A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
The essays gathered by Jeffrey Leak encompass three key periods of Schuyler’s development. The first section follows his literary evolution in the 1920s and 1930s, during which time he deserted the U.S. Army and briefly became a member of the Socialist Party. Part II reveals his shift toward political conservatism in response to World War II and the perceived threat of Communism. Part III covers the civil rights movement of the 1960s—an era that prompted some of his most extreme and volatile critiques of black leadership and liberal ideology. The book includes many essays that are not well known as well as pieces that have never before been published. One notable example is the first printed transcript of Schuyler’s 1961 debate on the Black Muslims with Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and C. Eric Lincoln.
Because African American experience is more often than not associated with liberalism and the left, the idea of a black conservative strikes many as an anomaly. Schuyler’s writings, however, force us to broaden and rethink our political and cultural conceptions. At times misguided, at times prophetic, his work expands our understanding of black intellectual thought in the twentieth century.
In May 1961, despite multiple Supreme Court rulings, segregation remained alive and well within the system of interstate travel. All across the American South, interstate buses as well as their travel facilities were divided racially. This blatant disregard for law and morality spurred the Congress of Racial Equality to send thirteen individuals—seven black, six white—on a harrowing bus trip throughout the South as a sign of protest.
These original riders were met with disapproval, arrests and violence along the way, but that did not stop the movement. That summer, more than four hundred Freedom Riders continued their journey—many of them concluding their ride at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm, where they endured further abuses and indignities. As a result of the riders sacrifice, by November of 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission finally put an end to interstate commerce segregation, and in the process, elevated the riders to become a source of inspiration for other civil rights campaigns such as voter registration rights and school desegregation.
While much has been written on the Freedom Rides, far less has been published about the individual riders. Join award-winning author B. J. Hollars as he sets out on his own journey to meet them, retracing the historic route and learning the stories of as many surviving riders as he could. The Road South: Personal Stories of the Freedom Riders offers an intimate look into the lives and legacies of the riders. Throughout the book these civil rights veterans’ poignant, personal stories offer timely insights into America’s racial past and hopeful future.
Weaving the past with the present, Hollars aims to demystify the legendary journey, while also confronting more modern concerns related to race in America. The Road South is part memoir and part research-based journalism. It transcends the traditional textbook version of this historical journey to highlight the fascinating stories of the many riders—both black and white—who risked their lives to move the country forward.
In the decade that followed the Civil War, two questions dominated political debate: To what degree were African Americans now “equal” to white Americans, and how should this equality be implemented in law? Although Republicans entertained multiple, even contradictory, answers to these questions, the party committed itself to several civil rights initiatives. When Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment, it justified these decisions with a broad egalitarian rhetoric. This rhetoric altered congressional culture, instituting new norms that made equality not merely an ideal,but rather a pragmatic aim for political judgments.
Kirt Wilson examines Reconstruction’s desegregation debate to explain how it represented an important movement in the evolution of U.S. race relations. He outlines how Congress fought to control the scope of black civil rights by contesting the definition of black equality, and the expediency and constitutionality of desegregation. Wilson explores how the debate over desegregation altered public memory about slavery and the Civil War, while simultaneously shaping a political culture that established the trajectory of race relations into the next century.
In Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson challenge the commonly held notion that all racial negativity, disagreements, and objections to policies that seek to help racial minorities stem from racial prejudice. They argue that racial resentment arises from just-world beliefs and appraisals of deservingness that help explain the persistence of racial inequality in America in ways more consequential than racism or racial prejudice alone.
The culprits, as many White people see it, are undeserving people of color, who are perceived to benefit unfairly from, and take advantage of, resources that come at Whites’ expense—a worldview in which any attempt at modest change is seen as a challenge to the status quo and privilege. Yet, as Davis and Wilson reveal, many Whites have become racially resentful due to their perceptions that African Americans skirt the “rules of the game” and violate traditional values by taking advantage of unearned resources. Resulting attempts at racial progress lead Whites to respond in ways that retain their social advantage—opposing ameliorative policies, minority candidates, and other advancement on racial progress. Because racial resentment is rooted in beliefs about justice, fairness, and deservingness, ordinary citizens, who may not harbor racist motivations, may wind up in the same political position as racists, but for different reasons.
With Racial Stasis, Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith argue persuasively that this is because millennials, a generational cohort far removed from Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era, lack sufficient understanding of the structural nature of racial inequalities in the United States and therefore also the contextual and historical knowledge to be actively anti-racist. While these younger whites may be open to the idea of interracial marriage or living next to a family of a different race, they often do not understand why policies like affirmative action still need to exist and are weary about supporting these kinds of policies. In short, although millennials’ language and rationale around race, racism, and racial inequalities are different from previous generations’, the end result is the same.
The Black Power movement represented a key turning point in American politics. Disenchanted by the hollow progress of federal desegregation during the 1960s, many black citizens and leaders across the United States demanded meaningful self-determination. The popular movement they created was marked by a vigorous artistic renaissance, militant political action, and fierce ideological debate.
Exploring the major political and intellectual currents from the Black Power era to the present, Cedric Johnson reveals how black political life gradually conformed to liberal democratic capitalism and how the movement’s most radical aims—the rejection of white aesthetic standards, redefinition of black identity, solidarity with the Third World, and anticapitalist revolution—were gradually eclipsed by more moderate aspirations. Although Black Power activists transformed the face of American government, Johnson contends that the evolution of the movement as a form of ethnic politics restricted the struggle for social justice to the world of formal politics.
Johnson offers a compelling and theoretically sophisticated critique of the rhetoric and strategies that emerged in this period. Drawing on extensive archival research, he reinterprets the place of key intellectual figures, such as Harold Cruse and Amiri Baraka, and influential organizations, including the African Liberation Support Committee, the National Black Political Assembly, and the National Black Independent Political Party in postsegregation black politics, while at the same time identifying the contradictions of Black Power radicalism itself.
Documenting the historical retreat from radical, democratic struggle, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders ultimately calls for the renewal of popular struggle and class-conscious politics.
Cedric Johnson is assistant professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Race in America is a multidisciplinary analysis of race and injustice by some of the nation’s foremost scholar-activists who helped shape the course of the struggle for civil rights during the recent past. These essays provide a historical retrospective, an assessment of where we are now, and an outline of possibilities for the future.
The major controversial issues in race relations, in the past and in the present, such as affirmative action, educational segregation, racial practices of labor unions, legal strategies for protest movements, the persistence of racism in American institutions, and the sources of resistance to change are discussed at length by major authorities in their respective fields.
Many of the most important events in recent American history come alive in these pages as the strategies and programs, the victories and defeats of the civil rights movement are rigorously examined. A unique aspect of the book is that the human experience of active participants in this rich history is evoked through personal and often poignant accounts, such as those of Kenneth B. Clark, who in a memorable autobiographical essay describes a long life devoted to the pursuit of racial justice, and Patricia J. Williams, who relates the contemporary struggles of African American women to the historical context of slavery and its aftermath.
As no other book can, this collection provides the basis for the critical insights and historical perspectives that are essential for an understanding of the central issue still confronting American society: race and racism.
This new edition brings fully up-to-date a book widely praised for its clear and objective presentation of changes in American racial attitudes during the second half of the twentieth century.
