bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“The Most Thorough Traitors and Deceivers”
Authors: Carayon Céline
Published: January 2021

As permanent colonial settlements took roots and French-Indigenous relations solidified in the seventeenth century, intercultural relations were increasingly defined by a tension between trust and distrust. Dependence on Indigenous knowledge made it necessary for the French to credit their allies with some degree of truthfulness. At the same time, they always remained on their guard, and used observations of Native bodies and movements to ground their claims about the quintessential deceptiveness of Indians. The French also used nonverbal eloquence in return to deceive and enact violence against Indigenous peoples. This chapter explores the complex intermingling of sincere friendship and deep distrust in seventeenth-century French colonial contexts, with a particular focus on the Circum-Caribbean region. The first section of the chapter is dedicated to the ways Indigenous bodies and embodied expressions were targeted as inherently “treacherous” by French writers. Next, the Indigenous practice of fictive kinship known as compérage by the French in Brazil, Guiana, and the Antilles is illuminated to understand how personal and intimate bonds worked or failed to preserve peace between the groups.
“A Thousand Gesticulations and Affectations”
Authors: Carayon Céline
Published: January 2021

From the first encounter, gestures were used alongside speech to communicate across linguistic and cultural barriers. Gestures and sign language continued to occupy a crucial place in the language-learning process as colonial relations matured in the seventeenth century. In both Europe and Native America, bi- or multi-lingual individuals were rare and multilingualism mostly associated with trade, war, and diplomacy. Nonverbal and paralinguistic elements of speech played an important role in shaping each group’s perception of the qualities and weaknesses of another’s language and culture. This chapter explores what identity shifts were associated with learning, teaching, and speaking another language in Indigenous societies and for different groups of Frenchmen. Lay Frenchmen, traders, and interpreters were able to adopt more fluid and immersive strategies to acquire Indigenous languages than Catholic missionaries. Still, despite their reluctance to adopt Indigenous language-learning techniques, the Jesuits also came to depend on deeply embodied dialogues with Indian and French informers and teachers to acquire verbal and nonverbal fluency critical to the success of their missions. Examples of Indian converts who preached in their tongues are given.
These People Have Always Been a Republic
Authors: Crandall Maurice S.
Published: January 2021

Spanning three hundred years and the colonial regimes of Spain, Mexico, and the United States, Maurice S. Crandall’s sweeping history of Native American political rights in what is now New Mexico, Arizona, and Sonora demonstrates how Indigenous communities implemented, subverted, rejected, and indigenized colonial ideologies of democracy, both to accommodate and to oppose colonial power. 
Focusing on four groups--Pueblos in New Mexico, Hopis in northern Arizona, and Tohono O'odhams and Yaquis in Arizona/Sonora--Crandall reveals the ways Indigenous peoples absorbed and adapted colonially imposed forms of politics to exercise sovereignty based on localized political, economic, and social needs. Using sources that include oral histories and multinational archives, this book allows us to compare Spanish, Mexican, and American conceptions of Indian citizenship, and adds to our understanding of the centuries-long struggle of Indigenous groups to assert their sovereignty in the face of settler colonial rule.
Repúblicas de Indios in Spanish New Mexico
Authors: Crandall Maurice
Published: January 2021

This chapter traces the development of Repúblicas de Indios (Indian Republics) among the Pueblo Indians of Spanish New Mexico. It demonstrates how the Pueblos implemented Spanish directives mandating annual elections of officers, such as governors and lieutenant governors, to form an Indian town council, or ayuntamiento/cabildo. The Pueblos ultimately transformed those elections to bring them more in conformity with traditional Pueblo leadership selection practices. This chapter interrogates the importance of Pueblo officers, the governor system, and the annual elections that put them in office. These elected Pueblo officers represented their communities in dealings with the Spanish church and state. While there were abuses of office, Pueblo governors and other leaders overwhelmingly worked for the survival of their people and to retain their sacred homelands.
Hopis, Yaquis, and O’odhams in the Spanish Arizona-Sonora Borderlands
Authors: Crandall Maurice
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores how three groups—Hopis, Yaquis, and O’odhams—incorporated the Indian-Spanish electoral system. Hopis elected officers during the seventeenth century, but effectively destroyed the Spanish electoral system in 1700 with the massacre at Awat’ovi, the village of the largest Spanish religious and political inroads. Yaquis incorporated the town electoral system to a high degree after missionization began in 1617. But Jesuit abuses and manipulation of Yaqui town electoral processes were among the main causes of the revolt of 1740, a violent uprising to reassert Yaqui autonomy. O’odham experiences with the town electoral system began with Father Kino’s missionary forays in the late seventeenth century. Over the course of the Spanish period, O’odhams in Pimería Alta endured an uneven process of missionization and political change, never fully controlling town elections, largely due to Jesuit interference.
Conclusion
Authors: Crandall Maurice
Published: January 2021

