bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
You Know Them by Sight Mostly
Authors: Long Alecia P.
Published: May 2023

In the hours and days following President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, two men in New Orleans developed assassination conspiracy theories. Private Detective Jack S. Martin and attorney Dean Adams Andrews both contacted local media and law enforcement to share information that had two elements in common: the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and accusations that he had associated with and potentially conspired with known homosexuals in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. Martin and Andrews’ stories were investigated locally and by the FBI. By 1964, the tales and their tellers had been discredited. Yet, three years later, those same accusations laid the groundwork for District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation and search for suspects in a New Orleans-based assassination conspiracy.
The Commission Has Investigated Rumors That Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald Were Both Homosexuals
Authors: Long Alecia P.
Published: May 2023

In the wake of the assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a commission to look into the facts surrounding the murders of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald. The report took its name from Chief Justice Earl Warren, who chaired the commission. The report concluded that Oswald was the lone gunman in the president’s murder. This chapter focuses on the report’s emphasis on the potential homosexuality of both Oswald and his killer, Jack Ruby. It also considers the impact of a case DA Jim Garrison argued before the Supreme Court in 1964. The finding in that case further empowered the prominent DA, leading to his reelection in 1965. It was during this second term that Garrison began an investigation into the possibility of a New Orleans-based conspiracy in the president’s murder.
Those Areas of My Private Life I Would Like To Keep Private
Authors: Long Alecia P.
Published: May 2023

Jim Garrison’s investigation began near the third anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, reflecting growing skepticism among Warren Commission critics and the public about the lone gunman conclusion. Garrison returned to the stories told by Jack Martin and Dean Andrews in 1963 and to their shared focus on Oswald’s association and possible collaboration with alleged New Orleans homosexuals. By March 1967, Garrison concluded that Clay Shaw, a closeted New Orleanian, had used the alias Clay Bertrand, and in that guise had conspired with Oswald and a third man, David Ferrie, in planning the president’ assassination. After Shaw’s arrest, he struggled to refute the charges against him and respond to the related complications of having been very publicly outed as homosexual at the time of his arrest.
Dr. Jekyll–or Mr. Hyde–or Both?
Authors: Long Alecia P.
Published: May 2023

In the two years between his arrest and trial, Clay Shaw’s sexuality remained a matter of public discussion and speculation. Prosecution and defense attorneys in the case drew on homophobic ideas and beliefs; so did media outlets, federal officials, and intelligence agencies whose reports seemed often to focus on the sexuality of alleged conspirators. Most parties gave serious consideration to the charge that homosexuality played an important role in the conspiracy Garrison alleged. Homophobia in various forms pervades the evidentiary record generated by Garrison’s investigators and Shaw’s own defense. Homophobic ideas significantly shaped the course of Shaw’s prosecution from 1967 arrest to the beginning of his conspiracy trial in 1969.
Underwriters of the United States
Authors: Farber Hannah
Published: May 2023

Unassuming but formidable, American maritime insurers used their position at the pinnacle of global trade to shape the new nation. The international information they gathered and the capital they generated enabled them to play central roles in state building and economic development. During the Revolution, they helped the U.S. negotiate foreign loans, sell state debts, and establish a single national bank. Afterward, they increased their influence by lending money to the federal government and to its citizens. Even as federal and state governments began to encroach on their domain, maritime insurers adapted, preserving their autonomy and authority through extensive involvement in the formation of commercial law. Leveraging their claims to unmatched expertise, they operated free from government interference while simultaneously embedding themselves into the nation’s institutional fabric. By the early nineteenth century, insurers were no longer just risk assessors. They were nation builders and market makers. Deeply and imaginatively researched, Underwriters of the United States uses marine insurers to reveal a startlingly original story of risk, money, and power in the founding era.
Prologue
Authors: Farber Hannah
Published: May 2023

The prologue walks the reader through the experience of a merchant who visits the office of a Boston marine insurance company in the year 1800 to purchase an insurance policy. The prologue discusses the appearance and location of the office, the terms of the policy, and how the insurance rate is decided upon. It continues with a discussion of the fate of the merchant's voyage, along with the fate of a voyage launched by a fellow merchant with a greater appetite for risk. The prologue concludes with a discussion of how losses were proved, and how indemnifications were calculated and paid out.
Introduction
Authors: Farber Hannah
Published: May 2023