The book retains the division of racial attitudes into principles of equality, government implementation of those principles, and social distance, but adds questions concerning affirmative action and beliefs about sources of inequality. A conceptual section now opens the book, evidence on social desirability has been added, and a new chapter deals with cohort effects and with the impact of income, education, and gender. In key instances, randomized experiments are introduced that test hypotheses more rigorously than is ordinarily possible with survey data. Throughout, the authors have reconsidered earlier ideas and introduced new thinking.
In Racialized Politics, political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists explore the current debate surrounding the sources of racism in America. Published here for the first time, the essays represent three major approaches to the topic. The social psychological approach maintains that prejudice socialized early in life feeds racial stereotypes, while the social structural viewpoint argues that behavior is shaped by whites' fear of losing their privileged status. The third perspective looks to non-racially inspired ideology, including attitudes about the size and role of government, as the reason for opposition to policies such as affirmative action. Timely and important, this collection provides a state-of-the-field assessment of the current issues and findings on the role of racism in mass politics and public opinion.
Contributors are Lawrence Bobo, Gretchen C. Crosby, Michael C. Dawson, Christopher Federico, P. J. Henry, John J. Hetts, Jennifer L. Hochschild, William G. Howell, Michael Hughes, Donald R. Kinder, Rick Kosterman, Tali Mendelberg, Thomas F. Pettigrew, Howard Schuman, David O. Sears, James Sidanius, Pam Singh, Paul M. Sniderman, Marylee C. Taylor, and Steven A. Tuch.
This book traces changes in American attitudes toward racial issues that have taken place between the 1940s and the 1980s--a crucial period that encompasses the civil rights revolution, the growth of black militancy and white resistance, and the enactment of affirmative-action legislation.
The authors are the first to compare data about black and white attitudes collected by three major survey organizations: Gallup, the National Opinion Research Center, and the Institute for Social Research. They make careful distinctions between attitudes toward principles of racial equality and attitudes toward government action to implement those principles. The wide research base and methodological sophistication of their analysis yield conclusions quite different from those of earlier, more narrowly drawn studies. For example, they find that while there has been a striking increase in support for principles of equality and fairness, support for some kinds of implementation of these ideals lags far behind or has even declined among both blacks and whites. The implementation measures considered range from busing to achieve integration of schools to laws requiring equal opportunity in employment. In addition to reanalyzing survey data, the authors have also performed several innovative experiments on the wording and context of survey questions to help them interpret the data more accurately.
If white Americans could reveal what they really think about race, without the risk of appearing racist, what would they say? In this elegantly written and innovative book, Paul Sniderman and Edward Carmines illuminate aspects of white Americans' thinking about the politics of race previously hidden from sight. And in a thoughtful follow-up analysis, they point the way toward public policies that could gain wide support and reduce the gap between black and white Americans.
Their discoveries will surprise pollsters and policymakers alike. The authors show that prejudice, although by no means gone, has lost its power to dominate the political thinking of white Americans. Concentrating on the new race-conscious agenda, they introduce a method of hidden measurement which reveals that liberals are just as angry over affirmative action as conservatives and that racial prejudice, while more common among conservatives, is more powerful in shaping the political thinking of liberals. They also find that the good will many whites express for blacks is not feigned but represents a genuine regard for blacks, which they will stand by even when given a perfectly acceptable excuse to respond negatively to blacks.
More crucially, Sniderman and Carmines show that the current impasse over race can be overcome if we remember what we once knew. The strongest arguments in behalf of equality for black Americans reach beyond race to the moral principles that give the issue of race itself a moral claim on us.
Who are the “race men” standing for black America? It is a question Hazel Carby rejects, along with its long-standing assumption: that a particular type of black male can represent the race. A searing critique of definitions of black masculinity at work in American culture, Race Men shows how these defining images play out socially, culturally, and politically for black and white society—and how they exclude women altogether.
Carby begins by looking at images of black masculinity in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Her analysis of The Souls of Black Folk reveals the narrow and rigid code of masculinity that Du Bois applied to racial achievement and advancement—a code that remains implicitly but firmly in place today in the work of celebrated African American male intellectuals. The career of Paul Robeson, the music of Huddie Ledbetter, and the writings of C. L. R. James on cricket and on the Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint L’Ouverture, offer further evidence of the social and political uses of representations of black masculinity.
In the music of Miles Davis and the novels of Samuel R. Delany, Carby finds two separate but related challenges to conventions of black masculinity. Examining Hollywood films, she traces through the career of Danny Glover the development of a cultural narrative that promises to resolve racial contradictions by pairing black and white men—still leaving women out of the picture.
A powerful statement by a major voice among black feminists, Race Men holds out the hope that by understanding how society has relied upon affirmations of masculinity to resolve social and political crises, we can learn to transcend them.
From rap music to preaching, from Toni Morrison to Leonard Jeffries, from Michael Jackson to Michael Jordan, Reflecting Black explores as never before the varied and complex dimensions of African-American culture through personal reflection, expository journalism, scholarly investigation and even homily.
"A landmark text in Afro-American cultural criticism. There is simply nothing like it that exists. The level of theoretical sophistication and political engagement is rare-and badly needed." -Cornel West"As Reflecting Black so richly demonstrates, Michael Eric Dyson combines cutting-edge theoretical acuity with the passionate, engaged, and accessible stance of a public intellectual. His critical purview encompasses scholarly tomes and mass market periodicals, trends in theology and in hip-hop culture alike. This book is a splendid introduction to a singularly important voice." -Henry Louis Gates, Jr."Dyson is a young black cultural, political and religious critic whose new book directs its nastiest commentary at racism, sexism, capitalism and straight-up immorality. His is a fresh voice seemingly unfazed by Blackademe's battle royal. Dyson's project is very much in the tradition of recent work by a number of young African-American cultural critics like Tricia Rose, Hilton Als, bell hooks, Greg Tate, Wahneema Lubiano, Elizabeth Alexander and Herman Gray, to name but a few. Reflecting Black is much more than a cultural critique in the formal sense. It interrogates the political, social and moral crises confronting American society generally and African-American communities in particular. In the end, Dyson is not one of those cultural studies scholars concerned with debating the fine points of discourse theory. He is an 'oppositional' critic with a much higher purpose than developing analytical tools to make sense of African-American culture. The Reverend Dyson is not only operating within a rich Marxist tradition but within a very old and continuing African-American tradition. Black communities, through newspaper columns, church groups, street corner gatherings, beauty parlor and barber shop discussions, have always debated and taken responsibility for their culture(s). Dyson's constant lecturing, chiding and encouraging embodies what Antonio Gramsci and his own mama expected us to do all along: not just interpret culture but actively change it--through struggle." -The Nation"Where Michael Jackson meets spirituality, where Martin Luther King meets Malcolm X, where the consolidating 'narrative of racial unity' meets the 'perplexing and chaotic politics of racial identity': These are the border zones of Michael Eric Dyson's compassionate, postmodern, eclectic critical project. Reflecting Black is an invigorating reader for our perplexing and chaotic times." -Voice Literary Supplement"He shows an admirable breadth, ranging from issues such as racism and political correctness in the seminary to examinations of such icons of popular culture as filmaker Spike Lee, singer Michael Jackson and athlete Michael Jordan. One entire section of the book is devoted to black religion, and includes an examination of the lives and examples of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X." -Washington Post Book World"Yet, if Dyson stumbles in his discussions of black popular culture, he soars in his section titled 'Beyond the Mantra: Reflections on Race, Gender, and Class.' In 'Remembering Emmett Till,' Dyson writes not just with his mind, but with his heart." -Boston Globe"Yet his insights are just as often incisive and challenging, and they demand serious consideration. By insisting that we acknowledge the complexities of race in America and by refusing to accept easy answers, Reflecting Black forces us to think harder about how we can create alterna
A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2022
“Emotional range without consequence,” Negesti Kaudo writes in her debut collection, Ripe, is a privilege of whiteness. In these essays, she fights back, exhorting readers to follow her through fury, grief, love, and hope as she confronts what it means to own her Blackness and her body in contemporary America. A scathing and nuanced cultural critic, she disentangles intersections of race, class, pop culture, size, sexuality, and more in spaces where she always seems to be either too Black or not Black enough. From attending private school as a poor Black student to the evolution of her hair routine to being fat and sexual when society says she should be neither, Kaudo overlooks nothing as she names the ways that white America simultaneously denigrates and steals Black culture. Most of all, she writes against the idea that a Black woman’s anger makes her an “angry Black woman,” claiming full emotional range as her birthright and as a tool against injustice on her quest to find herself no matter how uncomfortable the journey.
