bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Could the Virtual Dinosaur See You? Understanding Children’s Perceptions of Presence and Reality Distinction in Virtual Reality Environments
Authors: Liao Tony , Jennings Nancy A , Dell Laura , Collins Chris
Published: September 2019

Despite the growing interest and use of virtual reality (VR) in American homes, there is a notable gap in empirical studies that examine VR and children. This study identifies two important research concepts in children's research that have been studied across many types of media 1) reality distinction and 2) presence, and applies them to studying VR experiences. Taking a qualitative approach, 6 to 8-year-old children (N=29) participated in a VR experience as an extension of the children’s television show called Dino Dana. During the child’s VR experience where they swam in a pool with dinosaurs, we recorded a computer capture of what the child sees within the VR experience; and a video recording of the child in the VR headset and their behaviors during the VR experience. In addition, children responded to questions before and after their VR experience. We observed several behaviors of how children attempted to test and assess the reality of VR (e.g. holding their breath). Through interviews, we also found that children had certain presence experiences within VR that challenged their understanding of reality, where the dinosaurs were treated as real and evoked social presence. This study builds on our understanding of how VR might impact on young children and their perception of VR experiences, which have important implications for VR researchers, designers, and consumers.
Sculpting Cosmolectics
Authors: Chacón Gloria Elizabeth
Published: September 2019

The introduction situates indigenous writers within Latin American literary historiography. It enumerates key historical indigenous political changes that led to the rise of indigenous writers. This chapter proposes cosmolectics to name the relationship between cosmos and indigenous communities. It offers kab’awil as an exemplary cosmolectics to analyze contemporary indigenous literatures.
New Cures
Authors: Cromwell Jesse
Published: September 2019

Chapter 3 examines the creation and administration of the Caracas Company as an organization designed to increase trade to Venezuela but also to police its coastline. Although realizations of Spanish commercial vulnerabilities predated the Bourbon period, bureaucrats in the new dynasty singled out contraband trade as an especially troubling defect. Venezuelan commercial rejuvenation represented one of the earliest Bourbon reform projects. Crown ministers conceived of the Caracas Company as a solution to the province’s commercial dysfunction. Madrid allowed the Caracas Company to maintain its commercial privileges in Venezuela despite prickly relations with the colony’s subjects because it was a profitable enterprise. This reality delayed the implementation of comercio libre reforms in Venezuela until 1789, long after every Spanish American colony aside from New Spain had been permitted trade liberalization. Essentially, an early Bourbon reform had overpowered the designs of later ones. Continued Company control assured that the province would remain a conflict zone. As this chapter emphasizes, imperial reformers were not ignorant or inflexible where smuggling was concerned. Rather, their plans miscalculated how deeply it was stitched into the fabric of Venezuelan life.
Does Your Mama Know?
Authors: Johnson E. Patrick
Published: September 2019

This chapter explores Black, queer, Southern women’s relationships with their mothers, their desires to have children and mother, and, in some cases, having maternal responsibilities imposed on them (due to poverty, abandonment, or the death of a parent). The women’s relationships with their mothers are varied; some recount the love and acceptance they were given when they told their mothers about their same-sex attraction, while others recall rejection. Similarly, these narrators have varied reasons for having children, including abiding by the conventions of heterosexuality and marrying men and wanting to raise open-minded people.
A Taste of Honey
Authors: Johnson E. Patrick
Published: September 2019

In this chapter, Johnson’s interlocutors share stories about sexual awakenings, sexual encounters, sexual desire, and sexual violence. Since their narratives move between and beyond pleasure and pain, the chapter is divided into three sections—the first focuses on sexual awakenings and the narrators’ various emotional attachments to sex with other women; the second centers women’s sexual behaviors and practices; and the third focuses squarely on these women’s painful experiences of sexual violence, often in adolescence and at the hands of male relatives. Importantly, these narrators stress that their sexual desires have not developed in response to these violent experiences, illustrating that their articulation of same-sex attraction is conscious and affirmative.
The Work My Soul Was Called to Do
Authors: Johnson E. Patrick
Published: September 2019

This chapter considers the role that art and political organizing play in the lives of Black, queer, Southern women. Defining art broadly—as baking, playing instruments, or writing creatively—Johnson makes visible their contributions to Black, Southern culture. The narrators discuss their impetuses for creating art, how being queer in the South impacts their creations, and how their works have developed over time. The chapter is divided into two sections: in the first, the narrators theorize about how their art and sexuality are related, and in the second, they talk frankly about the various ways that they stay politically involved.
Salsa Soul Sister
Authors: Johnson E. Patrick
Published: September 2019

