bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Prologue
Authors: Johnson Susan Lee
Published: January 2022

The Prologue introduces how and why amateur historians Quantrille McClung and Bernice Blackwelder wrote about the frontiersman Christopher “Kit” Carson. They wrote in the context of the Cold War, when men like Carson still seemed the heroes of U.S. westward expansion. They published when books about the West were as likely to be written by amateur as academic historians, though most of the buffs were white men, not women. Blackwelder and McClung kept writing into the 1970s but under different conditions. Not only had the field professionalized, putting them at further disadvantage, but also, with the changes that social movements brought to politics and popular culture, western deities like Carson were falling from grace. Underneath this story run questions about how we know what we know about history and how what we know is shaped by the conditions of our knowing.
Crafting Kit Carson, 1960s–1970s
Authors: Johnson Susan Lee
Published: January 2022

Part II explores McClung’s 1973 Carson, Bent, Boggs Genealogy Supplement and Blackwelder’s unfinished biographical dictionary of westerners. It argues that the women’s collaboration had become a traffic in men. And as western history professionalized, the women recognized that reception of their work hinged on the opinions of academic historians, who became another market for their traffic in men. All this transpired as these women’s world turned upside down. Hollywood Westerns declined as the postwar victory culture waned, Vietnam heated up, and anti-war protests and concurrent social movements wreaked havoc at home. Even Kit Carson came under attack, and Blackwelder and McClung suddenly found that they were studying men who many now saw as violent colonizers.
Children of Mixed Lineage in the Colonial Chesapeake
Authors: Wilkinson A. B.
Published: January 2022

The second chapter follows the development of English society’s response to the rise of mixed-heritage children in the colonial Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland from the 1690s into the early eighteenth century. This was a critical period for the establishment of hypodescent ideology in North America, as colonial officials in both Virginia and Maryland passed laws that sought to prohibit interracial relationships and inhibit racial intermixture. Colonial magistrates and planters wanted to regulate “Mulattoes” in order to keep them in bondage and many cases appear in county and provincial court records that identify longer period of indentured servitude and punishment for “white” Europeans, especially women, who engaged in relationships with “Negro,” “Indian,” and “Mulatto” men. Cases of “bastardy” and “fornication” began to appear with greater regularly in the Tidewater Chesapeake and often included additional punishment for interracial unions, along with thirty or thirty-one years of servitude for Mulatto children with “white” mothers, as colonists established that slavery would pass through the maternal line.
Mulattoes and Mustees in the Northern Colonies and Carolinas
Authors: Wilkinson A. B.
Published: January 2022

The third chapter moves outside of the Chesapeake, first into Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and New England, and then into the Carolinas. Colonial histories are provided for the northern colonies, where there were comparatively fewer Mulattoes, due to generally lower numbers of Africans in these regions. This chapter also explores the southern region of Carolina, giving a history of the development of North Carolina and South Carolina, while highlighting their respective response to intermixture. Initially, both colonies did not prohibit intermixture and the numbers of mixed-heritage people climbed, especially in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. In the early eighteenth century, North Carolina administrators began to mirror Virginia and Maryland by following stricter forms of hypodescent and legislating against “persons of mixed blood.” As in the Caribbean, South Carolina took a comparatively more lax approach to intermixture with Europeans. Mixture between Africans and Native Americans was most prevalent, due to the importation of Africans and the English involvement with the “Indian” slave trade. In all the English colonies, people mixed with Indigenous ancestry could be referred to as Mulattoes, but in South Carolina another mixed-race term, “Mustee,” emerged from the Spanish mestizo.
Our Sisters in China Are Free
Authors: Lee Mabel Ping-Hua
Published: January 2022

1912 was the year of the Chinese Suffragists in the United States, and Americans were closely watching the Chinese Revolution and the ways in which women participated in it. The Chinese republican revolutionists championed women’s rights, and white suffragists seized upon these news stories to support their cause and used them to shame American men. The white suffragists also looked for Chinese women living in the United States who could tell them more about the events in China. Those Chinese women, some American-born but most of them immigrants barred from naturalized citizenship, drew on transpacific conversations to educate their white sisters about the women’s movement in China. Having captured the white suffragists’ attention, Chinese women used the opportunity to raise their concerns about the United States’ policies towards China. As a result, Chinese and Chinese American women were unexpectedly visible in American suffrage debates and events. The chapter focuses mainly on Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, a Chinese-born resident of New York City and active suffrage campaigner.
The Indians of Today
Authors: Baldwin Marie Louise Bottineau
Published: January 2022