Despite the recent flood of scholarly work investigating the interrelated issues of race, gender, and representation, little has been written about black women’s depictions of their own bodies. Both past and present-day American cultural discourse has attempted either to hypereroticize the black female body or make it a site of impropriety and crime.
The essays in this volume focus on how African American women, from the nineteenth century to the present, have represented their physical selves in opposition to the distorted vision of others. Contributors attempt to “recover” the black female body in two ways: they explore how dominant historical images have mediated black female identity, and they analyze how black women have resisted often demeaning popular cultural perceptions in favor of more diverse, subtle presentations of self.
The pieces in this book—all of them published here for the first time—address a wide range of topics, from antebellum American poetry to nineteenth-century African American actors, and twentieth-century pulp fiction.
Recovering the Black Female Body recognizes the pressing need to highlight through scholarship the vibrant energy of African American women’s attempts to wrest control of the physical and symbolic construction of their bodies away from the distortions of others.
Contributors are Margaret Bass, Dorri Rabung Beam, Michael Bennett, Jacqueline E. Brady, Daphne A. Brooks, Vanessa D. Dickerson, Meredith Goldsmith, Yvette Louis, Ajuan Maria Mance, Noliwe Rooks, Mark Winokur, and Doris Witt. This book also contains a foreword by Carla L. Peterson and an afterword by Deborah E. McDowell.
A bold addition to an advancing field, Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism rewrites recent black cultural production even as it uncovers unexpected ways of locating black radicalism.
Sharing a focus on reparations as an issue of justice, the contributors provide a historical primer of the movement; introduce the philosophical, political, economic, legal and ethical issues surrounding reparations; explain why government, corporations, universities, and other institutions must take steps to rehabilitate, compensate, and commemorate African Americans; call for the restoration of Black people’s human and civil rights and material and psychological well-being; lay out specific ideas about how reparations can and should be paid; and advance cutting-edge interpretations of the complex long-lasting effects that enslavement, police and vigilante actions, economic discrimination, and other behaviors have had on people of African descent.
Groundbreaking and innovative, Reparations and Reparatory Justice offers a multifaceted resource to anyone wishing to explore a defining moral issue of our time.
Contributors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Hilary McDonald Beckles, Mary Frances Berry, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Chuck Collins, Ron Daniels, V. P. Franklin, Danny Glover, Adom Gretachew, Charles Henry, Kamm Howard, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Jesse Jackson, Sr., Brian Jones, Sheila Jackson Lee, James B. Stewart, the Movement 4 Black Lives, the National African American Reparations Commission, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, the New Afrikan Peoples Organization/Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Written by activists and scholars of law, political science, African American studies, philosophy, economics, and history, the twenty-six essays include both previously published articles and pieces written specifically for this volume. Essays theorize the historical and legal bases of claims for redress; examine the history, strengths, and limitations of the reparations movement; and explore its relation to human rights and social justice movements in the United States and abroad. Other essays evaluate the movement’s primary strategies: legislation, litigation, and mobilization. While all of the contributors support the campaign for redress in one way or another, some of them engage with arguments against reparations.
Among the fifty-three primary documents included in the volume are federal, state, and municipal acts and resolutions; declarations and statements from organizations including the Black Panther Party and the NAACP; legal briefs and opinions; and findings and directives related to the provision of redress, from the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 to the mandate for the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States is a thorough assessment of the past, present, and future of the modern reparations movement.
Contributors. Richard F. America, Sam Anderson, Martha Biondi, Boris L. Bittker, James Bolner, Roy L. Brooks, Michael K. Brown, Robert S. Browne, Martin Carnoy, Chiquita Collins, J. Angelo Corlett, Elliott Currie, William A. Darity, Jr., Adrienne Davis, Michael C. Dawson, Troy Duster, Dania Frank, Robert Fullinwider, Charles P. Henry, Gerald C. Horne, Robert Johnson, Jr., Robin D. G. Kelley, Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., David Lyons, Michael T. Martin, Douglas S. Massey , Muntu Matsimela , C. J. Munford, Yusuf Nuruddin, Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Melvin L. Oliver, David B. Oppenheimer, Rovana Popoff, Thomas M. Shapiro, Marjorie M. Shultz, Alan Singer, David Wellman, David R. Williams, Eric K. Yamamoto, Marilyn Yaquinto
Winner of the 2010 Booker Worthen Literary Prize, and the 2009 Ragsdale Award.
From the Civil War to Reconstruction, the Redeemer period, Jim Crow, and the modern civil rights era to the present, Ruled by Race describes the ways that race has been at the center of much of the state’s formation and image since its founding. Grif Stockley uses the work of published and unpublished historians and exhaustive primary source materials along with stories from authors as diverse as Maya Angelou and E. Lynn Harris to bring to life the voices of those who have both studied and lived the racial experience in Arkansas.
Topics range from the well-known Little Rock Central High Crisis of 1957 to lesser-known events such as the Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 and the shocking yet sadly commonplace attitudes found in newspaper reports and speeches. Through the words of the most powerful Arkansans such as racist Arkansas Govenor Jeff Davis (1901–1906) to the least powerful, including an unflinching look at the narratives of former slaves, readers will come away with increased awareness of the ways that race continues to affect where Arkansans live, send their children to school, work, travel, shop, spend leisure time, worship, and choose their friends and life partners.
Reimagining the Educated Citizen contends that the constructs of public education and citizenship in the struggle to constitute a U.S. national identity are inseparable from the simultaneous emergence of transatlantic constructs of an educated citizen along transnational and transracial lines. The nineteenth century is commonly understood as the age of nationalism and nation formation in which the Anglo-Protestant Common School movement takes center stage in the production of the American democratic citizen. Ironically, the argument for public, Common Schools privileged whiteness instead of equality. This book suggests that an alternative vision of the relationship between education and citizenship emerged from a larger transatlantic history. Given shape by the movement of people, ideas, commodities, and practices across the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi Valley, this radical egalitarian vision emerged at the crossroads of the Atlantic-colonial and antebellum Louisiana.
Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Reader documents the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, when SNCC and CORE workers and volunteers arrived in the Deep South to register voters and teach non-violence, and more than 60,000 black Mississippians risked everything to overturn a system that had brutally exploited them.
In the 44 original documents in this anthology, you’ll read their letters, eavesdrop on their meetings, shudder at their suffering, and admire their courage. You’ll witness the final hours of three workers murdered on the project’s first day, hear testimony by black residents who bravely stood up to police torture and Klan firebombs, and watch the liberal establishment betray them.
These vivid primary sources, collected by the Wisconsin Historical Society, provide both first-hand accounts of this astounding grassroots struggle as well as a broader understanding of the Civil Rights movement.
The selected documents are among the 25,000 pages about the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society. The manuscripts were collected in the mid-1960s, at a time when few other institutions were interested in saving the stories of common people in McComb or Ruleville, Mississippi. Most have never been published before.
In Remembering Emmett Till, Dave Tell gives us five accounts of the commemoration of this infamous crime. In a development no one could have foreseen, Till’s murder—one of the darkest moments in the region’s history—has become an economic driver for the Delta. Historical tourism has transformed seemingly innocuous places like bridges, boat landings, gas stations, and riverbeds into sites of racial politics, reminders of the still-unsettled question of how best to remember the victim of this heinous crime. Tell builds an insightful and persuasive case for how these memorials have altered the Delta’s physical and cultural landscape, drawing potent connections between the dawn of the civil rights era and our own moment of renewed fire for racial justice.
In addition to his previously published articles, Kremer includes a personal introduction revealing how he first became interested in researching African American history and how his education at Lincoln University--and specifically the influence of his mentor, Lorenzo Greene--helped him to realize his eventual career path. Race and Meaning makes a collection of largely unheard stories spanning much of Missouri history accessible for the first time in one place, allowing each article to be read in the context of the others, and creating a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts. Whether you are a student, researcher, or general reader, this book will be essential to anyone with an interest in Missouri history.
Throughout the twentieth century, millions of African Americans, many from impoverished, historically black counties, left the South to pursue what they thought would be a better life in the North. But not everyone moved away during what scholars have termed the Great Migration. What has life been like for those who stayed? Why would they remain in a place that many outsiders would see as grim, depressed, economically marginal, and where racial prejudice continues to place them at a disadvantage?
Through oral history William Falk tells the story of an extended family in the Georgia-South Carolina lowcountry. Family members talk about schooling, relatives, work, religion, race, and their love of the place where they have lived for generations. This “conversational ethnography” argues that an interconnection between race and place in the area helps explain African Americans’ loyalty to it. In Colonial County, blacks historically enjoyed a numerical majority as well as deep cultural roots and longstanding webs of social connections that, Falk finds, more than outweigh the racism they face and the economic disadvantages they suffer.
All young people need good role models, and black youth especially need positive and real examples beyond the famous and wealthy people they see on SportsCenter highlights and MTV Cribs. While success as a celebrity athlete or entertainer may seem like an achievable dream, the reality is that young African Americans have a much greater chance of succeeding in the professions through education and hard work—and a mentor to show them the path. Real Role Models introduces high school and college-age African Americans to twenty-three black professionals who have achieved a high level of success in their chosen fields and who tell their stories to inspire young people to pursue a professional career and do the work necessary to achieve their dreams.
Some of the individuals profiled by Joah Spearman and Louis Harrison, Jr., include Leonard Pitts, Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the Miami Herald; Melody Barnes, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council; Danyel Smith, editor-in-chief of Vibe; and Dr. Tim George, Chief of Pediatric Neuroscience at Dell Children's Medical Center of Central Texas. They and other interviewees describe their backgrounds, career paths, and desire to give back by helping others reach their goals. Representing a wide range of occupations, these real role models prove to African American youths that a whole world of successful, rewarding careers awaits them.
The Real Role Models
- Rufus Cormier, JD, Partner at the Baker Botts Law Firm, Houston, Texas
- Melody Barnes, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, Washington, D.C.
- Eric Motley, PhD, Managing Director of the Aspen Institute's Henry Crown Fellowship Program, Aspen, Colorado
- James McIntyre, Spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, D.C.
- Tracie Hall, Assistant Dean and Librarian at Dominican University, River Forest, Illinois
- Kimberlydawn Wisdom, MD, Surgeon General of the State of Michigan, Lansing, Michigan
- Timothy George, MD, Chief of Pediatric Neuroscience at Dell Children's Medical Center, Austin, Texas
- Victoria Holloway Barbosa, MD, Ethnic Dermatologist and Former Executive for L'Oreal, Chicago, Illinois
- Bill Douglas, White House Correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, Washington, D.C.
- Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for the Miami Herald, Miami, Florida
- Danyel Smith, Editor of Vibe Magazine, New York, New York
- Ed Stewart, Managing Director of External Communications for Delta Airlines, Atlanta, Georgia
- Lynn Tyson, Vice President of Investor Relations for Dell, Austin, Texas
- Willie Miles, Jr., Founder and CEO of Miles Wealth Management, Houston, Texas
- Horace Allen, Founder and CEO of TeamPact, Atlanta, Georgia
- Deavra Daughtry, President and CEO of Excellent Care Management, Houston, Texas
- Je'Caryous Johnson, Founder and CEO of I'm Ready Productions, Houston, Texas
- Steve Jones, Cofounder of a graphic design company, Oakland, California
- Isiah Warner, PhD, Chemistry Professor at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
- Gloria Ladson-Billings, PhD, Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
- Bernard Muir, Athletic Director at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
- Craig Littlepage, Athletic Director at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
- Beverly Kearney, Women's Track Coach at the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
The first-born daughter of emancipated slaves, Lucile refused to be defined by the racist and sexist climate of her times, settling on a career path in teaching that required great courage in the face of pernicious Jim Crow laws. Embracing her sister’s dream for higher education and W. E. B. Du Bois’s ideology, she placed education and intelligence at the forefront of her life, teaching in places where she could most benefit African American students. Over her 105 years she was an eyewitness to spectacular, inspiring, and tragic moments in American history, including horrific lynchings and systemic racism in housing and business opportunities, as well as the success of women's suffrage and Black-owned businesses and educational institutions.
Remembering Lucile employs a unique blend of Black feminist historiography and wider discussions of race, gender, class, religion, politics, and education to illuminate major events in African American history and culture, as well as the history of the University of Colorado and its relationship to Black students and alumni, as it has evolved from institutional racism to welcoming acceptance. This extensive biography paints a vivid picture of a strong, extraordinary Black woman who witnessed an extraordinary time in America and rectifies her omission from CU’s institutional history. The book fills an important gap in the literature of the history of Blacks in the Rocky Mountain region and will be of significance to anyone interested in American history.
Media:
Denver Post
Daily Camera
Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine
The subtle and profound connections between revolutions and the idea of equality are at the heart of this exploration in the history of ideas. Beginning with America’s response to the French Revolution and the wars of liberation in Latin America, David Brion Davis poses the intriguing question of why the United States, born in revolution, has fluctuated between fears of a revolutionary world and a joyous expectation that foreign liberations signal the Americanization of the globe.
