bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Conclusion
Authors: Chung Sue Fawn
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter discusses the departure of the Chinese from their involvement in lumbering, years after making a significant contribution to the building of the American West. In the 1880s Chinese immigrants constituted the majority of the men employed in the lumber trade in the Sierra Nevada. They undertook a variety of jobs, from wood transportation and mill operation to digging ditches, grading roads, cooking and cleaning, and caring for the animals. The wages they earned were determined by the type of job they did. This chapter shows that Chinese laborers in the logging industry had moved either into other occupations or to work in other forests—some even returned to China—by 1920 due to a variety of factors, such as the emerging forest conservation movement, technological improvements in logging, decreased demand for lumber, and the rise of large corporations that drove the smaller lumber firms out of business.
Smokestacks in the Hills
Authors: Martin Lou
Published: May 2017

Long considered an urban phenomenon, industrialization also transformed the American countryside. This book weaves the narrative of how the relocation of steel and pottery factories to Hancock County, West Virginia, created a rural and small-town working class—and what that meant for communities and for labor. As the book shows, access to land in and around steel and pottery towns allowed residents to preserve rural habits and culture. Workers in these places valued place and local community. Because of their belief in localism, an individualistic ethic of “making do,” and company loyalty, they often worked to place limits on union influence. At the same time, this localism allowed workers to adapt to the dictates of industrial capitalism and a continually changing world on their own terms—and retain rural ways to a degree unknown among their urbanized peers. Throughout, the book ties these themes to illuminating discussions of capital mobility, the ways in which changing work experiences defined gender roles, and the persistent myth that modernizing forces bulldozed docile local cultures.
A Rural Place and a Rural People
Authors: Martin Lou
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the culture of the farmers of Hancock County, which was shaped in several ways by their rural lifestyles. First, work assignments were divided among family members by gender, with women performing the bulk of household production and raising small livestock while men tilled fields, hunted for local game, herded sheep, and harvested apples. To fit into the factory systems, these rural people would have to adapt to a new set of gender roles of the rising industries of the early twentieth century. Second, successful farming required a wide spectrum of skills that enabled farmers to coax a living out of their fields and forests. These skills would prove useful in making ends meet even after they started to draw paychecks from local factories. Finally, the farmers exhibited a preference for local autonomy, self-government, and independence from distant powers. Their ideals of self-reliance and independence in turn shaped their politics.
“Apostles of a New Order”
Authors: Bussel Robert
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the crucial experiences that boosted the self confidence and social awareness of Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway and gave them a budding sense of purpose and direction. Before they first met in Chicago in the summer of 1937, the education of Gibbons and Calloway continued on parallel tracks. Amid the profound social dislocation of the Great Depression, each of them experienced epiphanies that they subsequently credited with bolstering their determination to lift up the working class. This chapter first considers Gibbons and Calloway's life in Chicago before discussing how the city's overlapping circles of reform and radicalism made it a political cornucopia for the two men following their escape from the constricted world of their coal patch youths. It also looks at three mentors who introduced Gibbons to the concepts of a strong union movement, independent political action, and the importance of education for effective citizenship: Annetta Dieckmann, Lillian Herstein, and Paul Douglas. Finally, it describes Brookwood Labor College's influence on Calloway's thinking as well as his anti-communism.
“A Hell of a Whipping”
Authors: Bussel Robert
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway's ambitious plans were derailed by aggressive investigations of alleged union corruption in which the Teamsters became a primary target and Local 688 faced sharp public scrutiny. It begins with a discussion of the successful campaign launched by Gibbons and the Teamsters, in collaboration with Calloway and the NAACP, against the charter reform initiative in St. Louis that would have diluted the union movement's political power and circumscribed the St. Louis civil rights movement's growing influence. It then considers Jimmy Hoffa's disputed election as Teamsters president and how the union's increasing use of trusteeships rankled local Teamsters across the country and came under scrutiny from Congressional investigators. It also explores Gibbons and Calloway's failed attempt to rally support for the Powell Amendment, proposed by New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell to bar unions from practicing racial discrimination.
“A Planned Social Revolution”
Authors: Bussel Robert
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway embarked on implementing their vision of total person unionism. As second-in-command at Teamsters, Gibbons now had access to a national audience. In St. Louis, Calloway had solidified his reputation as a gifted strategist and envisioned new possibilities for a community bargaining table where African Americans could sit as equals with the city's power brokers. However, both men experienced a growing sense of marginalization as social ferment bubbled. After the McClellan Committee hearings, the Teamsters became a suspect institution. This chapter discusses how Gibbons's ambitions repeatedly became entangled in charges of corruption during his five-year tenure as Jimmy Hoffa's executive assistant at Teamsters, along with his resignation from his post due to differences with Hoffa. It also considers Calloway's conflict with William Clay over whose vision would guide the political strategy of African Americans in St. Louis, as well as his growing marginalization within the black freedom struggle.
Introduction
Authors: Campney Brent M. S.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter decenters a number of common assumptions regarding racial violence by situating it in Kansas during the six and a half decades following the outbreak of the American Civil War. It also examines the limitations of a scholarly focus on lynching and sensationalized violence that centers around the spectacle, and broadens the discussion to include threatened and routine violence as part of the racial paradigm under investigation. Likewise, this chapter positions the usual arena of racial violence away from the South and toward Kansas in the Midwest, and provides a brief overview of the region as it grapples with racial politics and slavery.
“Light Is Bursting upon the World!”
Authors: Campney Brent M. S.
Published: May 2017