In this chapter, Johnson converses with the book’s eldest narrator, Aida Rentas. She discusses her upbringing in Spanish Harlem, her time living in Atlanta, and her work with Black and Latina lesbian organizations in the city. She also recalls romantic and sexual experiences with women in her adolescence.
Epilogue
Authors: Johnson E. Patrick
Published: September 2019

The final chapter is anchored by a poem from Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, titled “Touch.” Johnson argues that the poem exemplifies a central tension of these narratives by Black, queer, Southern women: the homophobia of the South and these women’s commitment to making the region more hospitable for Black, queer life. He discusses the work of Black feminist scholars Evelynn Hammonds, Darlene Clark Hine, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in publishing scholarship that rethinks strategies of survival, and stresses that Black. Queer. Southern. Women. follows in this intellectual vein. Finally, Johnson also offers a brief reflection on his subject position as a cisgender, Black, gay, middle-class academic from the South and the ways that this positionality shaped the work.
Dalton and Resaca
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: September 2019

Confederate earthworks were located on high, dominating ridges during the first confrontation of the Atlanta campaign at Dalton. These positions were nearly impervious to direct attack even though they contained only light fieldworks. But the Federals could outflank them by using gaps located in those ridges well beyond the Confederate flanks. From the beginning of the campaign Sherman was able to use maneuver with judicious use of holding works to pry Johnston from strong positions with minimal loss. At Resaca, the next battle of the campaign, the Confederates had far less advantageous ground to defend and they failed to construct proper fortifications to compensate for that disadvantage. As a result they suffered heavy losses and were compelled to evacuate the position after only two days of fighting.
Flanking the Kennesaw Line
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: September 2019

For nearly a week after the failed assault of June 27 the Federals continued to search for a way to break the Kennesaw Mountain Line. Fourteenth Corps troops lodged on Cheatham’s Hill sniped at the Confederate position only a few yards away and began digging a mine to blow up the angle in the opposing line. More promising was Sherman’s continued effort to flank the Confederate left wing. Meanwhile life in the trenches became stressful for soldiers in both armies. By July 2, Sherman was ready to break away temporarily from his railroad supply line and conduct a massive flanking march toward the Chattahoochee River. When Johnston got wind of this move, he evacuated the Kennesaw Mountain Line that night.
Crossing the Chattahoochee
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: September 2019

Demonstrating increasing tenacity as he neared Atlanta, Johnston fell back from Kennesaw Mountain only a few miles to a prepared position at Smyrna Station. He held here a short while before falling back to his last position north of the last river protecting the city, constructing the Chattahoochee River Line. It possessed somewhat innovative features designed by artillery chief Francis Shoup and thus could be termed the Shoup Line. It was one of the few Confederate defences of the campaign constructed largely by slaves and impressed free blacks. Despite its strength, Johnston evacuated the Chattahoochee River Line on July 9 when Sherman crossed troops over the river miles upstream. Then Johnston concentrated on improving the Atlanta City Line, designed and constructed by Capt. Lemuel P. Grant for the past several months, as Sherman rested his troops for a full scale crossing of the Chattahoochee River.
Peach Tree Creek, July 22, and Ezra Church
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: September 2019

When Hood replaced Johnston on July 18, the Army of Tennessee launched three tactical offensives in an attempt to prevent Sherman from snipping the rail lines feeding Atlanta. Temporary field fortifications played an important role in all three engagements. At Peach Tree Creek, on July 20, the Confederates took the Army of the Cumberland by surprise as it was crossing the stream but hasty breastworks shielded most Federal units as they repelled the attack. At the battle of Atlanta, on July 22, the Confederates very nearly crushed Sherman’s left flank but 17th Corps troops were able to hold on because they fought from both sides of their earthworks as needed to repel attacks from different directions. At Ezra Church on July 28, 15th Corps troops barely held on to their position on top of a low ridge with minimal breastworks to help them. In all three cases, hasty fieldworks added an important element in defensive capability that made a difference in the outcome of the battles.
Jonesboro
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: September 2019

On August 26, Sherman launched his final offensive in the Atlanta campaign by leading 6 corps in a wide flanking march to the west and south of the city, breaking contact with his railroad. He left one corps behind to protect the railhead north of the Chattahoochee River. By the time Sherman’s column reached the first railroad many miles southwest of Atlanta and began to tear it up, Hood knew where he was and shifted troops to the last railroad that lay due south of the city near Jonesboro. Here was fought the last battle of the campaign on August 31 and September 1. The Confederates attacked the first day and were repulsed. The Federals attacked the second day and drove the Confederates away. Light fieldworks helped the Federals the first day but they overcame Confederate fieldworks the second day. Hood evacuated Atlanta on the night of September 1-2 and Federal troops occupied it on September 2.
Neuroscience, Race, and Intelligence after The Bell Curve
Authors: Staub Michael E.
Published: September 2019