Before the Civil War, the question of slavery helped to define the way Americans looked at revolutions in terms of equality, for it was equality, and not liberty, that was the true antithesis of “the peculiar institution.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, foreign revolutions were closely tied to messianic aspirations and internal reform. Industrialization, political revolution, and dreams of equality and social justice went hand in hand. Writing in the grand style of Burke, Yale’s distinguished scholar of comparative history forces us to think once more about our revolutionary heritage and its tangled web of liberty, equality, and evil.
Reading the Early Republic focuses attention on the forgotten dynamism of thought in the founding era. In every case, the documents, novels, pamphlets, sermons, journals, and slave narratives of the early American nation are richer and more intricate than modern readers have perceived.
Rebellion, slavery, and treason--the mingled stories of the Revolution--still haunt national thought. Robert Ferguson shows that the legacy that made the country remains the idea of what it is still trying to become. He cuts through the pervading nostalgia about national beginnings to recapture the manic-depressive tones of its first expression. He also has much to say about the reconfiguration of charity in American life, the vital role of the classical ideal in projecting an unthinkable continental republic, the first manipulations of the independent American woman, and the troubled integration of civic and commercial understandings in the original claims of prosperity as national virtue.
Reading the Early Republic uses the living textual tradition against history to prove its case. The first formative writings are more than sacred artifacts. They remain the touchstones of the durable promise and the problems in republican thought
How General Washington Avoided the Peril From Within His Own Forces
"It gives me great pain to be obliged to solicit the attention of the honorable Congress to the state of the army...the greater part of the army is in a state not far from mutiny...I know not to whom to impute this failure, but I am of the opinion, if the evil is not immediately remedied and more punctuality observed in future, the army must absolutely break up."—George Washington, September 1775
Mutiny has always been a threat to the integrity of armies, particularly under trying circumstances, and since Concord and Lexington, mutiny had been the Continental Army's constant traveling companion. It was not because the soldiers lacked resolve to overturn British rule or had a lack of faith in their commanders. It was the scarcity of food—during winter months it was not uncommon for soldiers to subsist on a soup of melted snow, a few peas, and a scrap of fat—money, clothing, and proper shelter, that forced soldiers to desert or organize resistance. Mutiny was not a new concept for George Washington. During his service in the French and Indian War he had tried men under his command for the offense and he knew that disaffection and lack of morale in an army was a greater danger than an armed enemy.
In Rebellion in the Ranks: Mutinies of the American Revolution, John A. Nagy provides one of the most original and valuable contributions to American Revolutionary War history in recent times. Mining previously ignored British and American primary source documents and reexamining other period writings, Nagy has corrected misconceptions about known events, such as the Pennsylvania Line Mutiny, while identifying for the first time previously unknown mutinies. Covering both the army and the navy, Nagy relates American officers' constant struggle to keep up the morale of their troops, while highlighting British efforts to exploit this potentially fatal flaw.
Recollections of the Revolution did not always take today's form. In this lively collection of essays, historians and literary scholars consider how the first three generations of American citizens interpreted their nation's origins. The volume introduces readers to a host of individuals and groups both well known and obscure, from Molly Pitcher and "forgotten father" John Dickinson to African American Baptists in Georgia and antebellum pacifists. They show how the memory of the Revolution became politicized early in the nation's history, as different interests sought to harness its meaning for their own ends. No single faction succeeded, and at the outbreak of the Civil War the American people remained divided over how to remember the Revolution.
The Marquis de Lafayette and the French Navy join Nathanael Green, John Sullivan, and a Continental Army to Attach a British Stronghold in New England
On July 29, 1778, a powerful French naval squadron sailed confidently to the entrance of Narragansett Bay. Its appearance commenced the first joint French and American campaign of the Revolutionary War. The new allies’ goal was to capture the British garrison at Newport, Rhode Island. With British resolve reeling from the striking patriot victory at Saratoga the previous autumn, this French and American effort might just end the war.
As the French moved into the bay, surprised British captains scuttled or burned many of their vessels rather than risk capture, resulting in the most significant loss of warships suffered by the British navy during the war. French Admiral Comte d’Estaing then turned to sea to engage the main British fleet but his ships were scattered and damaged by a huge storm. After his flagship and two other ships were attacked, d’Estaing’s squadron was taken out of the campaign. The American army under General John Sullivan, meanwhile, was stranded on a small island near Newport without the expected French naval support. When they tried to retreat off the island, British and Hessian regulars were sent to destroy Sullivan’s army; instead of a rout, a running battle ensued that lasted for more than six hours. Continentals, brimming with confidence after their training during the winter of Valley Forge, once more proved that they were an effective fighting force. While the Rhode Island Campaign ended in failure for the Americans and French, there were positive signs for the future of the alliance and the Revolution.
The Rhode Island Campaign: The First French and American Operation of the Revolutionary War unravels one of the most complex and multi-faceted events of the war, one which combined land and sea strategies and featured controversial decisions on both sides. Many prominent patriots participated, including Nathanael Greene, Marquis de Lafayette, John Hancock, and Paul Revere. Most important, while the campaign’s failure led to harsh criticism of the French in some quarters, leaders such as Greene, Lafayette, and George Washington steadfastly worked to ensure that the alliance would remain intact, knowing that the next joint operation could well succeed. Relying on in-depth research from American, French, British, and German original sources, author Christian McBurney has written the most authoritative book on this fascinating episode in American history.
"In a book fairly bursting with feats of daring, perhaps the most spectacular accomplishment of them all is this volume's transformation of its readers into the grandchildren of Revolutionary War soldiers. . . . An amazing gathering of 79 surrogate Yankee grandparents who tell us in their own words what they saw with their own eyes."—Elaine F. Weiss, Christian Science Monitor
"Fascinating. . . . [The soldiers'] details fill in significant shadows of history."—Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times
"It's still good fun two centuries later, overhearing these experiences of the tumult of everyday life and seeing a front-lines view of one of the most unusual armies ever to fight, let alone win."—Richard Martin, Wall Street Journal
"One of the most important primary source discoveries from the era. A unique and fresh perspective."—Paul G. Levine, Los Angeles Times
“Among the many events which took place during the Revolutionary War from its commencement to its termination [are] the cruelties inflicted upon that unfortunate class of men who had the misfortune to be numbered among the prisoners [of the British] and more particularly those whom the dreadful chance of war had placed on board their prison ships at New York.” So begins the remarkable narrative of Thomas Dring. In 1824, Dring was an aging man of 65, retired in his native state of Rhode Island. Forty-two years before, he, like thousands of other young men, had been caught up in the American cause. In 1782, he had been captured by the British and sentenced to the infamous prison ship Jersey, a demasted hulk anchored in the East River off New York City. It is estimated that more than 11,000 men perished on the British prison ships over the course of the war, and their bones regularly washed up on the shore long after hostilities ceased. Dring survived to tell the tale, and in 1824, he decided to do just that. He was motivated partly because the fate of the prisoners was beginning to be doubted, that their hardships were thought to have been grossly exaggerated, and even that the entire experience had never occurred.