This chapter debunks the idealistic notion that white Kansans were in favor of racial progress during the Civil War, when slaves took advantage of the turmoil to flee from Missouri and seek refuge in Kansas. It argues that most white Kansans tolerated the black influx owing to naked self-interest: blacks were indispensable to the war effort. By encouraging slaves to flee Missouri, Unionists, “even negrophobic ones,” recognized that “depriving enemies of their labor force would injure them economically and psychologically.” Moreover, white Kansans understood that by employing the “contraband” denied to the enemy, they could offset their own war-related labor shortages.
“Negroes Are the Favorites of the Government”
Authors: Campney Brent M. S.
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers attitudes toward Kansas's black refugees post-Reconstruction. After the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, whites increasingly believed that their debt to blacks had been repaid and that continuing overtures to them were merely partisan politics directed toward a special interest at the majority's expense. The chapter explores media attitudes toward blacks and racial uplift during this time, before embarking on a more in-depth investigation of the trends of routine violence, and the occasional episodes of racial progress, which occurred during this period. It also examines the gendered dimension of the routine violence inflicted on blacks—and especially black women—and how they have retaliated against this violence.
ABC’s Scandal and Black Women’s Fandom
Authors: Warner Kristen J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes the ways Black women fans have reacted to not being visible in the dominant spaces of fandom. It offers the fandom of ABC's Scandal—a program with Black women in central positions both behind and in front of the camera—as a primary example of the ways Black women fan communities work toward reinscription. Premiering on ABC in April 2012, the prime-time dramatic series produced by Grey's Anatomy showrunner Shonda Rhimes and starring African American actress Kerry Washington became a literal embodiment of the type of labor Black women practice in fan spaces. In this case, Black female fans have transformed the central Black lead, canonically drawn as normative and racially neutral, into a culturally specific Black character. This is commonplace labor for non-White fans—particularly in the early-twenty-first-century's so-called postrace moment.
After Ever After
Authors: Leonard Suzanne , Negra Diane
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how Bethenny Frankel's stabilization as an icon coincided with a sharp increase in reality television's encouragement for stars to monetize their so-called “personal lives” and with a distinctive phase of capitalistic production where entrepreneurship of the self reaped a compelling combination of economic and affective reward. In this respect, what may appear as the rising stardom of a singular, idiosyncratic personality should instead be read as having particular ramifications for feminized media culture. Dovetailing with an early-twenty-first-century cultural moment dominated by a worldwide economic recession, Frankel's success illustrates that economies of self can be leveraged as platforms on which to model female self-actualization, a pathway that inevitably involves the accrual of monetary gain.
Black Trans Narratives, Sex Work, and the Illusive Flesh
Authors: Stallings L. H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers how two writers—Toni Newman and Red Jordan Arobateau—rely on sex work, spirituality, and deconstructions of Western embodiment in order to theorize transgender subjectivity away from medical and classed models that do not account for race, culture, and pleasure. These black writers' fabrication of the transgender body serves as a spiritual decolonization to cease the continuous separation of spirit from body that Western embodiment perpetrates and that imperialists manipulated to enslave and terrorize. In their rough and explicit written narratives about sex work, Newman and Arobateau provide narrative representations of how unruly bodies can sometimes refuse to be transformed into the service of state power.
Shelter Hopping
Authors: Margaretten Emily
Published: May 2017