After the appearance of The Bell Curve and its (however qualified) reintroduction of the science of biological inheritance – including statistical evidence of a persistent gap in IQ and achievement between African Americans and whites, and an overt critique of federal investments in compensatory programs – efforts to neutralize the book’s impact focused on findings from neuroscience. From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development (2000) was an important and pathbreaking document that clarified how nature and nurture were in fact inseparable and that marshaled neuroscientific evidence that the brain of a young child was plastic and amenable to the influences of environment; it argued that the stresses of poverty itself could harm a young brain. From Neurons to Neighborhoods sought strategically to foreground the view that the neurosciences were now critical to any policy discussions of early childhood. The damages done by poverty were certainly real, and these sociological problems could be documented at the somatic level. Meanwhile, right-wing theorists argued for redirecting public funding to “gifted” education.
Introduction
Authors: Taylor Amy Murrell
Published: September 2019

The introduction offers an overview of the book by setting up its main questions and themes. It begins with a discussion of the geography of the refugee camps and describes how a new federal bureaucracy came into being in order to manage them. It describes the language used—then and now—to refer to the people seeking refuge from slavery and the spaces in which they lived. And it argues that“refugee” is a term that is rooted in the language of the 1860s and is more respectful of the personhood of these individuals than the term “contraband.” The introduction also urges readers to view this wartime period of emancipation as a distinct one, defined by its position inside military conflict and by the central challenge of seeking freedom inside the bureaucracy, culture, and spaces of the Union army. The introduction also describes the book’s methods, ranging from its examination of the material culture and environmental history of the refugee camps, to its microhistory approach that focuses on the stories of particular individuals. These approaches, the introduction explains, are necessary for understanding the most fundamental aspect of seeking freedom during the Civil War: survival.
Facing Combat
Authors: Taylor Amy Murrell
Published: September 2019

This chapter follows Eliza Bogan’s journey, and those of many thousands more, as they moved through the Mississippi River valley during the tumultuous years of 1863 and 1864. It begins with Bogan’s flight to the refugee camp in Helena, Arkansas, where her third husband, Silas Small, had gone to enlist in a regiment of the United States Colored Troops. But the upheaval of combat violence, especially during the 1863 Vicksburg Campaign, pushed Bogan and thousands of other refugees out of Helena and into other parts of the Mississippi River valley. The chapter then describes Bogan’s decision to join her husband’s regiment as a laundress and argues that positions like these opened up room for women in the Union army’s combat apparatus. This, along with the Union’s decision to resettle women and children on leased plantations in the region, as workers but also as occupiers of those plantations, reveals how deeply embedded all formerly enslaved people were in formal combat -- and in the Union army’s determined effort to defeat their former owners.
Introduction
Authors: Tone-Pah-Hote Jenny
Published: September 2019

This is an interdisciplinary study of how Kiowa men and women made, wore, displayed and discussed expressive culture. Kiowa men and women used the arts to represent new ways of understanding and representing Kiowa identity that resonated with their changed circumstances during the Progressive Era and twentieth century. Kiowas represented themselves individually and collectively through cultural production that emphasized the significance of change and cultural negotiation, gender, the ties and tensions over tribally specific and intertribal identities.
Creating the Foodways of Uplift
Authors: Wallach Jennifer Jensen
Published: September 2019

This chapter argues that self-consciously respectable middle-class eaters aspired to dining practices that emphasized modernity, elegance, and food selections that did not bear the historical taint of slave rations. It situates the maneuverings of members of this group within the wider context of other Progressive Era attempts at food reform, which were often coordinated by self-proclaimed “domestic scientists” intent on practicing culinary social engineering. Uplift-oriented black eaters drew inspiration from their white counterparts but inevitably had an ambivalent relationship with white activists who were steeped in racism, conscious and otherwise, and who promoted, among other things, a rigorous training program for domestic servants, an occupational role that few post-emancipation African Americans were willing to celebrate.
Conclusion
Authors: Wallach Jennifer Jensen
Published: September 2019

An April 22, 1971 soul food dinner hosted by the Bay Area Urban League is emblematic of the emergence of soul food as the preeminent symbol of black culinary identity after the 1960s. However, over the previous century, ideas about proper black food habits varied. Generations of reformers used food habits as a way to explore their relationship to the US nation state as well as to a stateless, black cultural nation. Their culinary debates reveal diversity, complexity, and disagreement over what to eat but agreement that food decisions are also political ones.
Conclusion
Authors: Geist Edward M.
Published: September 2019