The introduction presents the book's argument for insurers as underwriters of the United States. It discusses eighteenth-century definitions of underwriting, which included serving as the guarantor for a loan, committing funds to a certain purpose, or placing one's reputation behind a project. It lays out the ways in which insurance functioned as a form of merchant self-governance, which sometimes aligned with the American political project of self-governance and sometimes operated in tension with it. It demonstrates the political and social diversity of eighteenth-century marine insurers and places their history in the context of the Age of Revolution, when risky but lucrative ocean commerce became a crucial source of revenue for the new American state. The introduction also discusses the history of capitalism, problems with using "objective" quantitative data to assess early modern institutions, and the words that early modern writers used to describe different kinds of insuring groups.
Market Readers, Market Makers
Authors: Farber Hannah
Published: May 2023

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, commercial risks were high, and they shifted constantly. Nevertheless, the financial security of the United States depended on its foreign trade. Throughout this tumultuous period, American marine insurers accrued profits with a combination of market reading and market making. Since the progress of the war followed no calculable pattern, marine insurance could not be an actuarial business. Instead, it was a political one: insurers had to follow the latest developments in politics and war to assess risks accurately. Insurers were not just observers but also political and legal actors, who took every opportunity to establish the circumstances that determined the risks they took. Overseas, they engaged with foreign admiralty courts and special commissions; at home, they produced influential interpretations of international law. This chapter surveys insurers' interventions in the American conflict with Algiers; in conflicts with Britain and France over neutral shipping; in Jefferson's embargo, and in the War of 1812.
Wooden Ships, Paper Capitals
Authors: Farber Hannah
Published: May 2023

When the Napoleonic Wars ended, the world looked very different to American marine insurers. Peace lowered the risks (and profits) of ocean commerce. The republic's economic turn inland and the collapse of the Federalist Party presaged a national political economy less attuned to insurers' interests. Some American marine insurers liked their business in its new form: less political, lower-risk, and lower-reward. Others, like the financier Jacob Barker, preferred to chase higher-reward underwriting opportunities. This chapter traces Barker's career, framing him as a consummate underwriter of the United States. Aggressive even by the standards of his contemporaries, Barker helped finance the War of 1812. When the war ended, he reshaped his financial portfolio to take advantage of a world in which the United States itself was no longer such a high-risk investment. He co-founded an insurance company that underwrote risky voyages to Latin America and helped establish numerous corporations that were later adjudged fraudulent. Although one might envision Barker as the harbinger new era of chaotic free-market capitalism, he and his fellow underwriters after 1815 were driven by the same combination of ambitions that had propelled underwriters of the previous two decades, and they employed many familiar techniques.
Tears, Fire, and Blood
Authors: Meriwether James H.
Published: May 2023

In the mid-twentieth century, the struggle against colonial rule fundamentally reshaped the world and the lives of the majority of the world's population. Decolonization, Black and Brown freedom movements, the establishment of the United Nations and NATO, an exploding Cold War, a burgeoning world human rights movement, all became part of the dramatic events that swept through Africa at a furious pace, with fifty nations gaining independence in roughly fifty years. Meanwhile, the United States emerged as the most powerful and influential nation in the world, with the ability—politically, economically, militarily—and principles to help or hinder the transformation of the African continent.Tears, Fire, and Blood offers a sweeping history of how the United States responded to decolonization in Africa. James H. Meriwether explores how Washington, grappling with national security interests and racial prejudices, veered between strengthening African nationalist movements seeking majority rule and independence and bolstering anticommunist European allies seeking to maintain white rule. Events in Africa helped propel the Black freedom struggle around the world and ultimately forced the United States to confront its support for national ideals abroad as it fought over how to achieve equality at home.
No Stopping the Torrent, 1952–1960
Authors: Meriwether James H.
Published: May 2023

America faced a new Africa during these pivotal years, one in which dozens of African nations moved toward political freedom. An array of liberation struggles, from the relatively peaceful moves toward constitutional change led by Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, to the process in Francophone states and particularly the decision in Guinea to opt for independence, to protracted armed conflicts in places like Algeria, appeared across the continent. Belatedly, the Eisenhower administration started to expand efforts in Africa, such as some educational assistance for African students, in an attempt to effectuate a Western-oriented decolonization. Yet Cold War imperatives and racial prejudice continued to inhibit support for anticolonial nationalists, most visibly in the Congo with Patrice Lumumba. Richard Nixon and others were drawn to strongman or white minority rule.
Race, Insecurity, and the Invention of the Climate Migrant
Authors: Ahuja Neel
Published: May 2023