The conclusion briefly highlights the cases of Miguel Trujillo (Isleta Pueblo) and Frank Harrison (Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation), whose 1948 legal challenges led to the overturning of Native American voter restrictions in New Mexico and Arizona, respectively. It argues that we must view such legal cases as part of a long history of Indigenous electorates, and not simply as the culmination or end point. From the Spanish colonial era through the U.S. territorial period in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Indigenous peoples elected individuals who worked tirelessly and at great sacrifice to ensure tribal sovereignty. The conclusion ends with the author’s family gathering for a tribal election in fall 2016, which the author argues must be seen as a continuation of the elections most important to Indigenous communities; those that pertain to leadership in Indigenous nations and maintaining self-government.
Introduction
Authors: Downs Gregory P.
Published: January 2021

What is a revolution and why should we think of the U.S. Civil War Era as part of a revolutionary wave? The introduction lays out theories of revolutions and revolutionary changes and explores why the United States’ domestic transformation fits categories of a revolution because of its reliance on bloody constitutionalism, as well as its relation to a broader international revolutionary wave connecting Spain and Cuba and Mexico to the United States.
The Second American Republic
Authors: Downs Gregory P.
Published: January 2021

What made the U.S. Civil War a domestic revolution? This chapter examines the reliance upon military force and oddly constituted congresses to override judicial controls and create constitutional change meant to permanently remake the country’s economic and political base. The chapter narrates the reliance upon military rule and unusual forms to create the constitutional changes of emancipation, civil rights, and voting rights. Thus the chapter demonstrates that the U.S. Civil War did not merely restore a republic but created a new one.
The World the Civil War Might Have Made
Authors: Downs Gregory P.
Published: January 2021

What type of revolutionary change did the U.S. Civil War have on the world? This chapter follows the impacts of the Civil War onto the world stage, focusing upon the simultaneous revolutions in Cuba and Spain. By tracing the relationship between the U.S. Civil War and republican, anti-slavery risings in both sites, the chapter examines the development of an international revolutionary movement. It also, however, traces the disappointments of those hopes in the simultaneous retreats of revolutionary change in the 1870s in all three sites, and in the related events in Mexico.
A Finished Revolution
Authors: Downs Gregory P.
Published: January 2021

Where did the memory of this revolutionary change go? The afterword asks what happened to the revolutionary fervor after the 1870s. In Spain, the U.S., and Cuba, and Mexico, the period after the 1870s witnessed a rollback of earlier changes, a consolidation of power, and amnesia around earlier changes. Thus the afterword asks what happens to dissipate revolutionary change and obscure its meaning, and why Americans might need to access this revolutionary spirit today.
Engines of Redemption
Authors: Huffard R. Scott Jr.
Published: January 2021

After the upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction shattered the plantation economy of the Old South, white southerners turned to the railroad to reconstruct capitalism in the region. Examining the rapid growth, systemization, and consolidation of the southern railroad network, R. Scott Huffard Jr. demonstrates how economic and political elites used the symbolic power of the railroad to proclaim a New South had risen. The railroad was more than just an economic engine of growth; it was a powerful symbol of capitalism’s advance.However, as the railroad spread across the region, it also introduced new dangers and anxieties. White southerners came to fear the railroad would speed an upending of the racial order, epidemics of yellow fever, train wrecks, violent robberies, and domination by corporate monopolies. To complete the reconstruction of capitalism, railroad corporations and their allies had to sever the negative aspects of railroading from capitalism’s powers and deny the railroad’s transformative powers to black southerners. This study of the New South’s experience with the growing railroad network provides valuable insights into the history of capitalism--how it evolves, expands, and overcomes resistance.
Introduction
Authors: Huffard R. Scott
Published: January 2021