This conclusion describes some general findings about the historical evolution of civil defense in the two superpowers over the course of the Cold War. Neither U.S. nor Soviet officials regarded their civil defense efforts as successful, but the shortcomings of the programs appear to have resulted from domestic political obstacles rather than technical, strategic, and budgetary considerations. In the United States, Congressional opponents blocked large-scale funding for civil defense before its unpopularity with the general public became a crippling obstacle. In the Soviet Union, ideological strictures simultaneously impelled the development of civil defense yet undermined its plausibility. This chapter also makes some observations about post-Cold War developments in U.S. and Russian civil defense and their possible policy implications.
The Way We Were
Authors: Pinho Patricia de Santana
Published: September 2019

This chapter examines the dominant African American roots tourist gaze on Brazil. Contrasting the discourse of the tourists, as expressed in ethnographic interviews, with the representations found in various textual and audiovisual sources, such as documentary films, books, newspaper articles, and tourism promotional materials, the chapter examines the three major intersecting tropes that inform and sustain this gaze: the trope of Bahia as a “closer Africa” and a place where African Americans can find their past; the trope of the “happy native,” or the perception that, because Afro-Brazilians supposedly inhabit the African American past, they are imagined to be essentially more culturally fulfilled than African Americans; and the trope of “black evolution,” which defines the “Africanness” of Afro-Brazilians as an earlier stage in the unidirectional path toward a modern form of blackness, one supposedly already reached by African Americans. In this view, Afro-Brazilians enjoy abundant African tradition, but have yet to achieve black modernity, and should therefore look up to African Americans for guidance.
Golden Age
Authors: Lovejoy Henry B.
Published: September 2019

This chapter traces Prieto’s odyssey across the Atlantic from Ouidah to Barbados to Jamaica to Cuba. After the destruction of Badagry, Prieto likely ended up in Ouidah where he was sold to British merchants from Liverpool. Even though Prieto was not documented on board a specific ship, it has been possible to identify the ship named Golden Age as a likely vessel to transport Prieto to the Americas. This chapter examines slave trading at the African coast, the Middle Passage, which involved the inter-Caribbean slave trade because Spain did not trade directly with the Bight of Benin and Cuba when Prieto arrived to the Spanish colony in c. 1784.
Batallón de Morenos
Authors: Lovejoy Henry B.
Published: September 2019

Prieto’s military career lasted over two decades from the 1790s into the 1810s. During this time, he was involved in the Aponte Rebellion in Cuba in 1812. After, he was sent to Pensacola Florida, where he witnessed from his garrison the War of 1812 and the Creek War of 1812-1814.
Ṣàngó Tẹ̀ Dún
Authors: Lovejoy Henry B.
Published: September 2019

Once Prieto retired from the military, he and his wife, Maria Francisca Camejo, became the leaders of one Cuba’s most famous cabildos de nación dedicated to Santa Bárbara, aka Ṣàngó. Their leadership lasted between c. 1818 and 1835. In this mutual aid society, Camejo and Prieto organized extensive festivals, and participated in many different types of religions from Africa and Cuba, which are arguably at the root of modern-day Santería.
Conclusion
Authors: Lovejoy Henry B.
Published: September 2019

After summarizing Prieto’s life, the conclusion examines how Prieto holds a prominent place in the oral and documented histories of Santería in Cuba. Although he is not generally remembered by name, Prieto is represented via the institutional legacy of the famous cabildo Ṣàngó Tẹ̀ Dún, especially surrounding the oral traditions associated with bata drums and other cabildos dedicated to Santa Barbara.
They Can Kill Me, but They Can’t Eat Me
Authors: Lowery Malinda Maynor
Published: September 2019

In the 1980s, some Indians in Robeson County began to fill the economic gap by participating in the black-market economy with illegal drugs. Death and injustice followed: Indians were arrested for violent and drug crimes at disproportionate levels compared to whites and blacks, in part because Lumbee kinship networks extended to information networks that facilitated the process of investigating and convicting criminals. Police corruption was rampant, and members of the police department, including Sheriff Hubert Stone, were suspected of involvement with the drug trade. Several murder and suspicious death investigations were mishandled or quickly open-and-shut, such as the fatal shooting of Jimmy Earl Cummings by Deputy Kevin Stone, Hubert’s son; the murder of activist-turned-district-judge-candidate Julian Pierce; and the murder of James Jordan, Michael Jordan’s father, whose death brought national attention to Robeson County. The fight against corruption in Robeson County made a sense of unity possible. Whites, blacks, and Indians began to organize and work together more consistently on issues of concern to everyone. More Indians and blacks ran for elected office and won. The national spotlight provided by the drug war also propelled the Lumbees to reignite their campaign for federal recognition and self-determination.
Field Trip—Kentucky
Authors: Matthews Scott L.
Published: September 2019