This book publishes for the first time the complete text of Dring’s handwritten manuscript, a major primary-source document, in which he describes the horrible conditions, treatment by guards, and experiences that he and others endured during captivity. Recollections of Life on the Prison Ship Jersey is a plea not to forget but instead to remember the inhumanity of the captors and the sacrifices of the captives—a message that continues to resonate today. Editor David Swain has provided an introductory essay and extensive notes that contain background information and historical documentation to accompany and illuminate the original manuscript.
The first full account of the relationship between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, countering the legend of their enmity while drawing vital historical lessons from the differences that arose between them.
Martha Washington’s worst memory was the death of her husband. Her second worst was Thomas Jefferson’s awkward visit to pay his respects subsequently. Indeed, by the time George Washington had died in 1799, the two founders were estranged. But that estrangement has obscured the fact that for most of their thirty-year acquaintance they enjoyed a productive relationship. Precisely because they shared so much, their disagreements have something important to teach us.
In constitutional design, for instance: Whereas Washington believed in the rule of traditional elites like the Virginia gentry, Jefferson preferred what we would call a meritocratic approach, by which elites would be elected on the basis of education and skills. And while Washington emphasized a need for strong central government, Jefferson favored diffusion of power across the states. Still, as Francis Cogliano argues, common convictions equally defined their relationship: a passion for American independence and republican government, as well as a commitment to westward expansion and the power of commerce. They also both evolved a skeptical view of slavery, eventually growing to question the institution, even as they took only limited steps to abolish it.
What remains fascinating is that the differences between the two statesmen mirrored key political fissures of the early United States, as the unity of revolutionary zeal gave way to competing visions for the new nation. A Revolutionary Friendship brilliantly captures the dramatic, challenging, and poignant reality that there was no single founding ideal—only compromise between friends and sometime rivals.
In August 1812, under threat from the Potawatomi, Captain Nathan Heald began the evacuation of ninety-four people from the isolated outpost of Fort Dearborn to Fort Wayne. The group included several dozen soldiers, as well as nine women and eighteen children. After traveling only a mile and a half, they were attacked by five hundred Potawatomi warriors. In under an hour, fifty-two members of Heald’s party were killed, and the rest were taken prisoner; the Potawatomi then burned Fort Dearborn before returning to their villages.
On the morning of January 19, 1847, Charles Bent, the newly appointed governor of the American-claimed territory of New Mexico, was savagely killed at his home in Don Fernando de Taos, a small, remote town located north of Santa Fe. Those responsible for Bent’s murder were New Mexican settlers and Indians from nearby Taos Pueblo who refused to recognize the United States occupation. With emotions rubbed raw, the natives continued their bloodbath until five more leading citizens were massacred in Taos. During the ensuing months, American civilians and soldiers, along with scores of New Mexicans and Taos Indians, were killed and wounded throughout the region. Less than a month following Bent’s murder, in a two-day battle, volunteer and regular elements of an American army under the command of Colonel Sterling Price emerged victorious after bombarding the insurrectionists at their refuge in the church at Taos Pueblo. Surviving participants in the earlier Taos murders were arrested, tried in American-dominated courts, and, within weeks, hanged for their actions. The murder of Bent and the others at Taos and the subsequent trials and executions brought with them misunderstanding, controversy, mistrust, and recrimination on both sides of the issue. The events also subjected President James K. Polk’s administration to censure over what some critics believed was an overextension of presidential authority in claiming New Mexico as a territory.
In Revolt at Taos: The New Mexican and Indian Insurrection of 1847, writer and historian James A. Crutchfield explores the fast-moving events surrounding the bloody revolt which left native inhabitants of New Mexico wondering how their neighbors and kinsmen could be legally tried, found guilty, and executed for acts they considered to have been honorable ones committed in defense of their country. These concerns have never been adequately addressed and their struggle has been all but scrubbed from the history of American expansion.
Major John Henshaw, a dutiful regimental officer in the American invasion of Mexico, was one of only a handful of eyewitnesses to describe the two major theaters of that war from start to finish. But unlike most of his peers, he did not see himself as a conquering warrior and took pride in never having taken a life. He even wrote, “If I were alone, no earthly power could induce me to lend a helping hand in this base and infamous war.”
This book presents Henshaw’s recollections for the first time, covering all the action from the first skirmish in southern Texas to the collapse of Mexico City. As a member of the Seventh Infantry Regiment, this pugnacious line officer from New England served under both of the war’s principal generals, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, and survived seven major battles. His writings constitute a virtual “minority opinion” report on the Mexican War.
Henshaw’s recollections include a rare and highly descriptive account of the siege of Fort Texas (later Fort Brown), plus rich new details of the storming of the Bishop’s Palace at Monterrey, the bombardment of Veracruz, the assault on Cerro Gordo, and the savage fighting outside the capital. His records of battles, marches, and maneuvers greatly augment what is already known about the campaign, but in addition to reporting daily occurrences and describing combat in graphic detail, Henshaw also reflected on the strategies and tactics—and what he saw as shortcomings—of officers on both sides.
Bitingly critical of those in command, of American volunteers, and of the war’s glory hounds, Henshaw admired the valor of ordinary soldiers on both sides of the fighting. And in the midst of the carnage, he also found time to describe Mexico’s cities and scenery in rhapsodic prose and express considerable empathy for its people. In addition to the “Recollections,” the volume includes vivid passages from letters Henshaw sent back to his wife, which supply additional details of the campaign. Editor Gary Kurutz provides an extensive biography of Henshaw, as well as comprehensive annotations to the text.
What Henshaw may have lacked as an unquestioning officer he more than made up for as an astute observer. Offering a decidedly different view of this war of American expansion, these writings with their balanced approach lend a fresh perspective among other primary sources and paint a startlingly honest picture of both Americans fighting abroad and those they fought.
In this ambitious project, historian Katrina Thompson examines the conceptualization and staging of race through the performance, sometimes coerced, of black dance from the slave ship to the minstrel stage. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, Thompson explicates how black musical performance was used by white Europeans and Americans to justify enslavement, perpetuate the existing racial hierarchy, and mask the brutality of the domestic slave trade. Whether on slave ships, at the auction block, or on plantations, whites often used coerced performances to oppress and demean the enslaved.
As Thompson shows, however, blacks' "backstage" use of musical performance often served quite a different purpose. Through creolization and other means, enslaved people preserved some native musical and dance traditions and invented or adopted new traditions that built community and even aided rebellion.
Thompson shows how these traditions evolved into nineteenth-century minstrelsy and, ultimately, raises the question of whether today's mass media performances and depictions of African Americans are so very far removed from their troublesome roots.
Against a smoldering backdrop of violence, this study analyzes the various degrees of slave resistance--from the perspectives of both slave and master--and how they differed in various regions of antebellum Florida. In particular, Rivers demonstrates how the Atlantic world view of some enslaved blacks successfully aided their escape to freedom, a path that did not always lead North but sometimes farther South to the Bahama Islands and Caribbean. Identifying more commonly known slave rebellions such as the Stono, Louisiana, Denmark (Telemaque) Vesey, Gabriel, and the Nat Turner insurrections, Rivers argues persuasively that the size, scope, and intensity of black resistance in the Second Seminole War makes it the largest sustained slave insurrection ever to occur in American history.