This chapter outlines the institutional displacements and disenfranchisements of Durban's street youth population. It follows their movements from shelter to shelter as they attempt to establish a semblance of stability in a precarious situation of state-sanctioned evictions and arrests. One of these shelters is Thuthukani, a children's street shelter located in the metropolis of Durban. The chapter also discusses the centrality of Point Place as a viable yet problematic housing option for older street youth and females. In this sense, it sets up the overarching narrative of the study, in which the youth look to each other to mitigate the hardships of their urban poverty.
Love, Betrayal, and Sexual Intimacy
Authors: Margaretten Emily
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers why the Point Place females, who are aware of how HIV/AIDS is transmitted, agree to unprotected intercourse. Certainly, material circumstances impinge on their capacity to negotiate condom use, yet this does not fully account for why the Point Place females use condoms with boyfriends who reside outside the building but not with those who reside within the building. Their construction of “outside” and “inside” boyfriends is connected to notions of trust and, more specifically, to acts of nakana—which in isiZulu means “to care about or take notice of one another.” This in turn opens them up to the risks of sexually transmitted infections, which they view as acceptable when compared to the perils of being unloved or forsaken on the streets.
Women and Power in Zimbabwe
Authors: Shaw Carolyn Martin
Published: May 2017

Rhodesia's rebirth as Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe's rise to power dashed the hopes of women who had imagined independence as a road to gender equity and economic justice. Using history, literature, participant observation, and interviews, this book draws on thirty years of experience to survey Zimbabwean feminism from the colonial era to today. The book's analysis shows how actions as seemingly disparate as an ability to bake scones during the revolution and achieving power within a marriage in fact represent complex sources of female empowerment. The book also presents the ways women across Zimbabwean society—rural and urban, professional and domestic—accommodated or confronted post-independence setbacks. Finally, the book offers perspectives on the ways contemporary Zimbabwean women depart from the widespread view that feminism is a Western imposition having little to do with African women.
Spatializing Blackness
Authors: Shabazz Rashad
Published: May 2017

Over 277,000 African Americans migrated to Chicago between 1900 and 1940, an influx unsurpassed in any other northern city. From the start, carceral powers literally and figuratively created a prison-like environment to contain these African Americans within the so-called Black Belt on the city's South Side. A geographic study of race and gender, this book casts light upon the ubiquitous—and ordinary—ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, the book explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, it investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with—and resist—spacial containment. A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, the book examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.
Sarah Bernhardt at Home
Authors: Duckett Victoria
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes Sarah Bernhardt at Home to show how Sarah Bernhardt, by exploring the different spaces that together represent “the home,” reveals her home's expansive horizons. It asks what it is we are seeing when we watch Sarah Bernhardt at Home by tackling a number of questions, for example, why Bernhardt made a film that had little or nothing to do with her famous theatrical roles. The focus is on what we can see on the film today: the different places, activities, and people that constitute Bernhardt “at home.” The chapter first looks at Hecla Films, which produced Sarah Bernhardt at Home, during the period 1912–1915 before explaining how the film provides a significant insight into the way that art nouveau entered and shaped the home at the opening of the twentieth century. It also considers how Bernhardt recontextualizes familiar paintings in Sarah Bernhardt at Home in order to fashion new visual meanings for us.
Cape Verde, Let's Go
Authors: Pardue Derek
Published: May 2017

Musicians rapping in Kriolu—a hybrid of Portuguese and West African languages spoken in Cape Verde—have recently emerged from Lisbon's periphery. They popularize the struggles with identity and belonging among young people in a Cape Verdean immigrant community that shares not only the Kriolu language but its culture and history. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research in Portugal and Cape Verde, this book introduces Lisbon's Kriolu rap scene and the role of rap music in challenging metropolitan Portuguese identities. It demonstrates that Cape Verde, while relatively small within the Portuguese diaspora, offers valuable lessons about the politics of experience and social agency within a postcolonial context that remains poorly understood. As the book argues, knowing more about both Cape Verdeans and the Portuguese invites clearer assessments of the relationship between the experience and policies of migration. That in turn allows us to better gauge citizenship as a balance of individual achievement and cultural ascription.
Prologue
Authors: Dall’asta Monica , Gaines Jane M.
Published: May 2017

This prologue examines overarching issues about women's film history, feminism, and the researching and writing of film history. Foregrounding historiographic problems, it explores the researching and writing about women “in” and “as” “history” in the cinema century by focusing on the critical-historical approach, which deals with the problem of “the history of history” —the approach used to expose the never-neutral amnesias of traditional historiography and to counter its claim to objectivity with the inevitability of its “fictions.” The chapter discusses the concept of becoming historical others and highlights the impossibility of history's history by drawing on the case of Elvira Giallanella, an Italian director and producer never mentioned in previous accounts of Italian silent cinema but who suddenly made her way into feminist historiography after a 35mm print of her 1919 antiwar film Umanità was discovered in 2007.
Alice Guy’s Great Cinematic Adventure
Authors: Tomadjoglou Kimberly
Published: May 2017