This chapter explores the field recordings, films, and photographs John Cohen made in eastern Kentucky during the 1950s and 1960s, particularly of the musician Roscoe Holcomb. It discusses Cohen’s connection to the era’s folk music revival and how his documentary work in the region represented both a break with his predecessors and a continuation of the tradition’s dominant themes. Cohen was motivated by personal desire and aesthetic interests rather than reformism or politics. Under the influence of the modern folk revival, Beat culture, Abstract Expressionism, and existentialism, Cohen created a new documentary ethos and methodology. Yet, he also presented Holcomb and southern Appalachia in a familiar manner. In his photographs, on records such as Mountain Music of Kentucky, and in his film, The High Lonesome Sound, they represented pure tradition, symbols of folk authenticity in an increasingly standardized and commercialized America. This chapter also addresses how Holcomb, and some members of his family, challenged Cohen’s vision of their culture and home, and how Holcomb himself, despite his friendship with Cohen, occasionally resisted Cohen’s attempts to represent his private life for a public audience.
The Rise of Big Bill
Authors: Greene Kevin D.
Published: September 2019

Big Bill would survive the seeming collapse and subsequent reorganization of the recording industry virtually intact as an artist. Quickly, he became one of the country’s leading and most prolific blues artists and would aid in the development of pre-WWII Chicago blues. By establishing relationships with agents and promoters like Lester Melrose, Broonzy would transform from William Lee Connely Broonzy into “Big Bill,” one of the most celebrated African American musicians among black audiences from the pre-war years. By 1942, however, with help from the American Federation of Musician’s two-year recording ban, Broonzy’s impact as a black pop star began to wane. A second wave of black migrants to Chicago would carry new sounds and ideas as they made their homes and built communities in black Chicago. After the war, “Big Bill’s” celebrity had lost its lustre, forcing him to look for new spaces and faces to reinvent his career and identity.
Epilogue
Authors: Greene Kevin D.
Published: September 2019

Born in 1956 just two years before Big Bill’s death, Michael van Isveldt, Big Bill’s only known son and heir, lives with his family in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Overtime, Michael has become steward of Broonzy’s legacy and memory. For decades, Michael resented his father for never teaching him about the nuances of racism as it related to global blackness, even in a place as seemingly progressive as Holland. In possession of an incredible archive of his mother’s personal effects, Michael has had to work with researchers and journalists interested in his father in a manner that has helped him overcome his frustration and disdain for a man he never knew.
You Must Remember This
Authors: Silber Nina
Published: September 2019

In the lead up to World War II, and in the course of the war itself, memories of the Civil War were deployed once again. This time, the war, the fight against slavery, and Lincoln in particular, assumed noteworthy prominence, reminding Americans of the importance of fighting a just and moral war. However, this created a challenging rhetorical environment for cementing a united homefront – including both white southerners and African Americans. White southerners, like Douglas Freeman, tried to keep Confederates prominent in the Civil War narrative, while black Americans used the new emphasis on Lincoln to talk about racial oppression at home and abroad. An anti-communist backlash, in the end, helped silence voices that focused on problems of racial oppression.
Biomedicalization and Globalization
Authors: Armstrong-Hough Mari
Published: September 2019

This chapter presents a discussion of the book’s theoretical framework and central argument, arguing that the everyday practice of biomedicine and the social process of biomedicalization rest on the foundations of relatively widely shared narratives within communities. As these narratives and narrative fragments are accessed selectively and deployed with creativity and contradiction, the transformations social scientists call biomedicalization are necessarily inflected and informed by their sociocultural context through what is available from the cultural repertoire or “tool kit” and how those cultural materials are deployed. As a result, biomedicalization does not eradicate diversity in “things medical,” but rather produces it. The following chapters explore this argument empirically, organized in descending order of imagined social space: world, nation, exam room, and home. Each is a site at which the meaning of the diabetes epidemic is imagined, negotiated, contested, and reimagined.
Cavemen Didn’t Get Diabetes
Authors: Armstrong-Hough Mari
Published: September 2019

Chapter 2 synthesizes scholarly work on diabetes narratives, a discussion of popular literature on diabetes, and interview data. It argues that the dominant American narratives on the origins of the diabetes epidemic emphasize the universality of risk and rely on the perception that illness arises when one treats the body in ways that are unnatural. The price of modernity, according to this origin story, is stress and the constant temptations of a sedentary lifestyle and unwholesome foods—indulgences that, because they are unnatural, cause harm to the body. Because everyone is imagined to be exposed to risks of modernity, mitigating risk is a matter of personal discipline; those that fall victim to so-called lifestyle diseases are implicitly or explicitly cast as morally culpable for their disease.
Our Genes Don’t Match Your Culture
Authors: Armstrong-Hough Mari
Published: September 2019