Marie Bottineau Baldwin saw the segregation of the federal civil service under the Wilson administration first-hand from her position in the Interior Department where she had been working for almost a decade. A large number of Native people were not U.S. citizens. In this increasingly rigid racial regime, white Americans had trouble classifying Métis people like Bottineau Baldwin who were of mixed Native and French descent and generally decided that if they kept ties to their Native kin, they remained Indians. As the Wilson administration built racial inequality into the civil service, it raised a number of very personal and immediate questions for Bottineau Baldwin. She went on the offensive. If Americans thought of her as an Indian, she would prove that Indians were different from African Americans. Echoing the language of the Wilson administration, she raised the specter of interracial relations.
Pacific Currents
Authors: Cahill Cathleen D.
Published: January 2022

Carrie Chapman Catt, Helen Hamilton Gardener, and Maud Wood Park were savvy and observant politicians. They convinced congressmen to create a Committee on Woman Suffrage in the House of Representatives in early summer 1917. They worked slowly and steadily throughout the war years to convince Congress that women deserved enfranchisement through a national amendment. And they often pointed to the extensive work the nation’s women were doing in the war effort. While on the whole, well-to-do white women were involved in the volunteering to help shepherd the amendment through the process, that did not mean people of color were absent from the congressional process. Women of color were consistently part of these congressional discussions—sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely. For example, since 1912, suffragists and their male allies had petitioned Congress to give the Hawaiian legislature the authority to vote to enfranchise women, and by 1915, both parties in Hawaii had pledged to support the issue. But despite these efforts, they did not convince the Hawaiian legislature to enfranchise women before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
The Roots of Activism
Authors: Parker Alison M.
Published: January 2022

Mary (“Mollie”) Church was born enslaved in 1863 in Memphis, Tennessee. Upon attaining their freedom, Mollie’s parents, Robert Reed Church and Louisa Ayres Church, became business owners. Rioting white Irish police officers targeted Robert Church and many other freedpeople during the 1866 Memphis Massacre. Although shot in the back of the head, Mollie’s father survived. Her family’s history of enslavement and continued terrorism led her to reject the injustices and prejudices so pervasive in United States society. During the Reconstruction era, her parents saw that their brilliant daughter was outpacing the segregated schooling options in Memphis and sent her to the Antioch College Model School in Ohio. Mollie Church graduated with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Oberlin College in the mid-1880s.
Conclusion
Authors: Parker Alison M.
Published: January 2022

The black freedom struggle, from Terrell’s perspective, was a multi-pronged approach. From her early work in the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), focusing on anti-lynching and black maternal and infant welfare, to her work in the NAACP as part of the long civil rights movement, Terrell nimbly used a variety of techniques from speeches and marches to picketing and boycotts to achieve equal rights. Like Rosa Parks, Mollie Church Terrell cannot be understood and appreciated for just one moment or action in her life. Instead, she must be appreciated for her resiliency and persistency--her unceasing militancy--over many long decades.
José Garcia Villa’s Book of Grotesques
Authors: Rana Swati
Published: January 2022

This chapter explores the ethnic character who severs art from biography through José Garcia Villa’s infamous disavowal of his racial and colonial identity. Focusing on Villa’s autobiographical short story cycle in Footnote to Youth (1933), this chapter rethinks Villa’s disavowal in terms of exposure. The grotesque characters of Villa’s fictive work draw attention to their own twisted forms and expose the social characterization of minorities and of Filipino colonial subjects, specifically their Orientalist and primitivist caricature. This chapter reveals Villa’s insistent disavowal of biography to be the result of social compulsion rather than eccentric choice.
That Middle World
Authors: Charles Julia S.
Published: January 2022

This chapter begins with a critical look into Charles W. Chesnutt, not just as author and civil rights activist, but also as race theorist. The chapter outlines Chesnutt’s racial theories, his lived experiences, and his commitment to Black life in order to introduce and theorize the space called “that middle world” that he spent the bulk of his intellectual energy exploring.
That Respectability
Authors: Charles Julia S.
Published: January 2022

Chapter 2 situates Charles W. Chesnutt’s novel The House Behind the Cedars and his short story “The Wife of His Youth” within this book’s larger point about in-betweeness. This chapter explores the various iterations of racial crossing in The House Behind the Cedars and literary depictions of the rise of the Black middle class as bourgeois-strivers in “The Wife of His Youth.” Examining the fictional representations of the so-called Blue Vein Society, it views this facet of “that middle world” as a distinctive space in which these characters employ strategies of respectability as a means to simultaneously distinguish themselves from larger Black society and gain respect from white society.
That Performance
Authors: Charles Julia S.
Published: January 2022