This chapter rethinks Alice Guy's legacy by analying her adaptation of the paternalist practices of Gaumont Film Company, where she began, to the matriarchal organization of her own film studio in America, Solax. It tackles a number of questions arising from the figure of Alice Guy: for example, whether she was a feminist; whether her husband Herbert Blaché was responsible for the failure of Solax; whether she directed La Fée aux choux (The Cabbage Fairy), which, according to her, was her directorial debut, made in 1896; or whether she directed her first film in 1902, the two-shot Sage-femme de première classe (First Class Mid-Wife). In historicizing Guy's practice, this chapter reconceptualizes her creativity in terms not of “auteur” but of metteur-en-scène—thereby recognizing her generative role in managing the creative output of her studio. It also examines the role of fantasy in creating a feminist historiography or a feminist Alice Guy.
Revising the Colonial Past, Undoing “National” Histories
Authors: Sawhney Rashmi
Published: May 2017

This chapter investigates the historical imagination of 1980s Indian women filmmakers seeking “companionship” with generations of women enduring or resisting convention in India's colonial past. Leveraging the emergence in the 1980s of an Indian women's cinema—and reflecting on the cinematic construction of gender debates in colonial India through its films, the chapter highlights the challenges they pose to establishing “national” narratives of gender or film history. Three films about gender and reform in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century colonial India are discussed: Phaniyamma (Prema Karanth, 1983), Rao Saheb (Vijaya Mehta, 1986), and Sati (Aparna Sen, 1989). Together these films present a constellation that supports the development of a feminist historiography of Indian cinema. The chapter also considers how literature on Indian regional cinemas, published in regional languages with little translation, has contributed to the marginalization of such cinemas in the construction of Indian film history.
Cinema of Women
Authors: Knight Julia
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the role of distributors and a range of issues that come into play in getting films from their makers to their potential audiences by focusing on the work of the UK women's distributor Cinema of Women (COW). COW was founded in 1979 by six women—Mandy Rose, Fern Presant, Audrey Summerhill, Caroline Spry, Melanie Chail, and Maggie Sellers—who had been “shocked by the limited availability of good films made by women.” They set out to get feminist films into first-run cinemas and onto television, but they felt also that women filmmakers should be able to exercise some control over where and how their films were exhibited. This chapter considers the challenges faced by COW in trying to make their films accessible to wider audiences in the UK via theatrical release. It shows that building audiences of especially (although not exclusively) women is central to COW's distribution work. Furthermore, COW's performance and the level of service the distributor offered did not always meet filmmakers' expectations.
Agnès Varda
Authors: Conway Kelley
Published: May 2017

Both a precursor to and a critical member of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda weaves documentary and fiction into tapestries that portray distinctive places and complex human beings. Critics and aficionados have celebrated Varda's independence and originality since the New Wave touchstone Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) brought her a level of international acclaim she has yet to relinquish. The book traces Varda's works from her 1954 debut La Pointe Courte through a varied career that includes nonfiction and fiction shorts and features, installation art, and the triumphant 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnès. Drawing on Varda's archives and conversations with the filmmaker, the book focuses on the concrete details of how Varda makes films: a project's emergence, its development and the shifting forms of its screenplay, the search for financing, and the execution from casting through editing and exhibition. In the process, it explores the artistic consistencies and bold changes in Varda's career and reveals how one woman charted a nontraditional trajectory through independent filmmaking. The result is a book that reveals the artistic consistencies and bold changes in the career of one of the world's most exuberant and intriguing directors.
The Rhetorical Equivalent of War
Authors: Mariani Giorgio
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how the rhetoric of war may be turned against war by focusing on the views of William James, Kenneth Burke, and Stephen Crane. Recent literary criticism has suggested that, far from being powerless or simply neutral vis-à-vis the armed conflicts it seeks to represent, language is complicit with violence. This understanding of the relationship between language and violence has been filed by James Dawes under the rubric of “the disciplinary model”—a model that conceives language and violence “as mutually constitutive.” This chapter first considers the ways in which the hard facts of war and violence may be both acknowledged and worked through before discussing Burke's template for understanding the tension as well as the cooperation between war and peace. It also analyzes James's “The Moral Equivalent of War” and concludes by testing the usefulness of some of Burke's recommendations for literary studies through a reading of Crane's “A Mystery of Heroism.”
An American Counter-Epic?
Authors: Mariani Giorgio
Published: May 2017