The introduction starts by discussing how the railroad embodied nineteenth century capitalism and it notes how the book looks at the South’s railroads as a cohesive network that connected the South through a capitalist means. It also sets the scene by describing how the South was in transition after the Civil War and Reconstruction and how the white elites in the region were seeking to reconstruct capitalism. The railroad was a powerful symbol and an economic engine of change that allowed these boosters to proclaim that a New South had risen. But the railroad’s link with progress obscured the anxieties and monsters that it generated, and the introduction introduces counter narratives to the New South story that later chapters discuss. The book argues that railroads were uniquely destructive in the region and that white elites and railroad companies exploited the region’s racial tensions to obscure these anxieties.
The Phantasmagoria of the Rail
Authors: Huffard R. Scott
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses how white boosters used the symbolic power and magic of the railroad to support their regional and local claims that a New South had risen. It opens with a discussion of the New Orleans Exposition in 1884, which provided a microcosm for the transformations of the railroad. The chapter discusses how this magical thinking around the railroad meshes with Walter Benjamin’s concept of the phantasmagoria. The chapter then traces the arguments promoting 1880s railroad expansion projects in Macon, Greensboro, and Troy to show how this spirit filtered down into small towns across the South. It discusses how railroad construction imposed the logic of capitalism on southern environments and ends by looking at the community celebrations and travel narratives that boosters and journalists used to welcome new railroads.
Ubiquitous, Promiscuous, Frequent, and Numerous
Authors: Huffard R. Scott
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses the life and legend of two train robbers active in Alabama in the 1890s – Railroad Bill and Rube Burrow. While there is a tendency to see train robbers as embodiments of resistance to capitalism, this chapter argues that it is more useful to see these men as personification of the dangers of capitalism. In their train robbing careers, Rube Burrow and Railroad Bill both exploited the increasing systemization, expansion, connectivity, and circulation of the southern railroad network. The crimes of these men touched off panicky reactions that revealed southerners anxieties about the railroad itself. In the end, these anxieties were obscured by the mythmaking that occurred after their violent deaths. Railroad Bill faded into legend as the subject of a folk song that stretched the truth about his deeds and popular memory and the media conflated Rube Burrow’s legend with that of Jesse James and sought to portray him as an anti-capitalist and neo-confederate avenger.
Fighting the Octopus
Authors: Huffard R. Scott
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on the creation and expansion of the Southern Railway corporation and the ways in which the corporation overcame anti-monopoly sentiment in the South. While the company styled itself as an embodiment of the New South, northern capitalist J.P. Morgan financed its reorganization, and its expansion engendered resistance in Georgia and North Carolina. This chapter traces the origins of this company in the economic depression and wave of railroad bankruptcies in the 1890s and notes the attempts to brand this new company as a southern enterprise under the leadership of its first president Samuel Spencer. The chapter then traces resistance to the new company in Georgia and North Carolina, two states in which the Southern Railway tried to purchase other railroads. Foes of the railroad, which formed a broad coalition of Populists, Democrats, and other anti-monopolists, labelled the road as an “octopus” for its monopolistic tendencies. In two case study states – Georgia and North Carolina – appeals to white supremacy and elections marked with violence, as in the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, defeated the anti-monopoly critique and preserved the power and size of the Southern Railway.
Hope and Despair
Authors: Lambe Ariel Mae
Published: January 2021

Cuban popular political leader Julio Antonio Mella originated the fight for a New Cuba and Cuban antifascism in the 1920s. No Barrier Can Contain It begins with him, and his life intersects with the topics and themes covered in chapter 1. The chapter sets the stage for the discussion of antifascism by following Cuban popular politics from the crisis of 1920 through the election of Gerardo Machado, his devolution into a strongman, and his overthrow, to Fulgencio Batista’s rise to power and victory in breaking the March 1935 general strike. The chapter introduces activists Teté Casuso and Pablo de la Torriente Brau as central figures and guides throughout the book.
Cuba’s Revolutionary Spirit and the Hopes of Free Spain
Authors: Lambe Ariel Mae
Published: January 2021

Chapter 3 follows Pablo de la Torriente Brau from where we left him in chapter 1, examining his path from the Cuban domestic struggle into exile and then on to a combat death on the Spanish front in December 1936. His trajectory illustrates at an individual human scale the meaning of transnational antifascism for Cuban activists. The chapter studies recruitment in New York City and Havana for the Cuban volunteers inspired by Torriente, and considers the logistics of the recruitment effort. It examines notable Cuban martyrs in the Spanish conflict as well as their symbolism, especially with regard to the pursuit of Cuba’s domestic struggle abroad. The chapter discusses Cubans’ belief that Spain would offer “countless lessons that will benefit our people” in the fight back home.
The Blood of These Children… Runs through Our Veins
Authors: Lambe Ariel Mae
Published: January 2021

Chapter 4 begins with Teté Casuso in the aftermath of her husband’s death in Spain, when she founded Havana’s Asociación de Auxilio al Niño del Pueblo Español (Association of Aid to the Child of the Spanish People, or AANPE), the central organization of the Cuban campaign to assist Republican children during the conflict. Composed of children, women, and men from all over the island and Cuban communities abroad, the AANPE was part of the international campaign to aid Republican children but was nonetheless unmistakably Cuban. One of its most powerful organizing mechanisms was the argument that the blood of Spanish children ran through Cuban veins. Fostering this sense of familial and cultural solidarity and billing itself as a nonpartisan charity served the association well for much of the war, helping it to achieve impressive successes in collecting aid. That its pro-Republican stance was deemphasized indicates mobilization of a subtle solidarity, in which the cause was obscured to garner broader popular support.
Factionalism, Solidarity, Unity
Authors: Lambe Ariel Mae
Published: January 2021