This chapter argues that the figure of the “climate refugee” has become one of the central concerns of interdisciplinary climate research. Recounting the genesis of the figure of the environmental refugee in development studies, law, and NGO research on environmental degradation, the chapter claims that a narrow, state-centered view of climate migration as an international security crisis produces racialized ideas about overpopulation and environmental degradation attributing environmental destruction to the poor. The chapter concludes that environmental justice research should resist militarized discourses of climate migration and climate war in order to develop a broader account of the carbon economy’s human and ecosystemic costs.
Weather as War
Authors: Ahuja Neel
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines how the Syrian civil war has been configured by security experts, climate scientists, and Western journalists as a “climate war,” particularly in the wake of a 2015 study claiming that drought was the trigger event for the uprisings. Detailing how narratives of racial disability are used to buttress claims that the Syrian uprisings are climate conflicts requiring humanitarian intervention, Ahuja argues that visions of climate-driven resource conflict attempt to skirt the complex political and economic underpinnings of Syrian resistance to the Assad government. By focusing on accounts of aerial bombing and infrastructure collapse during the war, it is possible to give an alternative account of how environmental factors relate to the war and to witness other histories of environmental resistance in the conflict, including efforts to redistribute land and develop ecological collectives in Rojava. This reflects some potential alternatives to narratives of scarcity-driven climate migration, as forms of ecological thought can envision collective approaches to land, wealth, and interspecies relations.
No Bigots in a Foxhole
Authors: Cline David P.
Published: May 2023

This chapter argues that the Korean War itself, when combat replacements were needed regardless of race, finally desegrated the active US military. Cline traces the history of the start of the conflict, the UN response, and the call up of both integrated and segregated units as the war began.
From the Service to the Streets
Authors: Cline David P.
Published: May 2023

In this chapter, Cline argues that returning African American veterans consciously drew upon their experiences in both the segregated and desegregated military in addressing civil rights issues and demands of equal treatment back home. He describes how veterans contributed to civil rights efforts in a variety of ways from nonviolent protest, to armed resistance, to political leverage.
The Jim Crow Welfare State and the Corporate Revolution
Authors: McClure Daniel Robert
Published: May 2023

This chapter outlines the history and relationship between the New Deal Welfare state, its adherence to US Jim Crow (whites-only) culture, and the evolution of the US multinational conglomerate after World War II. Attention is given to the way corporations negotiated the Welfare state regulations, including ways these tactics were in dialogue with the evolution of conservative and neoliberal ideas.
Sufficiently White
Authors: Morey Maribel
Published: May 2023

In describing the organization that Frederick P. Keppel inherited in 1923 when he assumed the presidency of Carnegie Corporation of New York—a philanthropic organization founded by gilded age steel titan Andrew Carnegie in 1911—this chapter considers Andrew Carnegie’s allegiance to an English-speaking world, or, as board member James Bertram put it, to “communities of whites” in the British Empire, and more broadly, throughout the Anglo-American world. This preference for privileging the needs and interests of white Anglo-Americans would form the institutional backdrop to Keppel’s subsequent decision to fund social scientific research on white and Black people as a means of helping white policymakers reinforce white Anglo-American supremacy across the Atlantic.
Building White Solidarity in South Africa
Authors: Morey Maribel
Published: May 2023

This chapter on Carnegie Corporation President Frederick P. Keppel’s first collaborative study in the social sciences as instrument for white domination and Black subjection begins by discussing how he tried to further obfuscate his own—and Carnegie Corporation’s—central role in this South African project by solicitating an invitation for the study from the Dutch Reformed Church. The chapter argues that Keppel was invested in guiding the research structure of The Poor White Problem in South Africa (1932), routinely described as The Poor White Study, and that the study met with his approval and expectations for a cooperative study in the social sciences authored by a team of researchers offering policy recommendations that would help guide white policymakers to further secure their domination over Black people.
The “Hailey Type” Study Gains Support in the United States
Authors: Morey Maribel
Published: May 2023

Tracing Gunnar Myrdal throughout his years as director of Carnegie Corporation’s study of Black Americans from 1938 to 1942, this chapter details how Myrdal built on Carnegie Corporation President Frederick P. Keppel’s networks in the United States and obtained assistance from key figures in philanthropy, the social sciences, and government. As this chapter argues, Myrdal played his part to approximate Keppel’s expectations that the U.S director and his study on Black Americans, modelled on Malcolm Hailey and his African Survey, would be able to solicit the cooperation of key figures across regions in the United States, and in the process, produce a national policy program on Black Americans that key white Americans—resistant as they might be to such a national policymaking focus—would consider acknowledging and applying.
In Sync with Carnegie Corporation
Authors: Morey Maribel
Published: May 2023