This chapter offers a reading of The Columbiad (1807), Joel Barlow's epic poem in ten books, four of which are devoted to the American Revolutionary War. More specifically, it considers how the poem addresses the historical question of the violence of war, as well as the aesthetic question of the relation between literature and war. The Columbiad registers with peculiar frankness some of the antinomies involved in writing about the American Revolution—in celebrating, that is, an act of war that the author saw as necessary to the creation of a unified world of peace. One of the reasons Barlow's epic has never become canonical is that it does not fit into the dominant traditions that historians and literary critics have acknowledged as “typically” American. This chapter examines Barlow's views on arms, poetry, and Indians and concludes by focusing on how he tries to handle the problem of war in his epic.
Beyond the Semantic Netherworld
Authors: Mariani Giorgio
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace, a meditation on the difficulty of matching anti-war literature with some much-needed imagining of what peace might look like when disengaged from a context of war. The problem of how to turn war literature into peace literature runs like a red thread through Kingston's text. The Fifth Book of Peace interrogates the limits of war resistance not only in practice but also, and perhaps mostly, in literature. This chapter argues that Kingston's thoughts on the literature of peace and war are an inseparable part of her pacifist politics. It also considers Brian Turner's poetry and Helen Benedict's 2011 novel Sand Queen as two “cosmopolitan” responses to the Iraq War.
Television and College Sports as Mass Entertainment
Authors: Chudacoff Howard P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses how television changed college sports. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the NCAA pursued deals worth millions of dollars with commercial, for-profit networks instead of with nonprofit, public radio and television, where the link between athletics and higher education might have been maintained and the commercialism of intercollegiate athletics restrained. The college sports establishment chose an economic playbook that promised direct benefit to athletics and to the institutions in which they operated. Televised football increased the visibility of a few privileged schools, but the bulk of money an institution derived from TV appearances went to support athletics. The schools themselves willingly complied with television policy so they could use television revenues and booster contributions inspired by TV exposure to pay for sports rather than to fund them from the educational budget. Thus, the commercial route was the one taken. While the NCAA may have exerted control over who played football on television, the networks found ways to use dollar appeal and flex their muscle to stretch television policy in their favor.
The M Connection: Media and Money
Authors: Chudacoff Howard P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses how athletic budgets have spun out of control and created an athletic–academic divide that troubles observers both inside and outside the academy. Those who oversee college sports, from coaches to athletic directors to presidents, harbor a three-pronged motivation that prevents them from reversing the tide: (1) they want more money so they can spend more; (2) they need more money because their competition is getting more; and (3) they are caught in a spiral where they need money because they think it will enable them to win, and they need to win because they think success on the field is going to bring more money. Media exposure is one means to these ends. While the big money that flows into athletic departments from television provokes resentment from the academic side, those in athletics who bask in the limelight of an adored sport exude an attitude that is simultaneously cynical and realistic.
Closely, Consciously Reading Feminism
Authors: Wu Yung-Hsing
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers the fate of close reading in second-wave reading and writing communities, through an analysis of memoirs, literary criticism, and a novel, Marilyn French's The Women's Room. It argues that just as feminist consciousness-raising believed that reading could generate closeness among women, and just as feminist fiction of the 1970s was regularly cited (and decried) for an intimacy of identification it was said to create for women readers, early feminist literary criticism was marked by an investment in the political promise of closeness. For feminist literary critics of that first academic generation, this sensibility marked a shift from closeness described as a familiar stance toward textuality to one with distinctive affective and political valences. In other words, this sensibility yoked the question of women reading to consciousness: to its nascence, whether sudden or gradual, and to its qualities of strangeness, pain, even joy. While their assumptions led them to find reading in very different places, their critical desires stemmed from the shared view that reading, wherever it is found, can be a place for politics.
The Color Purple and the Wine-Dark Kiss of Death
Authors: Gordon Phillip
Published: May 2017

Alice Walker's 1982 novel The Color Purple was published six months after AIDS was first described in medical literature. This chapter reads The Color Purple as an AIDS narrative by looking into the surrounding details of its publication to uncover what may have been an accidental narrative for Walker as she wrote her masterpiece but that proves nonetheless as important for our current moment as the novel was, in the moment of its publication, for second-wave feminism. A close consideration of the details of the novel reveals a subnarrative with devastating relevance to the lives of black women living in the Southeastern United States in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. By considering the sexual economy, the emphasis on illness and sexual contact, the postcolonial interests (which is to say, considering Africa), and the time and place of its writing, it is argued that The Color Purple should be read as the first AIDS narrative in American literature. Such a reading is a profound revision of our current model of AIDS literature and bears implications for our current political understanding of HIV/AIDS, a disease long associated with forgotten and unwanted populations.
“This Really Isn’t a Job for a Girl to Take on Alone”
Authors: Beyer Charlotte
Published: May 2017

