns. She concludes that she and Lovie are both good white women who have clean-up work to do when it comes to racism.
Take Off or Leap Forward?
Authors: Miller Chris
Published: September 2017

China and the USSR had been stark ideological opponents throughout much of the Cold War as they feuded over the meaning of Marxism-Leninism. In the early 1980s, however, their relationship rapidly changed as Soviet intellectuals realized that Deng Xiaoping was transforming China’s economy. This chapter examines Soviet economists and analysts who visited China, studied the changes underway, and reported on China’s new policies to top Soviet leaders.
Gorbachev’s Gamble
Authors: Miller Chris
Published: September 2017

This chapter discusses the political challenges that Gorbachev faced while devising policy during the late 1980s, and highlights the role played by economic interest groups, including the farm lobby, heavy industries, and the military industrial complex. These lobbies dominated economic policymaking and constrained Gorbachev’s ability to implement his desired policies. The chapter describes the political base of each of the major interest groups, and assesses their goals in shaping economic policymaking. Each of these groups, the chapter notes, had strong economic reasons to oppose Chinese-style reform.
Soviet Industry, Sichuan Style
Authors: Miller Chris
Published: September 2017

This chapter shows that China’s experience played an important role in Soviet debates about restructuring enterprises. Many of Moscow’s reform efforts, such as the demand that enterprises become self-financing, and the decision to let individuals start small businesses, mirrored Soviet understanding of Chinese practice. Using documentation from Soviet research institutes and from Politburo meeting notes, the chapter shows that Gorbachev struggled to change Soviet economic policy. Conservatives managed to delay Gorbachev’s initiatives, sometimes for several years. When confronted with conservative opposition, Gorbachev often cited China’s successes as evidence that his reforms would also boost growth. However, after much delay, Gorbachev succeeded in pushing through reforms that were as radical as China’s, creating a private sphere and de facto privatizing many firms.
Conclusion
Authors: Miller Chris
Published: September 2017

The long collapse of the Soviet economy did not end with the dissolution of the USSR. Governments quickly changed, but the infrastructure of the Soviet economy did not. From the metalworks of Magnitogorsk to the nickel mines of frozen Norilsk, the economy bequeathed to modern Russia by Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev was only slowly changed. Not all of that inheritance, of course, was harmful. The USSR invested heavily in schooling, for example, leaving a population significantly more educated than might have been expected. Yet much of the Soviet legacy is far less positive. Few of the manufacturing industries so celebrated by the Soviets are profitable today, and almost none are at the forefront of modern technology. Russia today has over a hundred ...
A Racial Reckoning on Campus?
Authors: Smith Christi M.
Published: September 2017

How did efforts to shift racial boundaries through interracial education fail? This chapter introduces the 19th century Anti-Caste Movement and its goal of revising the social order such that – through promoting colorblind ideology – race would no longer structure the American status hierarchy. I provide a theoretical introduction to the study of racial boundaries and provide a multi-level framework for analyzing the types of racial boundary processes that happen at the level of individual interactions, within organizations, through inter-organizational negotiation, and at the level of law-making and states. I then lay out my argument for studying integration as an organizational achievement and provide an overview of the subsequent chapters.
Education Follows the Flag
Authors: Smith Christi M.
Published: September 2017

Why did integrated education generate so much interest after the Civil War? This chapter contextualizes the anti- caste movement and the postwar rush to launch a mass education system in the South. Integrationists argued that segregation— and maintaining two separate school systems— demanded an irrational and excessive cost. But by filling the void, charitable funds enabled this disparity. Benevolent organizations relieved Southern states of their responsibilities to enforce constitutional commitments to public education. This reliance on private largesse— whether through benevolent organizations or the capitalist philanthropy that followed in subsequent years— had profound consequences for the kind of education groups were able to access.
Inside Interracial Colleges, 1837–1880
Authors: Smith Christi M.
Published: September 2017