Chapter 6 considers the antifascist perspectives and goals of a number of leftist individuals and groups on the island. Tension and overlap and conflict and collaboration between groups characterized the antifascism of the Cuban Left. The factionalism of the era is readily apparent, but so, too, is significant unity and solidarity building. Unity and solidarity—even if limited and imperfect—are notable not only I the various leftist internationalist groups well known to have fought among themselves but also between those ideological cohorts and Cuban domestic political actors and groups not affiliated with internationalist ideologies. Ultimately, to demonstrate that there was a continuity in the fight for a New Cuba in Cuban antifascism, chapter 6 illustrates the ways in which the defense of the Spanish Republic on the island involved the same people, groups, relationships, networks, ideas, goals, rhetoric, and tactics as did the Cuban struggle. The Spanish Civil War caused each group to reckon with its own existence, role, values, and aims. The conflict reenergized these groups and provided the impetus for unity, which was vital for the continuation of the struggle at home and abroad.
Conclusion
Authors: Lambe Ariel Mae
Published: January 2021

In the end, Franco’s Nationalists overthrew the Republican government of Spain, and Cuban antifascists suffered yet another defeat. The conclusion details how Cuban activists continued antifascist efforts during World War II as antifascism went “mainstream.” There was no greater symbol of the official position antifascism attained in Cuba than Batista himself; the book suggests that the fight for a New Cuba achieved substantial success in antifascism in part because it influenced Batista, at least for a time.
Modernism on the Nile
Authors: Seggerman Alex Dika
Published: January 2021

Analyzing the modernist art movement that arose in Cairo and Alexandria from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s, Alex Dika Seggerman reveals how the visual arts were part of a multifaceted transnational modernism. While the work of diverse, major Egyptian artists during this era may have appeared to be secular, she argues, it reflected the subtle but essential inflection of Islam, as a faith, history, and lived experience, in the overarching development of Middle Eastern modernity.
Challenging typical views of modernism in art history as solely Euro-American, and expanding the conventional periodization of Islamic art history, Seggerman theorizes a “constellational modernism” for the emerging field of global modernism. Rather than seeing modernism in a generalized, hyperconnected network, she finds that art and artists circulated in distinct constellations that encompassed finite local and transnational relations. Such constellations, which could engage visual systems both along and beyond the Nile, from Los Angeles to Delhi, were materialized in visual culture that ranged from oil paintings and sculpture to photography and prints. Based on extensive research in Egypt, Europe, and the United States, this richly illustrated book poses a compelling argument for the importance of Muslim networks to global modernism.
Introduction
Authors: Seggerman Alex Dika
Published: January 2021

This introduction defines the new term “constellational modernism” to describe Egyptian modern art. As opposed to the vagueness of global and the restrictive idea of transnational, constellational explains the finite nature of Egyptian modernism’s connection abroad as well as the way artists visualize these connections in their artwork. Second, Seggerman discusses the role of Islam in this constellation. These artists and artworks acknowledge Islam (as an idea and as a practice), but they refuse to be defined by it. Third, Seggerman positions Egyptian modernism as part of the rich intellectual framework of the Nahda movement, meaning that these cultural producers were deeply embedded within a wider movement that grappled with ideas of modernity, modernization, tradition, colonialism, and postcolonialism. Lastly, Seggerman defines what modern, modernity, and modernism mean in the context of this book. These redefinitions destabilize the ideas of both a singular modernity and easy plural modernities, and instead pinpointing the overlapping and dyssynchronous connections within a constellation of modernisms.
Mahmoud Mukhtar’s Pharaonic Classicism and Pedagogical Nationalism
Authors: Seggerman Alex Dika
Published: January 2021