Focusing on the writing stage of Carnegie Corporation’s study on Black Americans, this chapter illustrates how Carnegie Corporation President Frederick P. Keppel read and commented on drafts of Gunnar Myrdal’s final report. The chapter argues that An American Dilemma reflected Myrdal’s intellectual influences and observations in 1930s and 1940s Sweden and the US, and equally so, largely met—and in some ways, exceeded—Keppel’s expectations for a national policy program that would help stabilize white domination in the US. This is because, in An American Dilemma, Myrdal provided a means for white Anglo-Americans to fortify their supremacy within the US, as Keppel expected, and also beyond the US, a point which Keppel long had valued. In fact, as this chapter underscores, the biggest difference of opinion between Keppel and Myrdal during the writing stage of the study rested on their varying perspectives on the significance of white southerners for achieving Myrdal’s national policy plan on Black Americans. While Keppel thought that white southerners were critical for such a national effort, Myrdal discounted their importance by pointing to the political and economic power of white northerners and the New Deal federal government, as well as to intellectual divides among white southerners.
Epilogue
Authors: Morey Maribel
Published: May 2023

Carnegie Corporation Frederick P. Keppel never wrote a manifesto on international order along the color line. Rather, the research at the heart of this book illustrating his perspective on the need for a white Anglo-American world order is based on years reading through his papers at Carnegie Corporation, the archives of the corporation more broadly, and the personal papers of advisers and social scientists in Keppel’s network at the time. In Carnegie Corporation’s and Keppel’s papers, as this epilogue underscores, it furthermore required moving beyond files on the organization’s grant-making practices in the United States and to its grant-making practices abroad.
Introduction
Authors: Fischer Anne Gray
Published: May 2023

Police can approach any woman and arrest her for any reason. But they do not. This book narrates the historical process of how and why different women are made vulnerable to sexual policing. Asking this question showcases how the state recalibrated lethal social inequalities, even as sexual norms underwent dramatic revision; how the enforcement of normative white sexuality generated breathtaking power for urban police; and how sexual policing was foundational to the spatial and economic formation of modern US cities.This introduction defines sexual policing and the centrality of police discretion to the enforcement of prostitution-related morals misdemeanors, including disorderly conduct and loitering. It argues that sexual policing is a factory for making racialized and gendered meanings of white and Black womanhood; that prostitution policing shaped cities from segregation to gentrification; and that sexual policing was an engine of police power in twentieth-century US cities.
Los Angeles: Land of the White Hunter
Authors: Fischer Anne Gray
Published: May 2023

Los Angeles reveals two critical dimensions of the postwar racial history of sexual policing. First, it showcases how midcentury processes of sexual liberalization in social science and legal reform influenced law enforcement authorities’ growing reluctance to pursue white women, while preserving police officers’ discretionary power to target Black women. By the end of 1961, liberal legal reforms in California effectively decriminalized straight, nonmarital sex. But morals law reform took shape in the postwar context of rapidly segregating urban neighborhoods and the aggressive police mobilization to contain the growing Black population. As a result, white women were increasingly shielded from citywide sexual policing even as Black women were relentlessly policed. Second, Black rebellions against police gained momentum in Los Angeles during these years, in part triggered by this racial inequality in sexual policing. The racial inequality in sexual policing—exacerbated by liberal morals law reform—was a powerful, if underappreciated, factor in the many clashes between police and Black residents that culminated in the 1965 uprising in the Black neighborhood of Watts.
Taking Back the Night
Authors: Fischer Anne Gray
Published: May 2023

Between the 1970s and the 1990s, feminists led a major mobilization to end violence against women, focusing in particular on the serial murders of poor Black women. One central question that divided feminists was whether police were the problem—or the answer to the problem—of violence against women. This chapter discusses the activisms of two competing camps of feminists. On the one hand, dominance feminists (also known as carceral feminists) led by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, appealed to the state to protect women against violence. On the other hand, multiracial feminists in Wages for Housework, the Combahee River Collective, Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, and other sex workers’ rights organizations argued that the police were a powerful generator of violence against women, especially through the racist enforcement of prostitution laws, and by multiplying women’s vulnerability to nonstate harm. Feminist activisms during the ascendance of broken windows policing established the terms of engagement both with and against the state that would reverberate into the twenty-first century. As predominantly Black women mobilized to defend all Black women’s lives against police violence, dominance feminists demanded state protection, strengthening law enforcement authorities’ claims to discretionary power.
Choctaw Confederates
Authors: Yarbrough Fay A.
Published: May 2023