This chapter provides a local analysis of lived experiences on three integrated college campuses – Berea (KY), Howard (DC) and Oberlin (OH). Selected from among thirty colleges open to blacks and whites after 1870, these three were widely endorsed as models for replication by important cultural, political, and media figures. Diaries and personal letters from college presidents, students, and others reveal the intensity with which campus-level actors were attached to the ideal of integration. Administrative reports, budgets, fundraising materials and detailed minutes from Board of Trustee meetings illustrate decision-making processes and practices in structuring racial contact on campus. Fundraising materials, including speeches, pamphlets and letters to donors show how the colleges depicted their mission to potential students, donors, and policymakers; an independently-constructed data set of over four hundred newspaper articles shows how these colleges were portrayed to readers across the United States. Berea, Howard, and Oberlin differed in racial composition, recruitment strategies, and black representation on faculty and administration. Despite variation on key factors thought to predict inter-racial cooperation, on-campus dynamics were insufficient to resist segregationist pressures from beyond the campus gates.
From Cause to Common Charity
Authors: Smith Christi M.
Published: September 2017

Chapter 4 explains how racial coeducation at Berea, Howard, and Oberlin was undermined when, for the first time, colleges began to compete with one another. As education for blacks and mountain whites was increasingly defined as “charity,” the colleges faced increasingly stiff competition for donations, as well as the attention of the AMA. Whereas students’ higher education choices had previously been organized around religious disciplines and familial legacies, by the mid-1880s a competitive field of higher education emerged. As the chapter shows, law, migration, and external organizations played important roles in diffusing particular models of higher education. In response to competition in this growing field, Berea, Howard, and Oberlin differentiated their positions to maintain resource streams while activating unique articulations of race, class, and gender.
The “Perils” of Gender Coeducation
Authors: Smith Christi M.
Published: September 2017

Chapter 5 explores the intersection of racial and sexual politics in structuring various forms of higher education for women. A particular private organization—the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), now the American Association of University Women—played an important role in structuring women’s higher education. For the first time, the ACA initiated an evaluative campaign to measure the quality of higher education opportunities. This produced the first systematic efforts to commensurate educational offerings across colleges. Like contemporary rankings, this system exerted discipline on both coeducational and single-sex colleges.
A New Constituency for Berea
Authors: Smith Christi M.
Published: September 2017

Chapter 7 chronicles the efforts of Berea’s leaders to construct Appalachians as a particular brand of poor whites, and without the stigma of the Confederacy attached to other Southern whites. By the mid-1880s, a new wave of benevolent agencies launched a new form of colleges designed for this newly categorized group— “mountain education.” The mountain education movement treated poor white Southerners as deserving of Northern philanthropic aid by arguing that class oppression could rival racial oppression. Here, competitive dynamics, as navigated by organizational leaders, produced not only particular types of education but also consecrated groups of people.
Conclusion
Authors: Smith Christi M.
Published: September 2017

The prejudices of the whites, descending through generations, imbibed by individuals in infancy, and strengthened by universal sentiment, practice, and association of ideas cannot be easily and soon overcome, and are not, so far as feeling is concerned, wholly within the power of volition, so as to be annihilated at will. They will vanish gradually in the presence of increasing evidence of a noble manhood. Developed intellectual power, the higher education, success in industrial pursuits, the acquirement of wealth and culture and character, will cause them to dis appear. … When I deposit a gold coin on the table, it commands a certain degree of respect. … Will the result not be analogous, when the colored man shall be seen to have an intrinsic value equal to that of the white man? When one shall no longer associate him with the ideas of bondage, pauperism, and barbarism, but those of freedom, prosperity, intelligence, and culture; when he shall not only carry in his person the stamp of American citizenship, but shall come out from a university training a scholar and a gentleman, like a glittering coin from the die....
Gertrude Weil
Authors: Rogoff Leonard
Published: September 2017