Chapter 3 relies on data from in-depth interviews with clinicians and members of the general public, participant observation, and a review of Japanese popular intellectual literature to examine narratives about the origins of diabetes in Japan. It argues that the most pervasive Japanese narratives emphasize the particularity of diabetes risk to Japanese bodies. This narrative implies that illness arises from a disconnect between Japanese bodies and non-Japanese food culture. The road to health is a return to an imagined traditional Japanese lifestyle that has been lost to globalization and westernization. Rather than stressing individual responsibility and temptation, dominant Japanese narratives stress a shared struggle against outside forces.
Our Diabetes
Authors: Armstrong-Hough Mari
Published: September 2019

This chapter examines Japanese providers’ strategies for managing patients with diabetes using interview data and participant observation from full-time clinical shadowing of outpatient and inpatient exams at three major health centers, diabetes education classes, medical staff meetings, all-hospital assemblies, and dialysis center activities. While American health care providers spoke privately about diabetes and patients with diabetes in pessimistic terms, Japanese providers maintained high expectations and hopes for type 2 diabetes outcomes, even in private when they were not cheerleading patients. Providers in Japan imagined the origins and inevitable progression of diabetes differently from their peers in the United States, rendering them more optimistic about patients’ futures and more likely to favor lifestyle change.
The Eyes of the World Are upon Us
Authors: Murphy Mary-Elizabeth B.
Published: September 2019

This chapter analyses how black women living in Washington, D.C. in the 1920s and early 1930s worked hard to pass a federal anti-lynching law. Over a period of fifteen years, women employed a range of protest tactics, including petitions, pickets, prayer meetings, congressional testimony, and a Silent Parade. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill in 1922, but it died in the Senate. Four years later, two women testified in the Senate about the urgency of passing anti-lynching legislation, which reflected the growing visibility of black women in politics. But when activists protested the erasure of lynching at the National Crime Conference in 1934, they recognized that police brutality in the nation’s capital needed to be a political priority. Many of the veterans of anti-lynching activism turned toward eradicating interracial police violence in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s.
Make Washington Safe for Negro Womanhood The Politics of Police Brutality
Authors: Murphy Mary-Elizabeth B.
Published: September 2019

This chapter chronicles patterns of racialized and gendered interracial police brutality in Washington, D.C. and the efforts of black women and men to end this violence. Between 1928 and 1938 white police officers in the city shot and killed forty black men in the city. While white officers did not shoot and kill black women and girls, but subjected at least twenty nine to a range of violent behaviors, including street harassment, racial epithets, physical assaults, and intrusions into their homes. In addition to these abusive encounters, white officers employed a double standard by refusing to conduct investigates when black women were abused, raped, or murdered; this was a form of negligence. Black women who were the victims of police violence resisted interracial policy brutality by fighting back, alerting the press, and pleading innocence in police court. Black women activists joined with men to stem the crisis of interracial police violence through protest parades, mock trials, mass meetings, and congressional lobbying.
Women Riot for Jobs
Authors: Murphy Mary-Elizabeth B.
Published: September 2019

During the 1930s, many black women who had been engaged in national campaigns turned toward the economic crisis that was unfolding in the nation’s capital. The crisis of the Great Depression inspired activists to amplify their demands for economic justice, to argue that black women deserved the opportunity to work in a job of their choice, earn a living wage, provide for their families, and enjoy full participation in government programs that regulated hours and wages and provided a safety net in old age. Black women critiqued New Deal programs for marginalizing domestic workers, whether through their exclusion from the National Recovery Administration’s industrial codes, limited access to government relief programs, or their ineligibility to receive benefits from the Social Security Act. In 1938, 10,000 black women rioted for charwomen jobs in the federal government, which illustrated their desire for economic justice in the nation’s capital.
Jim Crow Must Go
Authors: Murphy Mary-Elizabeth B.
Published: September 2019

Chapter Six illustrates how, during World War II, black women in Washington, D.C. worked to steer the city on a path toward racial integration. Women’s activism became more militant in the 1940s as they built on the rich tradition of resistance from the previous decade in economic justice, civil rights, and campaigns for safety. During World War II, black women protested interstate transportation segregation, staged sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the city, and returned to their position as lobbyists in the federal government. As men departed to fight in World War II, black women crafted gendered arguments, contending that it was their duty to fight for racial equality in the city. At the conclusion of World War II, black women had laid the foundation for the post-war black freedom struggle across the nation.
Introduction
Authors: Quiros Ansley L.
Published: September 2019

This chapter lays out a historiography of the role of religion in the civil rights struggle and introduces the concept of lived theology. It describes the book’s setting in Americus, Georgia and the special role that town played in the conflict over racial justice in the American South. The Introduction argues that to truly understand the theological conflict inherent in the racial struggle, scholars must engage ideas, arguments and tactics as they existed in community.
Jesus, He’s My Brother
Authors: Quiros Ansley L.
Published: September 2019