This chapter undertakes a reappraisal of Sara Paretsky's 1982 crime novel Indemnity Only. It examines its critical engagement with genre and the diverse landscape of feminist criticism during the period of its publication, and discusses Paretsky's articulation of an evolving feminist position in genre fiction. As we enter the fourth wave of feminism and new feminist initiatives and campaigns take off, an assessment of the importance of second-wave feminist literature in the light of those developments is timely. A number of critics have discussed Paretsky's novel as an example of feminist appropriation of genre fiction. The chapter extends these readings by arguing for its centrality to second-wave feminist fiction, focusing on specific areas and thematic concerns that highlight the complex relationship between Paretsky's text and feminist criticism and illustrate the ongoing dialogue between activism and fiction.
“The Relief Would Have Had to Pay Someone”
Authors: Remes Jacob A. C.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how the people of Halifax integrated disaster relief aid into their complex family economies following the explosion. Relief workers and managers offered aid that seemed obvious after the Halifax explosion destroyed houses and rendered them uninhabitable. However, only a few people availed themselves of the help extended by the army, people, and institutions of Halifax, often preferring to stay in their ruined houses, in the overcrowded homes of their friends and relatives, or even in hastily jerry-rigged shacks. Drawing on a random sample of 739 case files of the Halifax Relief Commission, this chapter considers how survivors and other Haligonians engaged in delicate, subtle, and often tacit negotiations as they sought to maximize the material aid they claimed from the state while minimizing the autonomy and privacy the state took from them in return. It shows that many Haligonians rejected, or tried to reject, the new bureaucratic machine that offered them money and other material aid, and instead turned to the reciprocal solidarity of people they knew.
Banished
Authors: Risse Guenter B.
Published: May 2017

This chapter demonstrates how scenes of severe human hardship illustrate and authenticate the San Francisco pesthouse experience. While legislation, politics, aversive emotions, and medical theories determined the location of an isolation facility, ostracized patients' lives shaped the institution's character and dismal reputation. The trauma of total isolation compounded the stigma of disfigurement from disease. Life as a pariah detained in a discredited and feared prison-like institution offered occasional and welcome fodder for the print media, always a catalyst for revealing and often molding emotional landscapes. Although a religious context remained hidden, all segregations seemed per se penitential, a just destiny for people who had become dangerous to others.
Introduction
Authors: Sica Emanuele
Published: May 2017