This biography recounts the life of a Southern citizen activist whose career of social advocacy extended from the end of Reconstruction to the civil-rights movement. Born in 1879 in Goldsboro, North Carolina, into a German-Jewish family with antebellum southern roots, Weil was a cosmopolitan in a provincial society. Graduating from Smith College, she returned to Goldsboro and joined the Women's Club movement where as “Federation Gertie” she advocated for women's rights and against the exploitation of child and woman millworkers. As president of the state women's suffrage league, she fought but ultimately failed to win ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In 1920 she became founding president of the North Carolina League of Women Voters, using it as base for progressive social legislation. In the Depression years, she worked for labor rights and poverty relief. Weil was both a Southern Lady, holding traditional social values, and a New Woman, forging a public career in the civic marketplace. An observant Reform Jew, she inherited from her mother a commitment to Zionism. Active in organizations dedicated to world peace and internationalism, she abandoned her pacifism in World War II and worked to save her German family from the Holocaust. Her last crusade, prior to her death in 1971, was in support of black civil rights.
Hip! Hip! Hooray!!!
Authors: Rogoff Leonard
Published: September 2017

Educated at the Horace Mann school and Smith College, Weil represented a rising generation of college-educated women who were scientifically trained in new ideologies of social theory and public reform but found themselves unsuited for any particular career. Feeling the conflict of social and family claims, as defined by Jane Addams, Weil prized her autonomy but returned to her native Goldsboro. There she sought to move social welfare programs from their origins in the Social Gospel and religious societies to scientific principles of social reform. She began her social welfare career working with impoverished school children and joined Home Culture Clubs and the local Woman's Clubs.
Holding Her Breath
Authors: Rogoff Leonard
Published: September 2017

World War I deferred women's progress toward suffrage and social welfare. Like other women, Weil worked for the Red Cross and was appointed to civic boards that sought to ensure social services maintained their vitality in war time. War service demonstrated women's qualifications for citizenship. As a volunteer nurse, she served the poor during the influenza epidemic, later suffering a bout herself. Weil joined organizations like the North Carolina Conference for Social Service which advocated for reform legislation. At war's end she committed to women's international peace organizations in support of disarmament, a World Court, and the League of Nations.
Greater Heights of Spiritual Achievements
Authors: Rogoff Leonard
Published: September 2017

Weil rooted her in idealism in the ethics of Classical Reform Judaism although she described her beliefs as personal. A spiritual seeker, she adhered to a prophetic rather than a rabbinic Judaism that emphasized ethics, rationalism, and universalism. Judaism was a live issue, and she was drawn to Ethical Culture Society. At the Oheb Sholom temple in Goldsboro she served for fifty years as Sunday School principal and worshipped there faithfully on the Sabbath. She was also a leader of the North Carolina Association of Jewish Women, founded by her Aunt Sarah. In contrast to Reform ideology, the Weil women were committed Zionists, fostered through their friendship with Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah.
Breathing the Same Air
Authors: Rogoff Leonard
Published: September 2017

Weil pushed a reluctant Federation of Women's Clubs to adopt a suffrage resolution. In 1914 she served as president of the Goldsboro Equal Suffrage League and five years later was elected president of the Equal Suffrage Association of North Carolina. Either North Carolina Tennessee would need to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment for women to achieve the vote, but North Carolina's political climate was conservative. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, appointed Weil as state field commander. The legislature repeatedly voted down granting women the franchise or legal rights, and anti-suffragists campaigned that women's suffrage was immoral and would overturn white supremacy. Although the governor reluctantly endorsed women's suffrage, the state legislature tabled the motion, and Tennessee became the ultimate ratifying state.
How Shall Women Vote
Authors: Rogoff Leonard
Published: September 2017

In 1920 Weil convened a state League of Women Voters and was elected president. The League battled a corrupt, conservative Democratic political machine, which dominated state politics, and fought for ballot reform. Weil's leading campaign was for a state survey of working women. Weil was caught in the crossfire between advocates of the League's extensive and progressive national agenda and the conservatism of the state's women who argued for a state-centered approach to such issues as a child labor amendment. In the early 1930s Weil joined organizations dedicated to interracial cooperation and in opposition to lynching. As labor conflicts grew increasingly violent, Weil advocated for union rights. By the 1930s, with the onset of the Depression, the League had largely exhausted itself.
Meeting the Needs
Authors: Rogoff Leonard
Published: September 2017