This chapter analyses the theological tenets present in the historical black church tradition undergirding freedom movements. It discusses the role of the church, black religious intellectuals of the 1920s-1930s and certain theologies—the creative authority of God, the idolatry of segregation, the exodus, the person of Jesus, and redemptive love. The chapter reveals how these animated early civil rights actions and activities in Americus.
The Year of the Cop
Authors: Felker-Kantor Max
Published: September 2019

The LAPD’s postwar model of policing routinely served as a standard for departments across the country. Backed by federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration funds and support from newly elected law-and-order governor Ronald Reagan, the LAPD led the way in bolstering its paramilitary function through riot control plans, the use of helicopters, and the invention of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams, which was quickly adopted by other departments. At the same time, the department sought to legitimize the iron fist with the velvet glove of community relations and improved officer training. As this chapter shows, the LAPD engaged in a process of militarization and enhanced its martial capacity while expanding its reach through community relations programs.
High Noon in the Ghetto
Authors: Felker-Kantor Max
Published: September 2019

Get-tough policing was not the only possible response to the urban uprisings of the 1960s as this chapter shows. African American and Mexican American residents challenged punitive crime policy, demanded police accountability, and promoted anti–police abuse activism. Residents and activists, such as the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, imagined the meaning of safety that rested on community control of the police. Yet the LAPD responded to these movements by framing them as a threat to order to justify increased officer discretion to harass, arrest, and repress. This cut short the possibility for alternative models of policing and ensured that grievances with the police persisted.
Policing an Internal Border
Authors: Felker-Kantor Max
Published: September 2019

Within the context of global trade and migration to cities in the 1980s, the department remobilized to expand its discretionary authority to combat the growing number of undocumented migrants. Hoping to maintain the trust of new immigrant populations, officials limited police authority to make arrests based on immigration status. Yet, the LAPD constructed an “alien criminal” category to justify cooperation with the Immigration and Naturalization Service and to arrest undocumented immigrants and refugees fleeing South and central America. In the process, the LAPD employed racialized constructions of illegality that criminalized the city’s Latino/a population in the name of protecting the image of Los Angeles as a world city.
Prologue
Authors: Wall Cheryl A.
Published: September 2019

Despite the centrality of the essay to the African American literary tradition, this genre still enjoys little critical currency. Theprologue provokes and engages the question: What is the essay? Through analyzing authors as diverse as W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, the book illustrates how black author sutilized the genre of the essay to make critical interventions in political and aesthetic debates. Freedom, it argues, is the subject which engages the black essayist across three centuries. The “will to adorn,” a phrase coined by Zora Neale Hurston, conveys the essayists’ attitude toward language—the desire to make language an expression of beauty. Building on three concepts: democratic eloquence, troubled eloquence, and vernacular process, the author signals a way, a method, for reading the African American essay. These terms do not follow a linear progression but are constantly in movement, and it is through their use that African American authors continued to offer new variations on the genre of the essay. The prologue argues for the centrality of the essay to the African American literary tradition. It moves the genre of the essay from the margin to the center.
On Freedom and the Will to Adorn
Authors: Wall Cheryl A.
Published: September 2019

This chapter discusses how black essayists worked through and around ideas of freedom to produce new variations of the genre of the essay. The author shows how the African American essay serves as the medium through which authors make crucial political, social, and artistic interventions. At the same time the author is attentive to formal changes in the essay. Through a series of representative examples from authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Zora Neale Hurston, this chapter charts the way the essay at its best expresses both a determination to be free and the “will to adorn.” Although the emphasis changes, black essayists use three rhetorical strategies to make these crucial interventions: democratic eloquence, troubled eloquence and vernacular process. Frederick Douglass utilizes democratic eloquence to make crucial interventions in anti-slavery discourse. W.E.B. Du Bois’ troubled eloquence marks a historical shift in which freedom becomes aligned as much with individual identity as with a people’s collective freedom. Zora Neale Hurston uses a “vernacular process” to fuse high and low styles in her meditation on freedom and racial identity. It is through the use of these strategies that African American authors make a mark on the genre itself.
On Art and Such
Authors: Wall Cheryl A.
Published: September 2019

This chapter charts the debates on art and aesthetics that preoccupied writers during the Harlem Renaissance. It is argued that because African Americans had made slight political and economic progress they turned to the arts as the primary site for social justice. The questions generated by the ensuing aesthetic debates about the purpose of racial art, its form, its audience, and the efficacy of cultural difference, reverberated throughout the twentieth century. This chapter also analyzes the formal innovations made by African American essayists. It is shown through the examples of Alain Locke’s intellectual detachment, Langston Hughes’ fiery polemic, George Schuyler’s acerbic satire, and Zora Neale Hurston’s “jagged harmonies” that the essayists of the Harlem Renaissance both formulated and enacted the aesthetic they proposed in their writings.
On Women, Rights, and Writing
Authors: Wall Cheryl A.
Published: September 2019