Meticulously researched, Rebels and Runaways offers a detailed account of resistance, protest, and violence as enslaved blacks fought for freedom.
Winner of the SHEAR Book Prize
Honorable Mention, Avery O. Craven Award
“Few books have captured the lived experience of slavery as powerfully.”
—Ari Kelman, Times Literary Supplement
“[One] of the most impressive works of American history in many years.”
—The Nation
“An important, arguably seminal, book…Always trenchant and learned.”
—Wall Street Journal
A landmark history, by the author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The Broken Heart of America, that shows how slavery fueled Southern capitalism.
When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an “empire for liberty” populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves. River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reconsideration dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War.
Walter Johnson deftly traces the connections between the planters’ pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency. Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of daily life under cotton’s dark dominion. We meet the confidence men and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a global scale.
But at the center of the story are the enslaved people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the cotton—who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of the American dream.
“Shows how the Cotton Kingdom of the 19th-century Deep South, far from being a backward outpost of feudalism, was a dynamic engine of capitalist expansion built on enslaved labor.”
—A. O. Scott, New York Times
“River of Dark Dreams delivers spectacularly on the long-standing mission to write ‘history from the bottom up.’”
—Maya Jasanoff, New York Review of Books
Northampton's abolitionists were a heterodox group, yet most were intrepid devotees of democracy and racial equality, idealists who enjoyed genuine friendships and political alliances with African Americans. Several even took the bold step of hiring African Americans in their businesses. They avoided the doctrinal rivalries that sometimes troubled the antislavery movement in other places, skillfully steering clear of the xenophobic nativism that infected Massachusetts politics in the mid–1850s and divided the Republican Party at large. Although a prohibitionist faction disrupted the Northampton abolitionist movement for a time, the leaders prevailed on the strength of their personal prestige and political experience, making the seat of Hampshire County what one of them called an abolitionist "stronghold."
Through extensive reading and reflection, Abraham Lincoln fashioned a mind as powerfully intellectual and superlatively communicative as that of any other American political leader. Reading with Lincoln uncovers the how of Lincoln’s inspiring rise to greatness by connecting the content of his reading to the story of his life.
At the core of Lincoln’s success was his self-education, centered on his love of and appreciation for learning through books. From his early studies of grammar school handbooks and children’s classics to his interest in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the Bible during his White House years, what Lincoln read helped to define who he was as a person and as a politician. This unique study delves into the books, pamphlets, poetry, plays, and essays that influenced Lincoln’s thoughts and actions.
Exploring in great depth and detail those readings that inspired the sixteenth president, author Robert Bray follows Lincoln’s progress closely, from the young teen composing letters for illiterate friends and neighbors to the politician who keenly employed what he read to advance his agenda. Bray analyzes Lincoln’s radical period in New Salem, during which he came under the influence of Anglo-American and French Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Paine, C. F. Volney, and Voltaire, and he investigates Lincoln’s appreciation of nineteenth-century lyric poetry, which he both read and wrote. Bray considers Lincoln’s fascination with science, mathematics, political economics, liberal social philosophy, theology, and the Bible, and devotes special attention to Lincoln’s enjoyment of American humor. While striving to arrive at an understanding of the role each subject played in the development of this remarkable leader, Bray also examines the connections and intertextual relations between what Lincoln read and how he wrote and spoke.
This comprehensive and long-awaited book provides fresh insight into the self-made man from the wilderness of Illinois. Bray offers a new way to approach the mind of the political artist who used his natural talent, honed by years of rhetorical study and practice, to abolish slavery and end the Civil War.
The larger-than-life image Abraham Lincoln projects across the screen of American history owes much to his role as the Great Emancipator during the Civil War. Yet this noble aspect of Lincoln’s identity is precisely the dimension that some historians have cast into doubt. In a vigorous defense of America’s sixteenth president, award-winning historian and Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo refutes accusations of Lincoln’s racism and political opportunism, while candidly probing the follies of contemporary cynicism and the constraints of today’s unexamined faith in the liberating powers of individual autonomy.
Redeeming the Great Emancipator enumerates Lincoln’s anti-slavery credentials, showing that a deeply held belief in the God-given rights of all people steeled the president in his commitment to emancipation and his hope for racial reconciliation. Emancipation did not achieve complete freedom for American slaves, nor was Lincoln entirely above some of the racial prejudices of his time. Nevertheless, his conscience and moral convictions far outweighed political calculations in ultimately securing freedom for black Americans.
Guelzo clarifies the historical record concerning what the Emancipation Proclamation did and did not accomplish. As a policy it was imperfect, but it was far from ineffectual, as some accounts of African American self-emancipation imply. To achieve liberation required interdependence across barriers of race and status. If we fail to recognize our debt to the sacrifices and ingenuity of all the brave men and women of the past, Guelzo says, then we deny a precious part of the American and, indeed, the human community.
Naval hero for all the South, Raphael Semmes (1809-1877) sailed two famous Confederate raiders. He outfitted CSS Sumter in 1861 and captured 18 Union merchant ships in six months before the raider was blockaded at Gibraltar. Next he took command of CSS Alabama, an English-built raider, and terrorized U.S. merchant vessels on the high seas from August 1862 until the raider was sunk in battle off Cherbourg in June 1864. During that two-year period, he captured more enemy merchant ships than any other cruiser captain in maritime history. He is considered one of the greatest ship's commanders that America has produced.
In this first, full-scale biography that relies on Semmes's private papers, unpublished diaries, and correspondence, Spencer has produced a well-balanced and comprehensive account of the man, as well as the naval officer. The biographer paints a vivid portrait of Semmes—the intellectual, the family man, lawyer, romanticist, nationalist—providing a greater understanding of the man behind the heroic deeds.
Semmes was born in Maryland to a slave-holding family and entered the United States Navy in 1826. In 1849, he moved his family to Mobile, Alabama, to be near the navy base at Pensacola, Florida, and to practice law during leaves. Semmes was an astute student, not only of international and maritime law but also of weather patterns; astronomy; flora and fauna; naval, social, and cultural history; and the classics. His study of constitutional law led him to side with his adopted state in 1861, a move that set the stage for his place in history.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
Winner of the Merle Curti award
Winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize
No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion.In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. The ensuing decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble men of the Blue and the Gray. Nearly lost in national culture were the moral crusades over slavery that ignited the war, the presence and participation of African Americans throughout the war, and the promise of emancipation that emerged from the war. Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial.
Blight's sweeping narrative of triumph and tragedy, romance and realism, is a compelling tale of the politics of memory, of how a nation healed from civil war without justice. By the early twentieth century, the problems of race and reunion were locked in mutual dependence, a painful legacy that continues to haunt us today.
The Civil War thrust millions of men and women-rich and poor, soldiers and civilians, enslaved and free-onto the roads of the South. During four years of war, Southerners lived on the move. In the hands of Yael A. Sternhell, movement becomes a radically new means to perceive the full trajectory of the Confederacy's rise, struggle, and ultimate defeat.
By focusing not only on the battlefield and the home front but also on the roads and woods that connected the two, this pioneering book investigates the many roles of bodies in motion. We watch battalions of young men as they march to the front, galvanizing small towns along the way, creating the Confederate nation in the process. We follow deserters straggling home and refugees fleeing enemy occupation, both hoping to escape the burdens of war. And in a landscape turned upside down, we see slaves running toward freedom, whether hundreds of miles away or just beyond the plantation's gate.