Although battling cancer, family deaths, and the financial crises of the Depression, Weil continued her fight to establish a welfare state. Her platforms included the Goldsboro Bureau for Social Service and the North Carolina Conference for Social Service. Weil served in New Deal agencies as chair of City Emergency Relief Committee, working for a relief program to provide social services and public works projects for the unemployed. She also supported Margaret Sanger's birth control agenda and, like many progressives, endorsed eugenics not as a racial policy but to relieve the financial burden of generations of dependent families on public relief.
My Kinship with All Other Jews
Authors: Rogoff Leonard
Published: September 2017

After the war and Holocaust, Weil dedicated herself to the restoration of the Jewish people in Palestine. She took state leadership positions in the North Carolina Association of Jewish Women. She remained a Temple lady, a congregational activist teaching Sunday school and worshipping on the Sabbath, but she retained a questioning, universalistic outlook on religious questions. In a series of credos she wrote and spoke on What Judaism Means to Me, delineating a prophetic ethic reflective of German idealism but still affirming Jewish peoplehood. As a member of Hadassah and the Zionist Organization of America, she was a benefactor of the budding state of Israel which she visited in 1951 and 1962, returning to Goldsboro as a public advocate for the Jewish State.
The Whole of Life
Authors: Rogoff Leonard
Published: September 2017

Weil traveled the word but remained a rooted cosmopolitan, a citizen of Goldsboro. There she hosted an intellectual salon featuring a southern-style dinner and intense conversation with a visiting lecturer, journalist, or professor. She worked to keep the Jewish congregation alive as the local Jewish population declined. She involved herself in local efforts to support school bonds and to build a new town library. She declined honorary degrees although she accepted a Sophia Smith Medal from Smith College. Nearing death, she dissipated her wealth with charitable benefactions and bequeathed her home and an endowment to build a new public library. She died in 1971 in the house in which she was born,
The Centennial
Authors: Denson Andrew
Published: September 2017

In 1938 civic and business leaders in Chattanooga organized an elaborate festival to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga and the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of their city. While planning the festival, they added a third anniversary, the centennial of the Cherokee Trail of Tears. The festival became the period's single largest commemoration of Indian removal. This chapter explores the Chattanooga event as a particularly vivid example of the emergence of the Cherokee removal story within southern public memory in the interwar period. It traces the evolution of the removal centennial from a minor addendum to an elaborate program, arguing that the event helped to establish Cherokee history as a prominent element of this non-Indian city's public identity. It also describes Cherokee participation in the festival. Cherokees played several important roles in the centennial, but those roles were defined and closely scripted by local organizers. The chapter also explores relationships between the removal memory and more traditional commemorative themes, like the honoring of the Civil War dead and the celebration of community progress.
The Capital
Authors: Denson Andrew
Published: September 2017

This chapter describes the expansion of removal commemoration in the post-World War Two decades, focusing particular attention on Georgia's reconstruction of New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. While the project began as a local effort to promote heritage tourism, state officials applied a loftier theme to the commemoration, describing the site as an apology for Georgia's part in removal. The chapter examines the New Echota project in the context of the South's civil rights-era politics and as an example of American Cold War culture. It argues that the commemoration of the Trail of Tears offered white southerners a politically safe way to contemplate their region's history of racial oppression. The New Echota project included very little Cherokee participation, a feature that suggests the organizers assumed modern Cherokees were mostly irrelevant to their work in Georgia. The New Echota project required Cherokees to act as witnesses to commemorative acts conducted by non-Indians. It did not require them to participate as authors of those commemorations.
The Remembered Community
Authors: Denson Andrew
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the roles played by public history and historical memory in the reconstruction of the Cherokee Nation in twentieth-century Oklahoma. The United States dismantled the Cherokee political system at the turn of the twentieth century, when it forced Cherokees to accept the allotment policy. By the middle twentieth century, however, Cherokees began to reestablish a tribal administration, creating new institutions to represent and provide services to Cherokee communities. The memory of the nineteenth-century Cherokee Nation contributed to these developments in several ways. Tribal leaders invoked their people's nineteenth-century achievements to promote political cooperation in the present. They also used the memory of the Indian republic to bolster their own legitimacy as tribal representatives, offering themselves as heirs to the leaders of the old Nation. They depicted their work as an effort to restore the Cherokees' nineteenth-century greatness, applying tribal history to the task of building a modern Cherokee Nation.
The National Trail
Authors: Denson Andrew
Published: September 2017