When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people—the tribe had owned enslaved Blacks since the 1720s. By the eve of the Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved Blacks. Avid supporters of the Confederate States of America, the Nation passed a measure requiring all whites living in its territory to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and deemed any criticism of it or its army treasonous and punishable by death. Choctaws also raised an infantry force and a cavalry to fight alongside Confederate forces.
In Choctaw Confederates, Fay A. Yarbrough reveals that, while sovereignty and states’ rights mattered to Choctaw leaders, the survival of slavery also determined the Nation’s support of the Confederacy. Mining service records for approximately 3,000 members of the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles, Yarbrough examines the experiences of Choctaw soldiers and notes that although their enthusiasm waned as the war persisted, military service allowed them to embrace traditional masculine roles that were disappearing in a changing political and economic landscape. By drawing parallels between the Choctaw Nation and the Confederate states, Yarbrough looks beyond the traditional binary of the Union and Confederacy and reconsiders the historical relationship between Native populations and slavery.
Even If the Master Was Good the Slaves Was Bad Off
Authors: Yarbrough Fay A.
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on the experiences of enslaved people among the Choctaws and in Indian Territory more broadly. What emerges from this examination is an institution that shared some similarities with slavery as practiced in the United States, including work patterns and religious life for the enslaved people; however, some sharp differences are also revealed. Choctaws did not just mirror the nearby southern states in their allocation of resources for the market economy or in the legislation they passed regarding their human property. Rather, they devoted resources to economic activities such as corn production that aligned with traditional Choctaw practices, and they passed statutes regarding the behavior of enslaved people and free people of African descent that respected Choctaw notions of descent and the importance of blood relationships. Thus, as the Choctaws adopted the practice of racialized slavery, they did so in a manner that preserved Choctaw identity.
We Know Dey Is Indians
Authors: Yarbrough Fay A.
Published: May 2023

This chapter relies largely on service records from the National Archives to paint a rich picture of the lives of Choctaw soldiers both on and off the battlefield: they expose some of the influences on Choctaw society, illuminate who enlisted and under what terms, and give shape to the fighting that took place in Indian Territory, as well as its consequences. This Native military force operated in a manner entirely recognizable to white Americans despite ideas about Native savagery and disorganization. Finally, a politics of allegiances also emerges through the military records. While Confederate leadership may have wanted to control Native soldiers, the fact remained that Native soldiers were citizens of their respective nations, not of the Confederate States of America.
Earning One’s Name
Authors: Yarbrough Fay A.
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the impact of military service on Choctaw notions of masculinity more broadly. The Civil War gave Choctaw men the opportunity to tap into some traditional masculine roles that had been limited by a changing political and economic landscape. This chapter first summarizes the traditional ways that Choctaws conceptualized masculinity around warfare in the eighteenth century. Then the chapter traces the shift in Choctaw definitions of manhood as opportunities for warfare declined, with particular attention to the role of lighthorsemen in the nation. Finally, the chapter turns to the Civil War experience and the ideas about manliness that reemerged because of it. Some of the activity revealed in the personal correspondence and military records examined in this chapter take on different meaning when viewed through the lens of Choctaw ideas about masculinity.
The Geneticist’s Dilemma
Authors: Abel Sarah
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers how research scientists attempt to find “objective” and scientifically robust ways to convey personalized DNA ancestry reports to members of the public while guarding against “ideological” or divisive uses of these data. The narrative focuses on two case studies: first, a nationwide research project on the genetic dynamics of mestiçagem in Brazil, which offered personal admixture reports to participants; and second, the attempts of African American scientists to produce “ethnic-matching” tests for the descendants of enslaved Africans. The chapter points out that there is little consensus among scientists about the potential and limits of genetics for shedding light on personal origins, nor about what (if anything) constitutes an “ethical” model for DNA ancestry testing.
Technologies of the Self
Authors: Abel Sarah
Published: May 2023

Focusing on the case of AncestryDNA (currently the leading global provider of personalized ancestry tests) this chapter examines of the creative and scientific choices that shape the production of commercial “genetic ethnicity” data. It highlights the role of Mormon scientists in constructing a “global” database of genetic-genealogical lineages, upon which the test is based, as well as the influence of particular user communities, such as genetic genealogists, in feeding back to companies their views on what constitutes an “objective” portrayal of personal ancestry. The chapter explores the existence of strong Euro-centric and US-centric biases in the construction of commercial DNA ancestry databases, and considers how this and other technical factors may affect the reliability and relevance of genetic ethnicity percentages as a historical tool for shedding light on African-descendant genealogies.
Essential Origins
Authors: Abel Sarah
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers how DNA ancestry technologies may be affecting public conceptions of kinship and ethnic identity through the lens of American and Brazilian individuals who are seeking to connect with their African roots. Do DNA matches always translate easily into meaningful kinship relationships? What processes are used to socially “activate” genetic data? In particular, the chapter concentrates on the attempts of DNA test-takers to verify the authenticity of their genetic ethnicity designations through social encounters with potential African “kin.” The analysis reveals that, in the absence of other forms of genealogical knowledge that can be used to cross-reference results, DNA is often a blunt historical tool; instead, root-seekers tend to rely on additional forms of evidence such as physical resemblances, coincidences in taste and preference, and signs of reciprocity, as a guide for recognizing their “true” kin.
The Christian America Afropolitan Project
Authors: Adjepong Anima
Published: May 2023