Chapter three is chiefly concerned with the theatricality of racial passing, or with race as performance. By complicating the histories of Black-to-white passing, this chapter considers how whiteness is imagined in and through performance in Black passing literature. It examines how bodily adornment (costuming) and the mixed-race body itself each contribute to the success of the cross. The chapter discusses two works of African American racial passing literature that were produced on the eve of the Civil War: Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), the freedom narrative by William and Ellen Craft, and William Wells Brown’s The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), the first published play by an African American writer. This chapter also engages gender crossing. It reveals the sometimes infuriating, and often convincing, experiments of racial impersonation within these texts in order to argue that successful strategies of racial performance hinged equally on performer and audience.
China's Muslims and Japan's Empire
Authors: Hammond Kelly A.
Published: January 2022

In this transnational history of World War II, Kelly A. Hammond places Sino-Muslims at the center of imperial Japan's challenges to Chinese nation-building efforts. Revealing the little-known story of Japan's interest in Islam during its occupation of North China, Hammond shows how imperial Japanese aimed to defeat the Chinese Nationalists in winning the hearts and minds of Sino-Muslims, a vital minority population. Offering programs that presented themselves as protectors of Islam, the Japanese aimed to provide Muslims with a viable alternative—and, at the same time, to create new Muslim consumer markets that would, the Japanese hoped, act to subvert the existing global capitalist world order and destabilize the Soviets. This history can be told only by reinstating agency to Muslims in China who became active participants in the brokering and political jockeying between the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese Empire. Hammond argues that the competition for their loyalty was central to the creation of the ethnoreligious identity of Muslims living on the Chinese mainland. Their wartime experience ultimately helped shape the formation of Sino-Muslims' religious identities within global Islamic networks, as well as their incorporation into the Chinese state, where the conditions of that incorporation remain unstable and contested to this day.
Deploying Islam
Authors: Hammond Kelly A.
Published: January 2022

Chapter 4 examines plans from the Tokyo-based Greater Japan Muslim League to deploy Sino-Muslims to sell Japanese tea and manufactured goods in new, predominantly Muslim markets throughout South Asia, Central Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. These plans were central to efforts to create new markets in predominantly Muslim spaces.
Conclusion
Authors: Hammond Kelly A.
Published: January 2022

The conclusion delves into the legacies of global fascism and offers insights into the connections between Japanese wartime Islamic policy, the ethnic minority policies of the early People’s Republic of China, and both the Chinese Nationalists’ and Communists’ relationships with newly independent postcolonial states with sizable (or majority) Muslim populations in Asia, such as India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Egypt. With a particular focus on the echoes of anti-Soviet and anti-imperialist rhetoric in postindependence nationalist propaganda produced in Muslim countries by both communist and anticommunist governments around Asia and the Middle East, it argues that the legacies of Japanese fascism persisted into the Cold War.
Conclusion
Authors: Jemison Elizabeth L.
Published: January 2022

Christian citizenship arguments from the postemancipation Mississippi River Valley reverberated across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The opposite arguments about religious and political identity that Black and white Christians made in the decades after the Civil War would re-emerge in battles over Civil Rights and desegregation. The Religious Right’s efforts to protect white Christian power in the name of family values mirror the work of white southerners to create white supremacist political power in the late 19th century. Similarly, the separate silos in which communities had their own historical narratives that celebrated their preferred version of the past mirror political partisanship in the 2020s.
The Right to Live in Health
Authors: Rodríguez Daniel A.
Published: January 2022

Daniel A. Rodríguez’s history of a newly independent Cuba shaking off the U.S. occupation focuses on the intersection of public health and politics in Havana. While medical policies were often used to further American colonial power, in Cuba, Rodríguez argues, they evolved into important expressions of anticolonial nationalism as Cuba struggled to establish itself as a modern state. A younger generation of Cuban medical reformers, including physicians, patients, and officials, imagined disease as a kind of remnant of colonial rule. These new medical nationalists, as Rodríguez calls them, looked to medical science to guide Cuba toward what they envisioned as a healthy and independent future.
Rodríguez describes how medicine and new public health projects infused republican Cuba’s statecraft, powerfully shaping the lives of Havana’s residents. He underscores how various stakeholders, including women and people of color, demanded robust government investment in quality medical care for all Cubans, a central national value that continues today. On a broader level, Rodríguez proposes that Latin America, at least as much as the United States and Europe, was an engine for the articulation of citizens’ rights, including the right to health care, in the twentieth century.
Introduction
Authors: Rodríguez Daniel A.
Published: January 2022

Independence meant the new republic of Cuba had a unique opportunity and responsibility to make public health a matter of the highest state concern. These early debates in the earliest months of the Cuban Republic reveal an ambitious and far-reaching political project to join science and statecraft and secure health as a fundamental right of citizenship. This book explains how ideas about government and personal responsibility for health emerged during the transition from colony to republic, shaped the development of new health institutions and the lives of Havana’s residents, and were contested, transformed, and taken up by ever-broader swaths of the urban population to make claims about citizenship and state responsibility. It examines the post-colonial history of Havana as urban residents confronted disease and early death during a period of dizzying political, economic, and scientific change from 1897-1935. It contends that, over time, the growing interactions between the urban poor and the agents of the expanding public health state were transformative for both. The introduction provides a brief history of medical nationalism in postcolonial Cuba, the changes and medical landscape in Havana, and expanding collective rights in Latin America. It also provides a summary of the structure of the book.
Conclusion
Authors: Rodríguez Daniel A.
Published: January 2022