In the early 1980s, the National Park Service began exploring the idea of creating a national trail dedicated to Cherokee removal. The planning and designation of this national trail became a catalyst for a variety of public history projects across the South. While the Park Service, itself, devoted scant resources to the initiative, the national trail became a framework in which local groups of commemorators pursued dozens of public history ideas. This final chapter describes the creation of the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, paying particular attention to the ways in which the federal project influenced public memory in local communities. The national trail idea led local commemorators to emphasize their communities' Cherokee history, even when that Cherokee history was quite negligible. This chapter examines the expansion of removal commemoration since the 1980s as an expression of a contemporary American obsession with issues of history and memory. It also places the national trail in the context of recent "history wars," public debates over the interpretation of the American past.
Introduction
Authors: Gómez Pablo F.
Published: September 2017

After much delay, Bernardo Macaya finally arrived in Cartagena de Indias in late October 1675. The chief constable of the city of Portobelo in Panama had hastily arranged for Bernardo’s departure to Cartagena shortly after taking office some weeks before. The magistrate had heard worrisome notices about Bernardo during his time in Portobelo and had discovered equally disturbing accounts about him in paperwork left by the previous constable. Bernardo, a thirty-four-year-old West Central African slave of “Congo caste,” was a feared and renowned ritual practitioner operating around Portobelo. The chief constable was worried that he would not be able to keep Bernardo in prison or, worse, that he would end up like his immediate predecessor in office: dead. His fears were eventually realized by the events surrounding Bernardo’s departure from Portobelo....
Arrivals
Authors: Gómez Pablo F.
Published: September 2017

This chapter describes the larger historical and social context in which Caribbean epistemological transformations concerning the natural world and human bodies transpired. These transformations directly resulted from encounters that occurred between the thousands of people who arrived in the Caribbean from all over the globe during the early modern period. Most of these immigrants were of African descent, and by the end of the seventeenth century they had transformed the Caribbean into a cosmopolitan place where a new type of blackness was normative—one that used African inspirations to invent new realities. The chapter shows how Africans’ appropriation of the social and cultural landscapes of the Caribbean depended not only on the population of the realm of the living, but also of the underground. Otherworldly colonizers, the dead, represented powerful forces in Caribbean locales where cultural and social mores shaped by people of African descent were normative.
Landscapes
Authors: Gómez Pablo F.
Published: September 2017

This chapter describes the sanitary conditions of the seventeenth-century Caribbean, the diversity of ideas about illnesses, spaces for healing and diseasing, and the multitude of practitioners who operated in this context. It introduces a Caribbean geography of health and disease, the contours of which appear familiar, but upon closer scrutiny morph into unsettling spaces. Rather than being mere reproductions of Old World hierarchies and dynamics, the chapter shows, Caribbean landscapes of healing were created anew through the multiple encounters that occurred between mostly black historical actors in the highly competitive cultural economy based on the experiential that developed in the region. These were arenas in which a variety of actors deployed multiple visions of the natural, cultural, and social world of the early modern Atlantic. The multiplicity of origins of practitioners of African descent implies that analysis of their historical circumstances cannot be contained in simple dialectic terms of continuities, ruptures, or coarsely defined hybridities. By unmasking muddying labels and maps of social and physical landscapes conceived through Old World imaginaries, we begin to perceive the countless ways in which black Atlantic actors usurped canonical and mundane spaces in which to enact their own corporeal encounters.
Movement
Authors: Gómez Pablo F.
Published: September 2017