This book examines the Italian army’s occupation of the French Riviera during the period 1940–1943 at three different levels, each involving a triangular relationship. At a more general level, it analyzes the military occupation with the lens of historical sociology, making references to the triangular comparison of the Italian occupation of France to the German occupation of France and to the Italian occupation of the Balkans. It also considers “the structural effects of occupation on the occupied society’s environment and living conditions,” with particular emphasis on the triangular and rocky relationship between the representatives of the French state, especially the prefects and mayors, and the Italian military authorities, the officers of Italian units deployed on French soil, and Italian civilian authorities who were officially dispatched by Rome to supervise the implementation of the Franco-Italian armistice and to secretly prepare for the annexation of the occupied territories. Finally, at a grassroots level, the book explores the “face-to-face interaction between occupiers and occupied people” and how it was shaped by both groups’ habits, culture, prejudices, and tensions.
Countdown to War
Authors: Sica Emanuele
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the eve of World War II, as the Italian Fascist regime embarked on a collision course against the French Third Republic over the question of the irredentist territories such as the County of Nice and colonies such as Tunisia. The Pact of Steel, signed on May 22, 1939, virtually tied the destiny of Italy to that of Adolf Hitler and Germany, and the Secret Supplementary Protocols forecasted an alliance in the eventuality of a war. However, Benito Mussolini was adamant with the Germans that no war should be started before 1942, realizing that in the summer of 1939, Italy and its armed forces were anything but prepared for war. This chapter shows that the Italian Army was not in line with Mussolini’s brazen threats to invade France, a truism demonstrated in his troops’ disastrous performance in the four-day Battle of the Alps in June 1940. The campaign resulted in a meager booty—the medium-size town of Menton and a few pastures—for Mussolini at the cost of ruining his country’s relations with France.
A Prelude to Full Occupation
Authors: Sica Emanuele
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the city of Menton, a small area occupied by the Italian Army from 1940 to 1942. Menton became the primary locus of the Italianization campaign, which mirrored the Germanization efforts carried out in Alsace-Lorraine. The forced Italianization encompassed education and religion, but also touched other aspects of daily life in Menton. The chapter shows how Italy’s unofficial annexation of the area became controversial as Italian military authorities clashed with the country’s civil servants who endeavored to make Menton a city model of the new Fascist region. It also considers the entente between Italian soldiers and the French populace and the Italian authorities’ implementation of a more nuanced approach to the local population of Menton. It suggests that the failure of the Italianization campaign in Menton probably shaped the Italian military occupation policy of November 1942.
Collaboration and Accommodation
Authors: Sica Emanuele
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the concept of “collaboration” in the Italian occupation of the French Riviera, with particular emphasis on the range of opportunities for unscrupulous and desperate individuals to better their interests. The Vichy government fully embraced state-level collaboration, whereby it actively sought a collaboration beyond the armistice treaty in order to be considered a reliable partner in the prospective Nazi New Order. However, ordinary French also interacted with various degrees with the occupier, be it German or Italian. Philippe Burrin has divided these relationships into roughly three categories, which he labeled “accommodations”: structural accommodations, opportunist accommodations, and political accommodations. This chapter shows that, as in other parts of France, the majority of the “collaborators” were not ideologically motivated and that their real motivations remain unclear; this is evident in the ambivalent and complex relationships between Italian soldiers and local women. It also suggests that the Fourth Army on the French Riviera was bent on opportunist accommodations.
Conclusion
Authors: Sica Emanuele
Published: May 2017

This conclusion evaluates the nature of Italy’s military occupation of France during World War II. It compares the occupation of Menton with the German occupations in Alsace-Lorraine and the Italian invasion of the French Riviera in November 1942 with the German occupation of the region from September 1943 to August 1944, and then contrasts it with the Italian occupations in the Balkans. It shows that the Italian occupation of the strip of land including Menton in the summer of 1940 bore some similarities with Germany’s occupation of Alsace-Lorraine. It also highlights the differences between the German and Italian occupation policies both in terms of breadth and enforcement. Finally, it argues that the worst enemy of Italian Army commanders in southeastern France was the low morale of their troops, stemming from the growing sense that the tide of war had irremediably turned against the Axis side by the fall of 1942.
Globetrotting with The Greatest
Authors: Williams Sonja D.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Richard Durham's travels with Muhammad Ali as part of their collaboration to write the autobiography of the self-proclaimed “greatest” boxer in the world. Durham relished the idea of chronicling the life of a man who had mastered his favorite sport, and who had become an internationally known, if controversial, cultural icon. During his seven years as editor for Muhammad Speaks, Durham had interacted often with Ali and genuinely liked him. On February 25, 1964, Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, beat Sonny Liston to become the heavyweight boxing championship of the world at age twenty-two. Durham began shadowing Ali with his tape recorder and microphone, regularly recording the fighter's reflections and interactions. He even captured Ali talking in his sleep. The result was The Greatest, which Durham ended with a brief postscript summarizing Ali's exhausting September 1975 battle against Joe Frazier.
Reinventing Chinese Tradition
Authors: Wu Ka-ming
Published: May 2017

The final destination of the Long March and center of the Chinese Communist Party's red bases, Yan'an acquired mythical status during the Maoist era. Though the city's significance as an emblem of revolutionary heroism has faded, today's Chinese still glorify Yan'an as a sanctuary for ancient cultural traditions. The book examines the relation between the government and local communities for heritage preservation and cultural tourism in the age of runaway urbanization by focusing on the moments of mobilizing and representing folk traditions in both socialist and late socialist Yan'an. This ethnographic account of contemporary Yan'an documents how people have reworked the revival of three rural practices—paper-cutting, folk storytelling, and spirit cults—within (and beyond) the socialist legacy. Moving beyond dominant views of Yan'an folk culture as a tool of revolution or object of market reform, the book reveals how cultural traditions become battlegrounds where conflicts among the state, market forces, and intellectuals in search of an authentic China play out. At the same time, it shows these emerging new dynamics in the light of the ways rural residents make sense of rapid social change. The book uses “Yan'an and folk culture” to connote a historical model of the Chinese Communist Party appropriating folk traditions to promote rural reform and national state campaigns.
Harry T. Burleigh
Authors: Snyder Jean E.
Published: May 2017