Chapter two discusses how the idea of Christian America allows Ghanaians in Houston to claim cultural citizenship to the United States. Christianity here is framed as a religion that connects and affirms Ghanaians’ claims to belonging as US Americans. Perceiving the United States as a Christian nation affirms the belongingness of Ghanaians who identify themselves as also coming from a Christian country. The colonial missionary project that Christianized Ghana further articulates Christianity as a marker of modernity, global citizenship, and progress. The Christian America Afropolitan Project explores the cultural work that Ghanaians in Houston engage to assert their inclusion within the United States body politic. The author also examines how Christianity is used to justify Islamophobic and homophobic sentiments within the community.
Afropolitan Racial Politics
Authors: Adjepong Anima
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers how class-privileged Ghanaians understand their racialized identities within a changing global postcolonial context. The author introduces “colonial racialization” as a framework for understanding how it is that Africans discount their racialized experiences within the migrant context and navigate anti-Black and anti-African racism. By paying particular attention to how the book’s subjects understand their experiences as Black Africans both in Houston and Accra, including the ways that these identities – Black and African – diverge and overlap, the chapter delineates how postcolonial class positionalities, post-racial ideologies and racist experiences inform the racial politics of Ghanaian Afropolitans. Additional consideration is also given to how interlocutors develop solidarity with diasporic Black people and assert Africa’s belonging on the world stage.
Conclusion
Authors: Adjepong Anima
Published: May 2023

The concluding chapter surfaces critiques of Afropolitanism and shows how those critiques drown out the important cultural work that Afropolitan projects engage. The chapter considers the ways that Afropolitan ideas offer a politics of resistance for class-privileged Ghanaians to challenge persistent narratives about African abjection and to insert progressive racial, gender, and sexual politics into Ghanaian cultural politics. Reflecting on the transnational interactions between Houston and Accra, the concluding chapter also discusses how the process of diaspora remains intimately connected to the African continent via contact with migrants, diasporic Africans, and those Africans who remain at home. A discussion of the postcolonial analytic that animates the book’s chapters also explores how indigenous knowledge and culture structure daily understandings of gender, sexuality, race, and religion alongside colonial ideologies.
The Settler Memory of Bacon’s Rebellion
Authors: Bruyneel Kevin
Published: May 2023

Many historians and theorists of race politics in the United States view Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in the 17th century as a foundational moment in the creation of whiteness, of being white as political identity. Bruyneel re-examines this collective memory of Bacon’s Rebellion to draw Indigenous peoples and settler colonialism out of the background of this popular narrative to explain how it is white settler masculine identity that is produced at this moment. Bruyneel argues that we need to put the politics of land as well as labor at the center of our grasp of the meaning of this period. As well, he links the role of domination of land and that over bodies in the paired role of property and patriarchy and the formation of US settler colonial states.
Reconstructing Political Memory
Authors: Bruyneel Kevin
Published: May 2023

This chapter re-examines the political memory of the Reconstruction Era in United States history, with particular focus on how left and liberal political memories turn to the Reconstruction Era to call forth the lost possibilities of a radical effort to construct an equal society, on racial and economic terms in particular. Bruyneel focuses on the narrative of this period produced by W.E.B. Du Bois in his book, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 to reveal how, as important as is Du Bois’s narrative for our grasp of this moment, the story of land, land dispossession and Indigenous peoples resides in the background as a central but poorly attended aspect of this period. Bruyneel offers another way to remember the Reconstruction Era that accounts for Black and Indigenous politics, claims, and experiences as a radical memory that could be deployed in our time.
James Baldwin and Cowboys and Indians
Authors: Bruyneel Kevin
Published: May 2023

This chapter engages in a close textual reading of James Baldwin’s interviews and non-fiction writing to draw out the role of Indigeneity that is in many ways constitutive of his defining articulation of the meaning and power of whiteness in the United States. Bruyneel argues that Baldwin both engages in settler memory – seeing but not acknowledging the role of Indigenous peoples and settler colonialism – and also refuses settler memory when he centers and connects the history of US conquest and colonialism to US white supremacy and also connects Black and Indigenous radical struggles. Bruyneel draws out the importance of settler masculinity and sexuality in Baldwin’s analysis of whiteness in the United States.
The Free Pass
Authors: Bruyneel Kevin
Published: May 2023