The conclusion focuses on Cuba’s 1940 social democratic constitution, which formally enshrined the right to health for all Cubans. It uses this historical moment to reflect on broader historical continuities and discontinuities during a century of profound political, social, and scientific change. It reflects on contemporary Cuba’s association with medicine.
Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s Lyrical Activism
Authors: Zellinger Elissa
Published: January 2022

Chapter Two discusses Elizabeth Oakes Smith, the lecturer, journalist, novelist, poet, and women’s rights activist, whose literary career began in the 1830s and stretched well into her old age. Her essays and lectures asserted that women, not just men, had the right to develop their own lives and pursue their own interests as equals. While her poetry is very different from her prose, this chapter highlights the political aspirations that underpin Oakes Smith's poetics. By representing women's genius, her poems endeavor to symbolize women's fundamental right to self-sovereignty. Oakes Smith tries in her poetry to rewrite the terms of her reception, not as a generic female writer, but as the lasting, liberal poet. She adapts the conventions marking Poetess poetry to anticipate a different reception for herself, and, in the process, a different status for women. By exploiting the expectations regulating the Poetess's accidental exposure of interiority, Oakes Smith's poetry acknowledges the intimate emotions of its figured speakers but, crucially, refuses to excavate them for readers. In so doing, Oakes Smith purports to reveal her self-sovereign genius through her full control over what she sees and says.
Union
Authors: Lang Andrew F.
Published: January 2022

Nineteenth-century contemporaries held their Union created from the American Revolution as the pinnacle of modern political accomplishments. In a monarchical, aristocratic, and oligarchic world, the Union stood as a unique experiment in democratic self-government, restrained by constitutional procedure and popular deference. To destroy the Union was thus to obliterate the American citizenry’s providential calling to display the virtues of liberty to a world governed by tyranny. The Union was nevertheless a striking paradox: it was a republic of liberty and slavery, a nation of democratic inclusion and racial and ethnic exclusion. Marginalized, subordinate, and enslaved Americans thus charged the nation with rank hypocrisy. They employed exceptionalist rhetoric to protest and advocate for equal inclusion in a more perfect Union. Only then, they argued, could the United States be a truly exceptional nation.
Conduct
Authors: Lang Andrew F.
Published: January 2022

Confederates and Unionists would never achieve their stated national purposes without the triumph of their respective armies. Each nation’s standing—including emancipation in the United States—depended entirely on the conduct of military institutions populated largely by common citizens of each republic. This chapter demonstrates how each government subscribed to notions of just war theory: how nations justified, explained, limited, and expanded military conduct in accordance with the laws of war and the self-defined standards of “civilization.” To exceed or ignore a just war delegitimized a national cause before a reproving global community. Both the United States and Confederacy claimed principal standing among the western community of nations, influencing how both republics restrained military conduct while always being mindful that escalation and destruction necessitated legal and martial justification. Ultimately, the chapter questions the veracity of the American Civil War as a “total war,” contributing to a decades-long scholarly debate.
Endings
Authors: Lang Andrew F.
Published: January 2022

The final chapter of Part II explores the nature of Confederate surrender. While Union political and military leaders insisted that Confederates unconditionally end the rebellion, dismantle their government, dissolve their armies, and consent to emancipation, the Union also maintained policies in accordance with Lincoln’s pledge in his Second Inaugural Address of “malice toward none.” This chapter thus probes a controversial question about the end of the American Civil War: should the United States have extended far greater punishment to Confederates to avoid the forthcoming horrific white southern counterrevolution against Reconstruction? While some did, many loyal citizens believed that excessive retribution violated the purpose of waging a war for Union, emancipation, and the preservation of self-government. With the slaveholding class destroyed and seemingly no longer a threat to national accord, future rebellions against federal authority seemed unlikely. Former Confederates realigning in the nation alongside formerly enslaved people, according to myriad white loyal citizens, contrasted the Union’s peaceful, moral restraint to a world governed by state-sponsored reprisals.
Introduction
Authors: Gosse Van
Published: January 2022

This introduction argues that the White Republic was actively contested from the Founding, and that black voting was a constant factor in antebellum politics, as underlined by the frantic Negrophobia of white politicians in both North and South. It suggests a First Reconstruction proceeded from emancipation in the Northern states, organically linked to postbellum Reconstruction in the South.
The Very Sebastopol of Niggerdom
Authors: Gosse Van
Published: January 2022