This chapter investigates the role of anticolonial Egyptian nationalism in the sculptural works of Mahmoud Mukhtar (1891–1934). Government-funded schooling transformed this farm boy into a heroic nationalist artist. His monumental artworks reflect Egypt’s membership in transnational networks of nationalist ideology and post–World War I artistic classicism. Though distinctly nationalist on the surface, these forms are fundamentally international, echoing the synthesis of nationalism and classicism in parallel interwar modernisms. To explore this transnational phenomenon further, I establish connections between Mukhtar’s use of ancient Egyptian imagery, known as pharaonism, to trends in Egyptian literature as well as to histories of sculpturally depicting fabric. In Nahdat Misr (Egypt’s reawakening), Mukhtar pointedly references ancient Egypt through a monumental granite sphinx but pairs him with a proud female peasant who symbolically lifts her veil. He subtly adjusts the classical referents for a modern, transnational audience. The broad use of these forms exhibits the power of ancient Egyptian symbols as centerpieces for public formation worldwide.
The Be auty of Uncertainty
Authors: Seggerman Alex Dika
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores the postsurrealist paintings and drawings of Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar (1925–66) that “return” Islamic references to art. Gazzar’s early work indexes the Arab socialist concern for the urban poor and dispossessed, indicating Egypt’s postcolonial shift to transnational Arab alliances after the 1952 revolution. In The Green Man, Gazzar combines Islamic references of mystical talismanic imagery with European abstract oil painting. Gazzar’s later works lie between the opposing logics of social realism and abstract expressionism, and they parallel Egypt’s political status as a leading member of the Nonaligned Movement. Beyond national art and politics, this chapter connects Gazzar’s paintings with artworks from other postsurrealist turns to primitivism outside Europe in the postwar era. Seggerman argues that Gazzar heralds a new era of Egyptian modernism, which maintains its constellational nature, but with a dramatic shift in its main actors.
Railroading Religion
Authors: Walker David
Published: January 2021

Railroads, tourism, and government bureaucracy combined to create modern religion in the American West, argues David Walker in this innovative study of Mormonism’s ascendency in the railroad era. The center of his story is Corinne, Utah—an end-of-the-track, hell-on-wheels railroad town founded by anti-Mormon businessmen. In the disputes over this town’s frontier survival, Walker discovers intense efforts by a variety of theological, political, and economic interest groups to challenge or secure Mormonism’s standing in the West. Though Corinne’s founders hoped to leverage industrial capital to overthrow Mormon theocracy, the town became the site of a very different dream.
Economic and political victory in the West required the production of knowledge about different religious groups settling in its lands. As ordinary Americans advanced their own theories about Mormondom, they contributed to the rise of religion itself as a category of popular and scholarly imagination. At the same time, new and advantageous railroad-related alliances catalyzed LDS Church officials to build increasingly dynamic religious institutions. Through scrupulous research and wide-ranging theoretical engagement, Walker shows that western railroads did not eradicate or diminish Mormon power. To the contrary, railroad promoters helped establish Mormonism as a normative American religion.
Introduction
Authors: Walker David
Published: January 2021

This chapter introduces the irony in Corinne, Utah, where anti-Mormon Christians planned to destroy Mormonism by exposing Mormondom’s polygamy, theorcracy, and church restrictions on Mormon-Gentile commerce; however, in return, Mormonism became a success in a modern bureaucratic world. Three basic narratives are assessed in this chapter: first, the shift from anti-Mormonism and the discourse of Mormon irreligion; second, the relationship between commerce and religious discourse; and third, the failures and ironies of promotions and institutional practices. Overall, Railroading Religion shows how Mormons established beneficial contracts with railroad companies and politicians, and it reveals the rise of religion as industry.
Corinnethians and the Death Knell Thesis
Authors: Walker David
Published: January 2021

This chapter analyzes the railroading promises of Corinne in light of contemporary religious theories and antipolygamy legislation. The death knell thesis is the belief that by modernizing Utah through trains, capitalism, and opening the West to free enterprise and liberal thought, Mormondom would be destroyed. The death knell thesis provides insight on the relationship between Mormonism and anti-Mormons as railroads economically and politically brought interests to Utah. J.H. Beadle hoped for the railroad hub to bring Christians, he and aimed to expose who he saw as Mormons’ barbarous theocracy, violence, and polygamy. Overall, Congress’s attack on the LDS Church and polygamy through religious legislation such as the Anti-Bigamy Act and the Pacific Railway Act contributed to the death knell thesis’s goal of destroying Mormonism.
Tourists and the Making of an American Mainline
Authors: Walker David
Published: January 2021

This chapter aims to trace railroad, tourist, and Mormon interactions beneath–and influencings of–the canopy of congressional law. It explores the recasting of federal anti-Mormon policies in light of railroading concerns and how Charles Francis Adams Jr.’s preface was a profound political act. Railroad literature played a role in mediating and marketing Utah religion and amplifying the genre of prerailroad tourism and guidebooks by focusing on the Mormons. The chapter also demonstrates how even while Congress attacked and, in time, forced concessions from the LDS Church with regard to polygamy and politics, Mormon material culture and geography were concurrently identified with Mormonism by railroads and capitalists if not also by congressmen.
Searching for Black Confederates
Authors: Levin Kevin M.
Published: January 2021