This chapter analyzes the history of Indian team names and mascots and argues that they are not only racist, but also historically, culturally, and politically rooted and reproduced through US settler colonialism, genocide and the dispossession of Indigenous people’s territories. The argument thus connects racial and settler colonial analytics to offer a complex reading of the popular US practice of naming teams after Indigenous people and caricatures, and the chapter explores and analyzes the type of defenses and resistance made as it regards these team names. The chapter concludes by analyzing these Indian naming practices with the US military and US military actions abroad.
The Battlefield Belongs to the Nation
Authors: Titus Jill Ogline
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on the preservation battles of the 1950s and early 60s, and the struggles of local residents, National Park Service officials and battlefield preservationists to strike a balance between land preservation and economic development in the form of commercialization. It examines the evolution of the local tourism industry in response to the needs of family vacationers, debates over zoning, and the transformation of the battlefield’s commemorative landscape by erecting new “modern” monuments deploying Confederate memory as a weapon of massive resistance and anticommunism. Discussion of the commemorative approach taken by the federal Civil War Centennial Commission is also included in this chapter, as is exploration of commemorative activities undertaken on a local scale, such as the celebration of historical pageantry seen in the work of the Adams County Civil War Centennial Commission.
A Shrine for the Free World
Authors: Titus Jill Ogline
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines Richard Neutra’s 1962 Cyclorama Building as commemorative architecture, examining the Cold War symbolism baked into the architect’s vision and the structure’s design. As Gettysburg National Military Park’s first Visitor Center and new home to the park’s central interpretive tool, Paul Philippoteaux’s 1884 Cyclorama painting of the Battle of Gettysburg, the building was frequently held up as the National Park Service’s central contribution to the Civil War Centennial. The building also embodied the Mission 66-era tension between the National Park Service’s preservation mission and commitment to visitor services, setting the stage for later claims that the building was an intrusion on the historic landscape and its subsequent demolition in 2013.
1963
Authors: Titus Jill Ogline
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the multiple commemorative visions that converged during the anniversary year and how the Gettysburg Centennial Commission’s commitment to programming celebrating sectional reconciliation, national unity, and American democracy was challenged by emancipationist memory of the Civil War. The chapter explores the role of symbolic pageantry highlighting the shared historical experiences of white Union and Confederate soldiers in shaping the agenda for the battle anniversary. It also examines efforts to utilize the centennial as a tool for speeding up the process of public accommodations desegregation on a local level and bringing about a nationwide shift in racial attitudes. Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1963 Memorial Day speech at the National Cemetery – a direct response to the protests convulsing Birmingham, Alabama and his first major speech in support of the civil rights movement – receives significant coverage.
The Black Sheriff 2010
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

National Republicans rolled into the 2010 election ready to counter President Obama’s first two years in office. Bladen had been a predominantly Democratic county, but now white Democrats here were fleeing to the other side. Amid all of that, the Bladen Improvement Association managed a huge upset: Its get-out-the-vote efforts got Benston elected as Bladen’s first Black sheriff by 554 votes. Even sweeter: They’d beaten McCrae Dowless, who worked for Benston’s opponent. Local Republicans were convinced Benston cheated, and they were adamant the Bladen Improvement Association harvested ballots from dying and disabled people in a local nursing home.
The Backlash 2014
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

Bladen County was safer by nearly every statistical measure under Benston—violent crime dropped by 33 percent, and robberies, larceny, assault, property crimes all dropped—but racial divisions increased all around him. Republican leader Pat Melvin was incensed by Benston’s election and was ready to deliver “backlash” in the 2014 election. Meanwhile, halfway through Benston’s first term, a 17-year-old Black boy was found hanging from a swing set in a park. Local police ruled it a suicide, but Lacy’s family and many Black leaders in Bladen County believed it was a modern-day lynching. Two years later, a white man named Jim McVicker won the sheriff’s race with a big helping hand from a local political operative named McCrae Dowless
The Vampire Beast April 7, 2017
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

Bladen County residents are consumed with a story from the 1950s about a mysterious cat-like creature that killed dogs and farm animals in the dark of night. The county now has an annual fall festival to honor the Beast of Bladenboro, and it’s become a vital campaign stop for political candidates like congressional hopeful Mark Harris. Harris signed McCrae Dowless to work for him after that 2017 meeting in the furniture store, and one of Dowless’s first recommendations was that Harris attend the Beast Fest that fall. Harris did, but little did he know that state investigators were simultaneously investigating Dowless’s operation.
The Boss Man February 1, 2018
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

State elections director Kim Strach and general counsel Josh Lawson try to get the attention of US Attorney, Bobby Higdon. They have nearly 300 pages of evidence detailing election fraud in Bladen County in 2016. Among the most striking were text messages from a young man named Matthew Matthis, who worked for McCrae Dowless that year. Matthis requested and received a ballot for a friend who was living in Ohio. “Yo, do u care who you vote for? I got ur ballot in the mail. Who u want for president?” But that evidence sits on Higdon’s desk while he investigated a handful of undocumented immigrants instead. Meanwhile, the 2018 primaries came and went, with Mark Harris winning the Republican nomination for the 9th District, and Marine Corps veteran Dan McCready winning the Democratic nod. Later that summer, Dowless and his opponents at the Bladen Improvement Association fire up their ballot harvest operations for the big midterm elections.
The Spaulding Dynasty March 1868
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