New Bedford was the U.S.’s wealthiest city in the U.S., notorious nationally for its visible Black power. Its powerful Quakers patronized black leaders like Nathan Johnson, mentor to a young Frederick Douglass on his 1838 arrival. By then, black Bedforders had established a robust independent politics, forcing all parties to compete for their votes. In the 1840s, younger men like the brothers Ezra and Richard P. Johnson helped lead the local Liberty Party (and later the Free Soil and Free Democratic parties), fighting the dominant Whigs for African American votes. From 1848 through 1854, the black electorate joined a radical biracial coalition led by renegade Democrat Rodney French, Mayor in 1853-54. After 1855, Republicans incorporated black men into party and municipal offices.
Negroes Have Votes as Good as Yours or Mine
Authors: Gosse Van
Published: January 2022

During this period, black men voted freely throughout the state, constituting a major bloc of voters in New York city, and in upstate towns such as Hudson. Black leaders like Joseph Sidney were outspoken Federalists, because that party was tied to both emancipation via Governor John Jay and the defence of black voting rights by figures like Stephen Van Rensselaer, the last “Patroon” and American’s richest man. In the ‘Teens, Jeffersonian Republicans and future Democrats, including Martin Van Buren and the Tammany editor Mordecai Noah, began a long campaign to shift the balance of power in the state by disfranchising black voters, culminating in the 1821 constitutional convention instituting a $250 “freehold” property requirement for men of color.
Ohio, Flanked
Authors: Gosse Van
Published: January 2022

The schizophrenic nature of Ohio’s politics was represented by two Ohio Republican congressmen in early 1861: the “Corwin amendment” to the Constitution, proposed by the eminent Thomas Corwin, guaranteed slavery’s legality in perpetuity so as to forestall civil war; a bill by James Ashley mandated compensated emancipation for any enslaved person escaping to a free state. Meanwhile, former Governor Salmon P. Chase, widely identified with bringing black men into the Republican Party, joined Lincoln’s cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury.
This Land Is My Land
Authors: Inscoe John C.
Published: January 2022

This chapter explores four films that center on the quest for farmland by individuals (women as often as men) who attempt either to acquire it or to hold on to what they or their families already own. Struggles over land have long been vital components of the Appalachian experience and films set in the region have reflected that reality in a variety of ways. One of the major themes of the films explored in this chapter is the question of Appalachia as a repository of “fundamental Americanism” and “traditional American values,” in which the quest and struggle for land are the most fundamental of these values. The four films explored in this chapter are firmly grounded in historical moments—World War I and II, the Great Depression, and the New Deal Era—in which landownership challenges were front and center. The films are Sergeant York (1941), The Dollmaker (1984), Wild River (1960), and Foxfire (1987). Inscoe argues these four films show both the tangible and intangible ways the moral, economic, and personal challenges that have long characterized southern highlanders’ relationships to farmland and agriculture and, by extension, those of many other Americans as well.
American Gold Digger
Authors: Donovan Brian
Published: January 2022

The stereotype of the "gold digger" has had a fascinating trajectory in twentieth-century America, from tales of greedy flapper-era chorus girls to tabloid coverage of Anna Nicole Smith and her octogenarian tycoon husband. The term entered American vernacular in the 1910s as women began to assert greater power over courtship, marriage, and finances, threatening men’s control of legal and economic structures. Over the course of the century, the gold digger stereotype reappeared as women pressed for further control over love, sex, and money while laws failed to keep pace with such realignments. The gold digger can be seen in silent films, vaudeville jokes, hip hop lyrics, and reality television. Whether feared, admired, or desired, the figure of the gold digger appears almost everywhere gender, sexuality, class, and race collide.
This fascinating interdisciplinary work reveals the assumptions and disputes around women's sexual agency in American life, shedding new light on the cultural and legal forces underpinning romantic, sexual, and marital relationships.
The Alimony Panic
Authors: Donovan Brian
Published: January 2022

Chapter One examines concerns about alimony in the late 1920s, a moral panic at which gold diggers took center stage. Historians have described the first two decades of the twentieth century as the “first sexual revolution,” a time period which drastically altered attitudes about love, marriage, and divorce. The acceleration of romantic love as the primary justification for marriage coupled with new social and economic roles for women, prompted a rise in the divorce rate. As the divorce rate increased, and as the economic basis for family life changed, many Americans expressed widespread concern about men falling victim to alimony-seeking gold diggers. Coinciding with these changes, the parameters of who was considered “white” were in flux, and cultural negotiations of whiteness occurred in gendered and sexualized spaces, like advertising and popular entertainment. Specific white women, like former Ziegfeld star Peggy Hopkins Joyce, came to embody the gold digger and the problem of extravagant alimony awards. Well-publicized stories of greedy gold diggers focused on the high alimony awards sought by Joyce and others but, in reality, alimony payments had not substantially increased. Rather, the social panic about alimony reflected Progressive-Era angst about gender, class, and race.
Colonial Thought
Authors: Casimir Jean
Published: January 2022