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil War and a rising backlash against African Americans’ gains in civil rights and other realms.
Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.
Turning Camp Slaves into Black Confederate Soldiers
Authors: Levin Kevin M.
Published: January 2021

By the 1990s, photographs of uniformed black men as well as pension applications in which the distinction between slave and soldier was sometimes clouded were perceived as evidence that there were large numbers of Black Confederate soldiers. In the late 1970s, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, became more aggressive in their claims that Black men enlisted in the Confederate army as the general public sought accurate information regarding the history of slavery. This interest intensified during the civil rights era as historians and Black Americans pushed back against the Lost Cause narrative, specifically the belief that enslaved population was loyal to their enslavers. The belief that there were willing, Black soldiers in the confederacy spread with the advent of the internet, as many people did not know how to vet sources. Additionally, films and other media blurred the distinctions between camp slaves and soldiers. Ultimately, false narratives made their way into textbooks and even historical sights.
Introduction
Authors: Chase Robert T.
Published: January 2021

The introduction offers a historical intervention to a number of critical narratives surrounding the advent of the carceral state, prisoners’ rights and radicalism, and mass incarceration.
Epilogue
Authors: Chase Robert T.
Published: January 2021

The epilogue reflects on what happened to the prisoners who brought civil suits to Texas and frames the legal and political legacy of Ruiz within the current political moment of national prison strikes and the ongoing struggle over mass incarceration. The chapter considers Ruiz’s legacy through the lens of the Tennessee prison hostage crisis of 1985 as well as ongoing contemporary prisoner politicization over mass incarceration. It considers the development of the Prison Litigation Reform Act as part of carceral federalism’s effort to overturn judicial intervention in favor a return to state’s rights and control of its prison systems. It concludes with an analysis the country’s first national prison strikes of 2016 and 2018 as critical moments tied to Ruiz and the case’s political legacy.
The Indigenous Caribbean
Authors: Dubois Laurent , Turits Richard Lee
Published: January 2021

This chapter confronts the challenge of telling a long-term history of the indigenous Caribbean. It emphasizes that this history is ongoing, with indigenous peoples still very much shaping the present and future of the region. We explore the deep history of indigenous presence in the region, Columbus’ journey, the history of indigenous peoples in the Eastern Caribbean who became known as “Caribs.” We also tell story of the Garifuna, a community that emerged in St. Vincent from the encounter between Africans who had escaped enslavement and indigenous communities on the island.
Emancipation and the Rooting of Freedom
Authors: Dubois Laurent , Turits Richard Lee
Published: January 2021

The history of emancipation in the Caribbean stretches from the first struggles of maroon communities to free themselves through the ongoing struggles that have emerged after slavery. We trace this long history first by exploring the history of the maroons, then by turning to the abolition of slavery during the Haitian Revolution and in the British Caribbean in the early 19th century, through a focus on the role of rumors of abolition. We then turn to a focus on how the formerly enslaved anchored their freedom in forms of family land ownership that continues to shape life in the Caribbean.
The Making of the Cuban Revolution
Authors: Dubois Laurent , Turits Richard Lee
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores the roots and unfolding of the 1950s revolutionary movement in Cuba, in which Fidel Castro’s small guerrilla army triumphed against all odds over the powerful U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista regime. Castro’s army thrived in Cuba’s Oriente Province, where they tapped into a decades-old battle for land between planters and independent peasants and squatters. In this sense, Castro found a movement more than he founded one. The rural insurrection was complemented by an equally important urban uprising that helped destabilize and delegitimize a dictatorship beginning to crumble from within. The chapter integrates the urban, rural, and multi-class dimensions of the Cuban insurrection. In doing so, the chapter sheds light on the complexity of revolutions more generally and the way successful struggles depend on coalitions built among groups with often contradictory interests and goals. The chapter also demonstrates how political aims and alliances shift dramatically in the context of struggle, amid changing perceptions of the possible and new political opportunities, constraints, and alternatives.
Homeowner’s Business
Authors: Taylor Keeanga-Yamahtta
Published: January 2021

In the late 1960’s it was common knowledge that the nation’s urban areas, mostly inhabited by African Americans, were plagued by poverty and unrest. The Lyndon B. Johnson administration felt the urban housing issue could be solved with a marriage between the private and public sectors. For decades the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) barred African Americans from homeownership by claiming they were too financially risky to receive the same services from the real estate and banking industries as Whites. The passing of the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Act of 1968 eliminated this perceived risk by allowing low interest mortgage loans that were fully backed by the federal government. Finally, African Americans were given access to conventional real estate practices and mortgage financing. However, ingrained racisms within the government and private sector ensured African Americans were incorporated into the housing market on more expensive and unfair terms than White Americans. The author refers to this phenomenon as predatory inclusion.
Unfair Housing
Authors: Taylor Keeanga-Yamahtta
Published: January 2021