Harry T. Burleigh (1866–1949) played a leading role in American music, and African American music in particular, in the twentieth century. Celebrated for his arrangements of spirituals, Burleigh was also the first African American composer to create a significant body of art song. An international roster of opera and recital singers performed his works and praised them as among the best of their time. This book traces Burleigh's life from his Pennsylvania childhood through his fifty-year tenure as soloist at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan. As a composer, Burleigh's pioneering work preserved and transformed the African American spiritual; as a music editor, he facilitated the work of other black composers; as a role model, vocal coach, and mentor, he profoundly influenced American song; and in private life he was friends with Antonín Dvořák, Marian Anderson, Will Marion Cook, and other American luminaries. The book provides rich historical, social, and political contexts that explore Burleigh's professional and personal life within an era complicated by changes in race relations, class expectations, and musical tastes.
Burleigh at the National Conservatory of Music
Authors: Snyder Jean E.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Harry T. Burleigh's study at the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. It begins with a background on the National Conservatory of Music, founded by music philanthropist Jeannette Thurber. Her school became a magnet for talented music students from across the nation. Its faculty included some of the most renowned musicians in the United States and Europe, and it modeled principles for postsecondary music education that attracted Harry, particularly the openness to African Americans as well as women and handicapped students. The chapter also discusses the difficulty experienced by Burleigh before he won a four-year tuition scholarship for the Artist's Course at the National Conservatory of Music. Finally, it considers the influence of African American soprano Sissieretta Jones on Burleigh's early recital career.
The Symphony “From the New World”
Authors: Snyder Jean E.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Harry T. Burleigh's involvement in the creation of Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, “From the New World.” After attending the Chicago World's Fair and visiting Erie, Burleigh returned to New York City in late September 1893 to continue his studies at the National Conservatory of Music. He was joined this time by his friend Will Marion Cook, who was impressed by Jeannette Thurber's genuinely inclusive approach in recruiting students. The two men relished opportunities to enjoy the abundance of fine music the city had to offer, pondering how African American music should find its place in such settings. Burleigh continued to spend evenings with the Dvořák family through the fall. This chapter also considers the controversy stirred by Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 in E Minor and his advocacy of an American school of music based on Negro music.
Foremost Musician and Engaged Citizen
Authors: Snyder Jean E.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how Harry T. Burleigh came to represent African Americans as their premiere baritone and leading composer while also establishing a reputation as an engaged citizen in the first decades of the twentieth century. It first considers Burleigh's active participation in the life of the black community in New York and other cities on the eastern seaboard, lending the weight of his renown to benefit numerous social and educational causes, including efforts to improve the health and general welfare of African Americans. It then discusses Burleigh's connection with the city's black church community, including St. Philip's Episcopal Church and other Episcopal congregations, along with his relationships with Booker T. Washington, Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The chapter also describes Burleigh's position regarding the lynchings and race riots in various parts of the country.
Burleigh’s Singing Career
Authors: Snyder Jean E.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Harry T. Burleigh's singing career. When Burleigh auditioned for admission to the Artist's Course at the National Conservatory of Music, his goal was to become a classical concert singer. Like soprano Sissieretta Jones, he wanted to sing arias and art songs in recital. Like other well-known black singers, Burleigh sang for audiences in African American venues throughout the East and Midwest, as well as for mixed audiences, and on many occasions he sang for audiences that were primarily white. As he became known nationwide as “the premiere baritone of the race” and as the leading black composer in the early twentieth century, he was often invited to present full recitals, to represent African Americans as part of a program of American music, or to give a lecture-recital on spirituals. One of Burleigh's favorite accompanists was pianist R. Augustus Lawson. This chapter also examines Burleigh's contribution to the tradition of African American art music, along with his use of the works of American song composers and his collaboration with them.
Family Matters: Fame and Its Discontents
Authors: Snyder Jean E.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the family issues that Harry T. Burleigh faced as his success and fame increased steadily into the 1920s. Erie remained the family home until the early 1920s. Burleigh's mother Elizabeth Waters Burleigh Elmendorf and his stepfather, John Elmendorf, remained in Erie, anchoring the family during their lifetimes. After his mother died in 1903, John kept the home and his boarding stable for horses until about 1915. Various family members boarded at the family home on East Third Street until his death in 1919. The chapter first recounts Burleigh's meeting with Louise Alston, his future wife, and their courtship that culminated in marriage on February 9, 1899. It then considers Louise Alston Burleigh's background, her singing career, and her poems and songs. It also discusses Louise's influence on Burleigh's artistry as a singer and composer.