The French Revolution challenged the absolutism of royal power and had implications for France’s colonial holdings where the authority of the king could not be replaced with the authority of the sovereign people. Actors in colonial society began to express their own social and political projects, all of which maintained their colonist and proslavery nature. The only differences revolved around questions regarding the role of property owners who were the descendants of slaves. The conflicts at the end of the eighteenth century were unable to deal with two key issues: the need for local reproduction of labor and that modern colonial thought could not account for the managerial autonomy of the institutions that emerged from the local reproduction of labor.
Slaves or Peasants
Authors: Casimir Jean
Published: January 2022

This chapter focuses on the legal and social difference between the status of peasant, slave, and cultivator in the colony and Republic of Haiti. When property owners tried to replace the word slave, they did not change the character’s role. The rebaptized cultivator was still meant to remain a laborer. When the Haitian oligarchs succeeded the European oligarchy in 1804, there was no significant difference in the treatment of the population.
The Pursuit of Impossible Segregation
Authors: Casimir Jean
Published: January 2022

The Haitian Revolution (1804) did not change the experience on the ground for most Haitians. After its conclusion, the oligarchs tried to relaunch the traditional plantation structure that focused on producing export commodities; the oligarchs also segregated themselves from the rest of the population. Working populations thus had to exercise their new-found sovereignty in isolation and began creating a counter-plantation system that compensated for Haiti’s isolation from capitalist investment and production. Yet the even as the Haitian oligarchs used the same models of imperial culture, they were marginalized by the rest of the Western world and subject to European scientific racism.
The Power and Beauty of the Sovereign People
Authors: Casimir Jean
Published: January 2022

During the nineteenth century, the mass of Haitians were able to move successfully beyond the conditions of captivity and establish themselves. Despite adverse conditions, Haitians flourished in “garden-villages” and achieved sovereignty in their daily lives.
Ragging Style
Authors: Monod David
Published: January 2022

What was the cosmopolitan style promoted in vaudeville? It was ironic, slang-filled, critical of conventions, celebrated personality and pushed consumption. This chapter shows how the vaudeville style affected popular music, body ideals, physical movement, and racial stereotypes. The effectiveness of performers communicating style and the reason they could be taken as role models depended on the “actuality” of the variety theater. Performers in vaudeville were not seen to be “acting,” they were imagined to be revealing their authentic selves. This allowed performers to express an approach to living that appeared to have application beyond the theater. This chapter also tackles the issue of why a theater based on actuality continued to present such old-fashioned and artificial acts as blackface.
The Business of Mass Entertainment
Authors: Monod David
Published: January 2022

If vaudeville spoke so effectively to modern life and if it was so popular, why did it disappear after World War I? There was nothing inevitable about vaudeville’s decline; but its vulnerabilities were apparent even as it grew. As vaudeville became more popular, some entrepreneurs tried to separate their businesses from the mass of variety theaters by creating what they called the “big time,” a glitzier vaudeville based on palatial theaters, glamorous amenities and high-priced celebrities. Referencing characters like Fred Proctor, Edward F. Albee, and Sherman Dudley, this chapter shows how managers formed national chains and booking cartels and tried to strangle out their competitors. These tactics drove managers who could not secure enough affordable celebrity acts to reduce overhead by showing movies. The cost of ever-increasing glamor burdened “big time” chains with staggering overhead, something which made them vulnerable when the market contracted sharply after WWI. The cause of vaudeville’s decline was both structural and unrehearsed.
Introduction
Authors: Bailey Yelena
Published: January 2022

The introduction explores the concept of the streets as a physical, social, and cultural construct created through U.S. policy. The introduction focuses on how Black urban space has been depicted in popular and political discourses, with particular attention to how these narratives have shaped perceptions of Blackness and belonging. Finally, the introduction establishes a connection between housing policy, media, marketing, and popular culture as arenas that have collaboratively created sustaining ideas about Blackness and Black space.
Music Born of the Streets
Authors: Bailey Yelena
Published: January 2022

Chapter 4 examines the history of hip hop as a genre that was literally created in the streets (at block parties). Additionally, this chapter explores the role of hip hop as a Black art form that provides a complex picture of Black space. As a part of this discussion, this chapter analyzes The Fugees’s The Score, Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool, and Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City as examples of how hip hop operates as an art form that humanizes Black youth in counter cultural ways.
A Hood Genre
Authors: Bailey Yelena
Published: January 2022