The Great Migration saw millions of African Americans move from rural areas to cities between the 1940s and 1970s. The existence of segregated housing meant that African Americans were forced into the most impoverished residences. In the 50s and 60s, the government implemented urban renewal projects in which inadequate housing was destroyed. Subsequently, private land developers were supposed to purchase heavily subsidized land and build affordable housing for those displaced by the demolitions. Instead, land developers built housing and shopping areas for middle class clientele. Ultimately, more affordable housing was destroyed than was built, further contributing to the urban housing crisis. After the push to provide more housing for African Americans living in cities, the FHA and private companies saw an opportunity to increase profits. They knew that maintaining segregation would ultimately benefit the housing industry and in turn, the economy at large. They also realized expanding housing opportunities for African Americans would do the same. Overall, the FHA and private companies enacted practices that kept entry into White suburbs difficult for African Americans, which increased the ability to financially exploit African Americans looking for better housing.
Let the Buyer Beware
Authors: Taylor Keeanga-Yamahtta
Published: January 2021

One major problem with the HUD’s response to the urban housing crisis was the quality of the homes made available to working class and poor African Americans. While affordable housing was a government goal, it relied on private businesses that operated in the interest of profit. Additionally, the business of home appraisal was based on the assumption that property value decreased with proximity to African Americans. This racist ideology greatly limited the housing options of working class and poor African Americans. Homes with major issues were deemed inhabitable and sold. Unsuspecting buyers often did not have the disposable income to keep up with home repairs and mortgages. Mortgage lenders made a habit of profiting off houses that went into foreclosure quickly. The HUD was unable to effectively address the predatory practices of the private sector because of low staffing, over-extension, and anti-black racism within the organization.
The Great War and Civil War Memory
Authors: Brown Thomas J.
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the influence of Civil War commemoration on World War I commemoration and the impact of World War I on Civil War commemoration. The war limited recognition that the Lincoln Memorial climaxed development of the National Mall with less militarism than recent Lincoln statues suggested. Some sponsors of World War I monuments rejected Civil War precedents, such as those who projected useful memorials, but an army of doughboy statues built on Civil War precedents. The proliferation of male nudes was one example. The crisis of World War I caused some memorial promoters to treat the Civil War as a foreshadowing and some memorial promoters to treat the Civil War as a refuge from modernity. The Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain illustrated both tendencies and the displacement of public monuments by cinema in the 1930s.
Living by Inches
Authors: Kutzler Evan A.
Published: January 2021

From battlefields, boxcars, and forgotten warehouses to notorious prison camps like Andersonville and Elmira, prisoners seemed to be everywhere during the American Civil War. Yet there is much we do not know about the soldiers and civilians whose very lives were in the hands of their enemies. Living by Inches is the first book to examine how imprisoned men in the Civil War perceived captivity through the basic building blocks of human experience--their five senses. From the first whiffs of a prison warehouse to the taste of cornbread and the feeling of lice, captivity assaulted prisoners' perceptions of their environments and themselves. Evan A. Kutzler demonstrates that the sensory experience of imprisonment produced an inner struggle for men who sought to preserve their bodies, their minds, and their sense of self as distinct from the fundamentally uncivilized and filthy environments surrounding them. From the mundane to the horrific, these men survived the daily experiences of captivity by adjusting to their circumstances, even if these transformations worried prisoners about what type of men they were becoming.
Bite and Be Damned!
Authors: Kutzler Evan A.
Published: January 2021

This chapter shows how lice shaped the feeling of captivity in Civil War prisons. The organizing idea—non-human historical agents are significant to human history—is common in animal histories; however, it is often missing from scholarship on the Civil War era. Yet lice mattered to Civil War prisoners. Initial feelings of lice assaulted prisoners' conceptions of themselves as civilized men. Over time, the inescapability of prison lice and other vermin pushed prisoners to soften antebellum prejudices against these insects—and people infested with them. It also led to the popularization of public self-care performances of delousing that projected hygiene in unclean environments. Reimagining the louse as a participant, a trickster of sorts, reveals a new historical force and exemplifies the importance of looking beyond the human/nonhuman divide. Lice first made prisoners cringe, then laugh, and this should make historians think about what was lost and gained in the process.
Listening through the Cacophony
Authors: Kutzler Evan A.
Published: January 2021