Caribbean spaces were nourished physically and culturally by their sea links and a vast network of terrestrial connections uniting small rural settlements and larger urban spaces like Cartagena and Habana. Free blacks and slaves frequently traveled between different caribben locales, and between urban settlements and rural areas in the region, where they had contact with maroon blacks. These elastic, unbounded migrations proved to be journeys of historical consequence. The chapter explores how black ritual practitioners and their cosmopolitan practices of knowledge production about the natural world moved within this vibrant world. It argues that black ritual practitioners’ claims about the world emerged from local particulars that fostered an adaptive praxis predicated on the experiential. Early modern Caribbean epistemologies about the body were shaped not only by ritual specialists, but also by their patients. The chapter shows how this was a population that was highly mobile and exposed to ideas and treatments coming from all over the world. In the Caribbean, this amalgamating culture was driven by the imperatives of creating new healing techniques that could be deployed under myriad biological, political, cultural, and economical circumstances.
Astounding Creativity
Authors: Gómez Pablo F.
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores black Caribbean ritual practitioners’ use, classification, and production of wonders in the seventeenth century. The chapter argues that wondrous events established the foundation upon which black Caribbean experiential epistemologies about nature became cemented. The Caribbean’s baffling realities were anything but stable. The chapter shows how Caribbean ritual practitioners drew from their own traditions while creating new meanings with their awe-inspiring acts; they did not simply duplicate representations of preordained, episteme-bounded signifiers of Old World origin. Witnesses to black Caribbean ritual practitioners’ reality-creating rituals could not help but feel viscerally amazed when these men and women flayed open the skin of the world to reveal its mysteries. Their ability to astonishingly master nature imbued each ritual practitioner with the social capital necessary to validate his or her diagnoses, healing procedures, and preparations. The wondrous nature of Caribbean lands allowed black ritual practitioners to claim authority over material truths in a world where facts remained difficult to articulate formally within multicultural and transitional societies.
Truth and the Experiential
Authors: Gómez Pablo F.
Published: September 2017

The chapter examines the fundamental transformations to ways of knowing the natural world effected by black ritual practitioners in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. During this pivotal period, black Mohanes led an epistemological revolution in which the experiential replaced first principles as the basis for Caribbean ways of knowing truths about the natural world. Experientially based forms of producing and consuming medical knowledge proved essential to the creation of Atlantic nodes of knowledge production in spaces like Cartagena. Black Caribbean epistemological spaces in which the experiential overcame old dogma, even if experientially-based, were conspicuously located outside the boundaries that natural philosophers defined.In the early modern Caribbean a heterogeneous group of ritual practitioners of African descent arriving from Europe, Africa, and the New World experimented with new materials they found in the Americas and formulated material, conceptual, and social practices based on Caribbean experiential findings that they designed to interpret and establish authority over a natural world that encompassed the moral and the spiritual. As the chapter shows here, black ritual practitioners’ ways of knowing the natural world and bodies were intrinsically related to the development of novel Caribbean experientially based ways of articulating the nature of truth.
Vietnamese Adoptions in the Early War Years
Authors: Varzally Allison
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the first wave of Vietnamese adoptions against a backdrop of military escalation and growing anti-war sentiment. It examines the language of responsibility, culpability and multiculturalism that came to dominate defences of adoptions in the Vietnam War era as Americans reconsidered the effectiveness and morality of U.S. foreign policy. Integral to such rhetoric was the imagined and real participation of American men and women as soldiers and social workers in Vietnam. The chapter not only elaborates the ways in which Vietnamese adoptions offered Americans an opportunity to engage with gendered notions of citizenship, but also addresses questions about chances for racial equality at home, the extent of the nation’s international obligations, and the power of intimate, familial relations to alter society.
Amerasians’ Families and Hopes of Homecoming
Authors: Varzally Allison
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines Amerasians, those who could have been but were not adopted by American families in the 1970s. National concern about this population revived ideas about responsibility to the unwanted children of Vietnam and enabled the passage of legislation that facilitated their migration. Amerasians imagined rediscovering their fathers, winning social acceptance, and escaping poverty, but charges of fraud and misrepresentation, the complexity and rarity of father-child reunions, and the difficulties of adjustment in a national where one was presumed an American rather than guided to become one, compromised their sense of citizenship.
Discovering the South
Authors: Ritterhouse Jennifer
Published: September 2017