Chapter 5 examines the way Black urban space exists in the popular imaginary. This chapter offers a brief history of Black space on screen and then provides and in-depth analysis of how Black space is depicted in the hood genre films of the 1990s, Moonlight, The Wire, and The Chi. The film analysis in this chapter focuses on how these depictions illustrate competing narratives of the streets produced by white and Black imaginaries.
Conclusion
Authors: Bailey Yelena
Published: January 2022

The conclusion grounds a larger discussion of the streets within recent events, such as the 2020 summer uprisings in response to George Floyd’s murder. The conclusion frames these current events as a direct product of the history of housing segregation and the way the streets define Black life. Starting with the Kerner Commission and ending with discussion of reparations, the conclusion explores the possibility of redress.
The Punitive Turn in an Age of Vengeance, 2001–2009
Authors: Sherry Michael S.
Published: January 2022

The 9/11 attacks in 2001 propelled the long-building American currents of vengeance and punishment further onto the world stage under the leadership of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney. U.S. torture of terrorist suspects highlighted that vengeance (and broke many laws) but also served to obscure how much torture took place within stateside criminal justice.
Reversal or Redirection? 2009–2017
Authors: Sherry Michael S.
Published: January 2022

In the face of mounting resistance from old-line groups and new ones like Black Lives Matter, many elements of the punitive turn stabilized or even (as with incarceration rates) receded a bit during the Barack Obama years, while talk of crime-fighting as a “war” diminished. But by then the punitive turn was so deeply ingrained in American institutions that reversal was nearly impossible, and other elements, like America’s immigration system, worsened.
Jumping the Broom
Authors: Parry Tyler D.
Published: January 2022

In this definitive history of a unique tradition, Tyler D. Parry untangles the convoluted history of the "broomstick wedding." Popularly associated with African American culture, Parry traces the ritual’s origins to marginalized groups in the British Isles and explores how it influenced the marriage traditions of different communities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. His surprising findings shed new light on the complexities of cultural exchange between peoples of African and European descent from the 1700s up to the twenty-first century. Drawing from the historical records of enslaved people in the United States, British Romani, Louisiana Cajuns, and many others, Parry discloses how marginalized people found dignity in the face of oppression by innovating and reimagining marriage rituals. Such innovations have an enduring impact on the descendants of the original practitioners. Parry reveals how and why the simple act of "jumping the broom" captivates so many people who, on the surface, appear to have little in common with each other.
A Multicultural Tradition
Authors: Parry Tyler D.
Published: January 2022

The book’s introduction begins with a largely unknown vignette of two enslaved people “jumping the broom” in an elaborate ceremony, which the author specifically selected to portray the ritual’s complexity and rich symbolism. Following the analysis of this ceremony, the introduction engages a number of broader subjects explored in the book’s subsequent chapters. First, it questions why, despite its popularity among multiple groups throughout the Atlantic world, the broomstick wedding has not received adequate attention in previous literature. This requires an overview of researchers who have commented on the custom and why a more extensive history needs to be written. Second, it examines how certain traditions are lost to communities and how their descendants reimagine them to fit their contemporary needs. Essentially, the need to reinvent a ceremony crosses the various cultural groups who claim it. Finally, it provides an overview of the book’s trajectory, which is both thematic and chronological, showing how “culture” is conceptualized, reimagined, reinvented, and exchanged throughout time and space.
To Create Our Own Rituals
Authors: Parry Tyler D.
Published: January 2022

This chapter reviews the state of the broomstick wedding among same-sex couples, both before and after its the legalization in the United States. For many people facing systemic discrimination and marital inequality, jumping the broom symbolizes resistance to the status quo. This chapter examines how same-sex couples who used the broomstick ceremony were depicted in the mainstream media, which portrayed the LGBTQ movement as overwhelmingly white and middle-class. For Black people in this community, however, the ritual can hold a distinct meaning that is connected to their unique historical and contemporary experiences. To examine this distinction, it uses the film Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom (2008) as a starting point in this discussion, analyzing how the film uses (or does not use) jumping the broom to unveil the complexity of being Black and gay in the United States. It then uses an intersectional framework to examine how the broomstick wedding is used by white gay men and lesbians to promote a colorblind vision of the LGBTQ community, though for lesbian and gay African Americans it often holds a double-meaning for them as a group “twice-barred” from legal matrimony, once as enslaved people and then as those who are same-sex attracted.
Introduction
Authors: Wells Jamin
Published: January 2022

The introduction presents an overview of the book’s focus-- the radical transformation of the American coast’s physical, social, and cultural landscapes during the nineteenth century—as well as its argument that coastal shipwrecks played a decisive role in that transformation. It also introduces the book’s conceptual framework—maritime cultural landscapes—as well as the following key terms: shipwrecks, disasters, coasts, and beach. It concludes with a summary of the remaining chapters.
The Search for Black Power in the Sixties
Authors: Varel David A.
Published: January 2022