This chapter listens to captivity through the ears of Civil War prisoners. A full accounting of the cacophony of Civil War prisons includes the animate and inanimate sounds of domination, resistance, and survival. Examining how prisoners listened—a selective process of winnowing this cacophony—reveals how prisoners organized chaotic acoustic environments. Through the sounds and silences of church bells, rumours, nature, destruction, celebration, suffering, and perseverance, prisoners attempted to understand their present, reconcile it with their past, and predict the future. Listening also empowered prisoners because human vulnerability to noise—having no earlids—went both ways. In addition to creating their own interpretations through listening, prisoners made tactical use of sound and silence to resist captivity.
Introduction
Authors: Felber Garrett
Published: January 2021

Describes how Those Who Know Don’t Say uses the NOI as a vehicle to explore forgotten sites and forms of Black struggle that confronted the carceral state during the mid-twentieth century. Reconsidering the place and scope of the NOI within the history of the Black Freedom Struggle in this way expands the boundaries of Black liberation struggles by revealing a more dynamic freedom movement in which objectives and strategies were always contested and debated within communities themselves, changing who we see as political theorists and agents of change, and expanding our spatial lens to include prison yards and courtrooms as sites of activism.
Shades of Mississippi
Authors: Felber Garrett
Published: January 2021

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Nation of Islam deployed a series of tactics to fight for rights for incarcerated people. They used litigation, as well as They used direct action tactics such as sit-ins, hunger strikes, and occupations of solitary confinement, which anticipated the “Jail, No Bail” efforts of southern civil rights activists. These actions sought not only to neutralize the power of the cell but also to draw public attention to these groups struggles by eliciting violent reprisals from the state. These two simultaneous streams of activism—appeals to the Constitution and direct-action protest—operated as effective parallel strategies to win protections for prisoners under the law while challenging white supremacy and incarceration more broadly. The state responded with tactics such as prison transfers, confiscation of religious literature, solitary confinement, and loss of good time credit.
Whose Law and What Order?
Authors: Felber Garrett
Published: January 2021

Throughout the 1950s, the Nation of Islam encountered increasing surveillance and harassment from local and state police on the streets as well as inside prisons. As Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam became a force within the Harlem community, they seemed poised to submerge their political and religious differences in the interest of forming a local Black united front. An alliance of Black Nationalists, liberals, and labor activists was forging an ambitious and sweeping political coalition in Harlem around a platform of Black unity. Though the resulting Emergency Committee would not last long, it raises lasting questions about postwar Black social movements and the development of the carceral apparatuses that suppressed them.
We’re Brutalized Because We’re Black
Authors: Felber Garrett
Published: January 2021

Although civil rights historiography has largely focused on the role of the courts in changing federal jurisprudence, the Nation of Islam used the courtroom as a political arena to build Black unity on the issue of police violence and across religious and political divides within Black and Latinx communities. Unlike the efforts of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund or the cases brought forth by Muslim prisoners, these trials did not seek policy changes or promote civil rights legislation. The Nation of Islam sought to shift the discourse of the trial through political theater and community organizing around a united platform against police brutality. This narrative of the Ronald Stokes trial, in which the LAPD indicted 14 members of the Nation of Islam on 40 counts of assault and resisting arrest, explores the relationship between the trial and both local anti-carceral activism and the national civil rights struggle.
Introduction
Authors: Jacquet Catherine O.
Published: January 2021

This chapter introduces the frameworks and visions of the two major social movements that took up antirape organizing in the mid-to-late twentieth century United States – the black freedom movement and the women’s liberation movement. The dominant discourses on rape emanating from these movements privileged either narrowly defined racial or gender oppression. Many activists challenged these frameworks and pushed for an intersectional approach to the larger antirape agenda. The chapter gives a brief history of antirape activism in the decades prior to situate the work of mid-twentieth-century activists into a larger historical context. A brief chapter outline for the book is also included.
Rape as Racial Injustice
Authors: Jacquet Catherine O.
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines activists in the black freedom movement who politicized the connection between rape and racism in their fight for justice. These activists argued that rape law and the entire legal system served to uphold white supremacy. Black men almost exclusively faced the death penalty for interracial rape, and black women victims saw little to no justice in the aftermath of white male sexual violence against them. In response, activists launched local campaigns nationwide in defense of black women victims, demanding justice. Likewise, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund pursued the abolition of the death penalty in their defense of convicted black rapists. In calling attention to the injustices faced by black men, some lawyers and activists also engaged the trope of the lying white woman. This was one of the strategies employed in Maryland’s infamous Giles v. Johnson case. In defending both black victims and accused black assailants, lawyers and activists exposed the racial injustices embedded in rape laws and their application. However, activists’ formulation of rape as racist oppression failed to engage a politics of rape that included black female victims of intraracial rape. This ultimately limited the scope of the movement.