During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. On May 5, 1937, he set out to find it, driving thousands of miles in his trusty Plymouth and ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself. In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels’s unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings and a wealth of archival evidence to put this one man's journey through a South in transition into a larger context. Daniels's well chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s, from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to planters' and industrialists' reactionary worldview and repressive violence. The result is a lively narrative of black and white southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at the start of the nation's long civil rights era. For more information on this book, see www.discoveringthesouth.org.
Introduction
Authors: Ritterhouse Jennifer
Published: September 2017

This chapter introduces Jonathan Daniels and explains his intentions for his 1937 automobile trip around the South. He wanted to explore the range of political and cultural possibilities in the region during the Great Depression and show a truer picture than either plantation romance or "white trash" caricatures showed. His views as a white southern liberal and what his observations reveal about the start of the nation's long civil rights era are put into historical and historiographical context. The book Daniels published, A Southerner Discovers the South (1938), is compared to photo-documentary works of the era such as You Have Seen Their Faces and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The role of Jonathan Daniels's father, Josephus Daniels, in solidifying racial capitalism in North Carolina is introduced. The chapter concludes with a discussion of sources and methodology and a chapter outline.
This Division between Faith in Democracy and Power Descending from Authority
Authors: Ritterhouse Jennifer
Published: September 2017

This chapter traces the first leg of Jonathan Daniels's trip through the textile mill towns of North and South Carolina and into Tennessee. His ambivalent attitude toward working-class white southerners related to the popularity of poor-white caricatures in Erskine Caldwell's novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. Daniels saw the impact of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and pondered the effects of the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville, Norris, and Chattanooga. TVA commissioner David Lilienthal reassured him that New Deal programs were committed to grassroots democracy rather than social planning by outsiders. Yet Daniels was conscious of the challenges to segregation and white supremacy the New Deal was likely to bring. Wary of federal intervention in the South, Daniels looked to the road ahead with even greater concerns about far left and far right, Communist and proto-fascist, alternatives.
The Demand for Justice Will Not Be a Cause Furthered Only by Radicals
Authors: Ritterhouse Jennifer
Published: September 2017

This chapter follows Jonathan Daniels to Scottsboro, Alabama, and provides a concise account of the arrest, convictions, and eventual release of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American youths who were falsely accused of rape in 1931. Daniels's calls for justice for the Scottsboro defendants are contrasted with his opposition to federal anti-lynching legislation advocated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He saw the 1933 Costigan-Wagner bill and the 1937 Gavagan bill as impossible to pass in the Senate, unlikely to be effective, and certain to breed resentment among white southerners. His preferred solution was local and state action as well as education to increase whites' commitment to the rule of law. The chapter acknowledges that the defense of the Scottsboro Boys by the International Labor Defense (ILD) helped the Communist Party-USA gain in the 1930s the greatest influence it has ever had in American politics and culture.
Tenants Are Able to Hold Their Heads a Little Higher
Authors: Ritterhouse Jennifer
Published: September 2017

This chapter begins with Daniels's interview with Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) president J. R. Butler, then presents an overview of the union's founding and early years from 1934-1937. The union's struggles to achieve biracial unity and reconcile white leaders' Socialist vision with rank-and-file members' preference for independent landownership within the capitalist system are explored. The chapter briefly explains the disruptive effects of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and divisions within the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and the Department of Agricultural. Planters' violent reprisals against the STFU are also a major theme. The chapter recounts Daniels's visits to the Dyess Colony in Arkansas and the Delta Cooperative Farm at Hillhouse, Mississippi. Delta's relationship to the subsequent Providence Farm community in Holmes County, Mississippi, is noted. The STFU declined after its 1937 merger with the United Cannery, Agriculture, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPWA), which was affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Meanwhile, the creation of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) brought belated and ultimately inadequate federal attention to the problems of sharecroppers and tenant farmers.
Naked and Hot as If She Were Stripped in the Sun
Authors: Ritterhouse Jennifer
Published: September 2017