This chapter opens with Reddick’s 1960 trips to Ghana and Nigeria to celebrate their independence alongside his friends Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and St. Clair Drake. The chapter’s focus, however, is Reddick’s role in the evolving civil rights movement of the 1960s. His ongoing mentorship of Martin Luther King Jr., along with his continued strategic planning and public-relations work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, helped that vanguard organization successfully navigate its most tumultuous decade and force passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The chapter also challenges the simple dichotomy between civil rights and Black Power by using Reddick’s diverse activities—including his leadership of Leon Sullivan’s Opportunities Industrialization Center Institute—to explain the many roots and routes of Black Power as it evolved organically out of the southern struggle and parallel ones in the North. Reddick also continued to confront racism in an array of institutions including publishing, where he sought change by coauthoring a young adult’s history of African Americans’ role in the Civil War and Reconstruction entitled Worth Fighting For (1965).
Ebony Scholar in the Ivory Tower
Authors: Varel David A.
Published: January 2022

This chapter analyzes Reddick’s intellectual activism during the 1970s while a professor at Temple University and Harvard University, which came after the black campus movement had begun to remake American higher education. He clashed repeatedly with white administrators and faculty members at Temple while helping to build a Black Studies program there. Off campus, he took a leadership role in the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, the Philadelphia Bicentennial Corporation, the Kinte Library Project with Alex Haley, and in the crusade against white control of black history in the historical profession. Alongside Vincent Harding and others, he launched a scathing indictment of Time on the Cross (1974) and institutional racism within academia. With support from the Moton Center, he also pursued research on institutional racism on college campuses and the impact of desegregation on black colleges. Reddick demonstrates how black intellectuals began disrupting institutional racism within higher education, public history, philanthropy, and publishing, even as they encountered a growing climate of conservatism and white backlash symbolized by the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978).
Broke
Authors: Stein Michael
Published: January 2022

In this age of shortened office visits, doctors take care of their patients’ immediate needs and often elide their own personal histories. But as reflected in Broke, Michael Stein takes the time to listen to the experiences of his patients whose financial challenges complicate every decision in life they make. Stein asks his patients to tell him about their financial conditions not only to find out how to better treat them but also to bear witness to their very survival and the power of human resilience. Stein’s intimate vignettes capture these encounters, allowing his patients to offer profound, moving, and unguarded reflections about their struggles, sometimes in a single sentence.
Broke is a quietly passionate critique of a country that has grown callous to the plight of the poor, the tens of millions of people in the United States who live below the poverty line and who have no obvious path to security. Full of heartbreaking and surprising details and framed by a wry, knowing, and empathic humor, there is no other book that illuminates the experience of people facing economic hardship in this way.
Self
Authors: Stein Michael
Published: January 2022

The 38 stories in this section deal with how the patients see or define themselves. Many relate that they do not think of themselves as “poor.” Topics include problems with paying for car repairs, allowances, other people’s spending habits or salaries, money owed, domestic violence, and desires. The facts in this section relate to suicide, as well as food access for children experiencing poverty.
The Racist Foundations of Evangelicalism in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Butler Anthea
Published: January 2022

Slavery is the foundation of racism and power in American evangelicalism. Responses to slavery, both for and against, have fundamentally shaped the evangelical movement in a number of important ways. Many insightful works of history have been written helping to uncover and comb out this story. Drawing on them, this chapter builds out the essential foundation of the story in order to navigate the early period as an introduction to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century history of evangelical racism that will form the rest of this book. As a historian, Butler knows that American evangelicals made important and substantial contributions to the abolitionist movement and to the education and uplift of African Americans during Reconstruction. Butler deliberately focuses this chapter on the trajectory of evangelical history that supported slavery, the Lost Cause, Jim Crow, and lynching because this history is the key to understanding how evangelicals used and continue to use scripture, morality, and the political power they gathered across the course of the twentieth and, now, the twenty-first centuries.
Whitewashing Racism and the Rise of the Religious Right
Authors: Butler Anthea
Published: January 2022

For evangelicals, the years from the seventies to the nineties were defining ones, encompassing their cultural acquiescence to the inclusion of African Americans in their churches, revivals, and schools while simultaneously fighting against the gains of the civil rights movement in the political and legal arena. Holding on to racist ideologies, including prohibitions against race mixing, dating, and marriage, evangelicals embraced an intransigence that spurred them on to political activism and organizing—the very thing for which Falwell had come down on King just a few years earlier. Using morality and color-blind conservatism as a shield, evangelicals made new political alliances and created organizations, such as the Moral Majority, that would promote their favored issues while continuing to embrace racist practices and strategies to consolidate economic and political power.