This chapter charts the relationship between two prolific African American essayists, June Jordan and Alice Walker. Unlike Ellison and Baldwin, who were contemporaries but not allies, Jordan and Walker corresponded with one another, lectured together, and commented on each other’s works. It is argued that Walker and Jordan’s essays record their lifelong quest for redemptive art and politics. This project is marked by a desire for a freer, more hopeful future that comes to terms with a painful, oppressive past. As both essayists came to political consciousness during the civil rights movement, they utilized the rhetoric of rights to redefine ideas of national belonging. In doing so, they expanded the scope of the essay to includeissues of gender and sexuality. Through analyzing their essays, this chapter illustrates how Jordan and Walker in distinct, yet complementary ways, shape the art of the essay.
Boundaries and Paths
Authors: Calcaterra Angela
Published: September 2019

Chapter 1 traces intersections between Indigenous maps in the early eighteenth-century colonial southeast and William Byrd II’s History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (written in the years following the 1728 boundary-line survey). It shows that the creation of an Anglo-American colonial border and a text considered highly literary cannot be separated from the real and figurative lines Catawba, Cherokee, Weyanoke, and other Native people drew to distinguish polities in the region. Native peoples’ maps, narratives, and political assertions of space and relations shaped the Virginia-North Carolina boundary dispute and survey at every turn, contributing to the meandering form of Byrd’s History, a text he never completed to his satisfaction. Native creative practices were central to colonial American literatures of space and place.
Hurtin' Words
Authors: Ownby Ted
Published: September 2019

When Tammy Wynette sang "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," she famously said she "spelled out the hurtin' words" to spare her child the pain of family breakup. In this innovative work, Ted Ownby considers how a wide range of writers, thinkers, activists, and others defined family problems in the twentieth-century American South. Ownby shows that it was common for both African Americans and whites to discuss family life in terms of crisis, but they reached very different conclusions about causes and solutions. In the civil rights period, many embraced an ideal of Christian brotherhood as a way of transcending divisions. Opponents of civil rights denounced "brotherhoodism" as a movement that undercut parental and religious authority. Others, especially in the African American community, rejected the idea of family crisis altogether, working to redefine family adaptability as a source of strength. Rather than attempting to define the experience of an archetypal "southern family," Ownby looks broadly at contexts such as political and religious debates about divorce and family values, southern rock music, autobiographies, and more to reveal how people in the South used the concept of the family as a proxy for imagining a better future or happier past.
Bienville
Authors: Berry Jason
Published: September 2019

Sent by the French crown, commandant general Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, established La Nouvelle-Orlans on the banks of the Mississippi river in 1718, negotiating with the native Chitimacha and facing epidemics, tribal wars, and foot shortages. Born in 1680 in Montreal, Bienville became a French naval cadet and joined his brother Pierre’s crew, Sieur d’Iberville, at 16. With Iberville, Bienville travelled the Mississippi Valley, trading with and learning from the Native Americans. Events of note include Bienville’s conflict with governor La Mothe Cadillac and Bienville’s negotiations with the Natchez royalty that ended with breaking ground at New Orleans. Due to conflicts with French officials, Bienville was recalled to Paris in 1723, and Company of the Indies took over New Orleans governance. Tensions arose between the settlers and Natchez, worsened by the actions of Étienne de Chépart, who was eventually killed in a Natchez attack. The new governor, Étienne Boucher de Périer, violently retaliated against the Native Americans, and Company of the Indies officials responded to its catastrophic losses by washing their hands of Louisiana. In 1732, the king sent Bienville back as governor.
Mother Catherine and the Lower Ninth Ward
Authors: Berry Jason
Published: September 2019

In the 1920s, as Prohibition took hold in the U.S., New Orleans became a key port for liquor smuggled out of Cuba, the Bahamas, and British Honduras. Crime and police corruption were major problems. As the city developed North, the Ninth Ward grew downriver as blacks, Sicilians, and other ethnic whites found housing near St. Claude Avenue.
19th-century Spiritualism mixed with New Orleans culture to form unique Spiritual churches. Leafy Anderson, a charismatic woman of African and native heritage, drew crowds by invoking the spirit of Black Hawk, a famous Native American warrior. Nanny Cowans Jenkins, later known as Mother Catherine Seals, founded the Manger, a chapel and community harbouring pregnant girls, homeless youth, and abused women and their children. Catherine’s religion was matriarchal, akin to the Great Mother cults. She also performed faith healings. Author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston documented the churches of both women. Two families, the Cagnolattis and Johnsons, revolved around the Manger through the 1930s. Mother Catherine died in 1930. Her wake ran four days and was heavily covered in the press. Hundreds of people, both black and white, attended.