This chapter tells the story of the 1936 flogging of Willie Sue Blagden, a white, middle-class supporter of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) who became a target of antiunion violence when she and white clergyman Claude Williams went to Earle, Arkansas, to investigate the disappearance of black union member Frank Weems. This highly publicized attack on a white woman was seen as a violation of southern "chivalry" and contributed to both media sympathy and federal government support for the plight of sharecroppers and tenant farmers during the Great Depression. Unfortunately, historical scholarship about the flogging has reflected a rather sexist disdain for Blagden, who went on to join the Communist Party, among the STFU's predominately white, male, Socialist leadership. Other victims of antiunion violence including Jim Reese and Eliza Nolden deserve to be remembered as well. The chapter concludes with Jonathan Daniels's conversation with STFU attorney C. T. Carpenter, whom he admired as a patrician who fought for social justice.
A Red-Headed Woman Immaculate and Immediate from the Beauty Parlor
Authors: Ritterhouse Jennifer
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines Jonathan Daniels's negative reaction to visiting Atlanta and meeting Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell in June 1937. Daniels perceived Atlanta as the capital of the New South but was disappointed to see so much social distance between rich and poor, white and black, which seemed reminiscent of Old South social hierarchies. Mitchell, too, struck him as person full of contradictions. The vulgarity of her speech reminded him of the flappers or New Women of the 1920s, yet she had written a romantic epic of the Old South and seemed disappointingly conventional, rigid, and small-minded. Daniels had little insight into the gender struggles of white southern women of his and Mitchell's generation, but their ideological differences in relation to the New Deal were evident. Mitchell was very angry that Daniels included excerpts of their conversation in A Southerner Discovers the South without her permission, but the fact that he did not name her in the book resulted in very few readers recognizing her.
Conclusion
Authors: Ritterhouse Jennifer
Published: September 2017

This chapter shows how race-baiting, red-baiting, and white southern liberals' own ambivalence made it impossible for a broad-based coalition to lead an ongoing fight for democratic social change, despite the large number of people who had come together at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) in 1938. Activists like Virginia Durr lobbied for anti-poll tax bills in the early 1940s without success. Meanwhile, New Deal policies gave way to mobilization for World War II, which favoured the South with defense-related and infrastructure spending but did not challenge the Jim Crow system. Black civil rights activists like A. Philip Randolph and the lawyers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead in a Long Civil Rights Movement that earlier efforts to bring change to the South had helped to make possible. Jonathan Daniels was never an activist but became increasingly supportive of civil rights initiatives after working as an aide to Franklin Roosevelt from 1943-1945. The chapter describes his wartime work and briefly traces the remainder of his career, including the reissue of A Southerner Discovers the South in 1970 and his death in 1981.
Introduction
Authors: Pennock Pamela E.
Published: September 2017

Carrying signs and banners proclaiming “Jewish People Yes, Zionism No,” in November 1973 hundreds of Arab American autoworkers and their supporters picketed an event in Detroit at which the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith was honoring United Auto Workers’ president Leonard Woodcock. Plans for the protest had been building for several weeks, emanating from demonstrations held in reaction to the war fought between Israel and several Arab nations in October 1973. The October demonstrations that took place in Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States, focused on championing the Arabs’ fight along with protesting American support for Israel. In Dearborn and across the country, Arab American political mobilization on behalf of Palestine had escalated since the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, when Israel had defeated its Arab opponents and displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians....
Progressive Activism after the June War
Authors: Pennock Pamela E.
Published: September 2017

This chapter describes the formation of the Arab American University Graduates shortly after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and how it became the most influential organization on the Arab American Left. An organization of intellectuals, the AAUG was secular, pan-Arab, and it engaged in advocacy of Palestinian nationalism. It sought alliances with the Third World Left.
Intersections
Authors: Pennock Pamela E.
Published: September 2017

This chapter analyzes the intersections among African American, New Left, and Palestinian ideologies and activism in this period, exploring both the convergences and the tensions among these groups.
“A Disturbed Individual, not a Martyr”
Authors: Pennock Pamela E.
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the increasingly hostile climate faced by Arab American activists by examining Sirhan Sirhan and how his assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, his trial testimony about Palestine, and the U.S. media’s treatment of Sirhan and the Israel-Palestine conflict affected the environment for Palestinian activism in the United States.