George Henry White is one of North Carolina’s most important historical figures, and his story starts with being born in Bladen County and being raised by the Spaulding family, one of the state’s first landowning Black families. George was a teenager when his great-uncle and Republican liberal John Spaulding became Bladen County’s first Black elected official, winning a seat on the county commission in 1868, the first year Black men could vote in elections here. The success of Black candidates riled up white conservatives, who plotted ways to avenge the losses in 1870 and beyond.
Sacred Texts July 1898
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

Few people held more contempt for White than Alfred Wadell, the former Confederate officer who’d helped free the Home Guard murderers some three decades earlier. Waddell served three terms in Congress and used his power to prevent Ku Klux Klan members from his home state from being prosecuted. Meanwhile, a young newspaper owner Josephus Daniels became editor of the News & Observer, North Carolina’s most powerful newspaper, and began printing stories and cartoons promoting white supremacy. Daniels became friends with Democratic party leader Furnifold Simmons, and together the men outlined “the White Supremacy Campaign” to scare poor white voters away from the Fusionist party and back to Republicans. The tactic was rather simple: Promote the myth of the “Black beast,” or Black men who threatened and raped white women.
The Rigged Election and the Massacre November 10, 1898
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

White supremacists filled the newspapers with propaganda, then went to the polls to intimidate elections officials with violence at the polls to rig the elections throughout eastern North Carolina in 1898. Only one Black politician kept his office, George Henry White. Still the white supremacists wanted blood: Two days after the election, on November 10, 1898, white men led by Alfred Waddell staged the only successful coup on American soil in history. They killed at least 22 people that day, burned Manly’s newspaper to the ground, and forced Black people of Wilmington to flee along the Cape Fear River, into Bladen County and beyond. It is one of the darkest days in US history, one White described as “a miserable butchery of men, women and children.”
The Carnival Worker September 13, 1953
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

At least 124 Black North Carolinians were lynched during the Jim Crow era that followed White’s departure from Congress. But that number doesn’t include people like Bobby Joyner, a Black 17-year-old who was walking home from choir practice in eastern North Carolina and killed by white police officers. Bobby was the older cousin of a boy named Irving Joyner, who became a prominent civil rights attorney driven by a desire to right that wrong. Joyner, as it turns out, would go on to serve as the attorney for the Bladen Improvement Association in its battles with McCrae Dowless.
The Gospel Song at the KKK Rally December 18, 1994
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

In 1978, Bladen County elected its first Black county commissioner since Reconstruction. About a decade later, Bladen Improvement Association PAC, led by Dr. Delilah Blanks, filed a lawsuit that resulted in the Justice Department ordering the county to create more districts that would increase Black representation on the commission. Blanks soon was elected to the board in one of those new districts, but only weeks later, parents mounted a campaign to ban books like Heather Has Two Mommies from public libraries. One year later, the Ku Klux Klan aimed to push back on the county’s progressive swing even more, organizing a rally near the Mayo Yarns cotton mill one week before Christmas in 1994.
The Son’s Sword February 20, 2019
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

The third day of the hearing started with a jaw-dropping revelation: the board called John Harris, the son of Mark Harris. John’s testimony was rooted in a string of emails the younger Harris had sent his father back in 2017, warning him not to hire McCrae Dowless—advice his father ignored. Those emails had not been produced by Mark Harris’s campaign, raising questions about whether they fully complied with the subpoena issued by the board. One thing was clear from John Harris’s testimony: he had tried to warn his father, who hadn’t listened. And then Mark’s campaign tried to keep those warnings secret.
The Chilling Chant July 17, 2019
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

After calling for a new election, Mark Harris decided not to run again. Instead, a firebrand Republican state senator named Dan Bishop got the nomination. Democrat Dan McCready was running again. As Bishop set out to win a seat in Congress, he labeled himself the ‘right Dan’ and tolerated all manner of conservative extremism to win over voters.
Peach Ice Cream September 9, 2019
Authors: Michael Graff , Nick Ochsner
Published: May 2023

As the special election in the 9th Congressional District pulled closer, big Republican names came to campaign for Dan Bishop. Mike Pence did a road tour across the district that ended at a rally in Fayetteville with Donald Trump the night before the election. As Bishop campaigned with Trump and Pence, Democrat Dan McCready and his aides made one last drive west on Highway 74, the road that spans the district. On their way home, as Trump was lambasting him to a crown at a convention center, McCready stopped for peach ice cream.