Based on a vast array of documents, from slave testimonies to the papers of Confederate bureaucrats to the private letters of travelers from all walks of life, Sternhell unearths the hidden connections between physical movements and their symbolic meanings, individual bodies and entire armies, the reinvention of a social order and the remaking of private lives. Movement, as means of liberation and as vehicle of subjugation, lay at the heart of the human condition in the wartime South.
No aspect of Civil War military lore has received less scholarly attention than the battle cry of the Southern soldier. In The Rebel Yell, Craig A. Warren brings together soldiers' memoirs, little-known articles, and recordings to create a fascinating and exhaustive exploration of the facts and myths about the “Southern screech.”
Through close readings of numerous accounts, Warren demonstrates that the Rebel yell was not a single, unchanging call, but rather it varied from place to place, evolved over time, and expressed nuanced shades of emotion. A multifunctional act, the flexible Rebel yell was immediately recognizable to friends and foes but acquired new forms and purposes as the epic struggle wore on. A Confederate regiment might deliver the yell in harrowing unison to taunt Union troops across the empty spaces of a battlefield. At other times, individual soldiers would call out solo or in call-and-response fashion to communicate with or secure the perimeters of their camps.
The Rebel yell could embody unity and valor, but could also become the voice of racism and hatred. Perhaps most surprising, The Rebel Yell reveals that from Reconstruction through the first half of the twentieth century, the Rebel yell—even more than the Confederate battle flag—served as the most prominent and potent symbol of white Southern defiance of Federal authority. With regard to the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Warren shows that the yell has served the needs of people the world over: soldiers and civilians, politicians and musicians, re-enactors and humorists, artists and businessmen. Warren dismantles popular assumptions about the Rebel yell as well as the notion that the yell was ever “lost to history.”
Both scholarly and accessible, The Rebel Yell contributes to our knowledge of Civil War history and public memory. It shows the centrality of voice and sound to any reckoning of Southern culture.
less understood, or, to state the case more accurately, more persistently
misunderstood, than any other engagement . . . during the entire rebellion.”
In Rethinking Shiloh, Timothy B. Smith seeks to rectify these persistent
myths and misunderstandings, arguing that some of Shiloh’s story is either
not fully examined or has been the result of a limited and narrow collective
memory established decades ago. Continuing the work he began in The
Untold Story of Shiloh, Smith delves even further into the story of Shiloh
and examines in detail how the battle has been treated in historiography and
public opinion.
The nine essays in this collection uncover new details about the
battle, correct some of the myths surrounding it, and reveal new avenues of
exploration. The topics range from a compelling analysis and description of
the last hours of General Albert Sidney Johnston to the effect of the New
Deal on Shiloh National Military Park and, subsequently, our understanding
of the battle. Smith’s careful analyses and research bring attention to
the many relatively unexplored parts of Shiloh such as the terrain, the
actual route of Lew Wallace’s march, and post-battle developments that
affect currently held perceptions of thatfamed clash between Union and
Confederate armies in West Tennessee.
Studying Shiloh should alert readers and historians to the likelihood
of misconceptions in other campaigns and wars—including today’s military
conflicts. By reevaluating aspects of the Battle of Shiloh often ignored by
military historians, Smith’s book makes significant steps toward a more
complete understanding and appreciation of the Shiloh campaign in all of its
ramifications.
Large numbers of Civil War veterans remembered and reminisced about their war experiences, but only a relative few dedicated the rest of their lives to the task of commemorating their long-ago deeds. John S. Kountz was one of this latter group. Kountz joined the Thirty-seventh Ohio Infantry in September 1861 as a fifteen-year-old drummer boy and later, under General William T. Sherman, endured the long siege at Vicksburg before helping to win control of the city in July 1863. In 1899 the War Department appointed Kountz as the official historian at the newly designated Vicksburg National Military Park. As part of his duties, he produced two major works, an organizational chronicle of the armies that fought at Vicksburg and an unpublished narrative of the campaign and siege. This welcome volume presents both of these extremely rare documents together for the first time, providing a valuable resource for a new generation of scholars and enthusiasts.
Record of the Organizations Engaged in the Campaign, Siege, and Defense of Vicksburg was published in a limited edition by the Government Printing Office in 1901 and offered visitors and historians a detailed examination of the various commands that fought at Vicksburg. The record has long been an essential but hard-to-find source for historians. Kountz’s impressive 116-page campaign overview is rarer still. Because of turnover at the park and Kountz’s death in 1909, the manuscript never saw publication and has, until now, lain buried in the archives at Vicksburg. Offering an unbiased account of both sides of the battle, it delves into the minds of the commanders, examines their decision-making processes, and articulates several opinions that have sparked debate ever since.
With a new introduction by noted historian Timothy B. Smith, this significant work makes widely available an important history by a participant in the action and opens a fascinating window into the history of Civil War scholarship.
In the expansive canon of Civil War memoirs, relatively few accounts from women exist. Among the most engaging and informative of these rare female perspectives is Constance Cary Harrison’s Recollections Grave and Gay, a lively, first-person account of the collapse of the Confederacy by the wife of President Jefferson Davis’s private secretary. Although equal in literary merit to the well-known and widely available diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut and Eliza Frances Andrews, Harrison’s memoir failed to remain in print after its original publication in 1916 and, as a result, has been lost to all but the most diligent researcher. In Refugitta of Richmond, Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and S. Kittrell Rushing resurrect Harrison’s work, reintroducing an especially insightful perspective on the Southern high command, the home front, and the Confederate elite.
Born into an old, aristocratic Virginia family in 1843, Constance Cary fled with her family from their estate near Alexandria, Virginia, to Richmond in 1862. There, the nineteen-year-old met Burton Norvell Harrison, a young math professor from the University of Mississippi who had come to the Confederate capital to work for Davis. The pair soon became engaged and joined the inner circle of military, political, and social leaders at the Confederate White House. Under the pen name “Refugitta,” Constance also wrote newspaper columns about the war and became a respected member of Richmond’s literary community.
Fifty years later, Constance used her wartime diaries and letters to pen her recollections of her years in Richmond and of the confusing months immediately after the war. She offers lucid, insightful, and detailed observations of the Confederate home front even as she reflects on the racial and class biases characteristic of her time and station. With an informative introduction and thorough annotations by Hughes and Rushing, Refugitta of Richmond provides a highly readable, often amusing, occasionally troubling insider’s look at the Confederate nerve center and its ultimate demise.
Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. is the author or editor of twenty books relating to the American Civil War, including The Life and Wars of Gideon J. Pillow; Brigadier General Tyree H. Bell, C.S.A.: Forrest’s Fighting Lieutenant; and Yale’s Confederates.
S. Kittrell Rushing, Frank McDonald Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, is the editor of Eliza Frances Andrews’s A Family Secret and Journal of a Georgia Woman, 1870–1872. Rushing also edited and annotated Judge Garnett Andrews’s Reminiscences of an Old Georgia Lawyer.
The Photographic Record of the First Wide-Scale Mechanization of War
Over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, America would find itself following two increasingly divergent tracks: an industrialized North and an agricultural South. By 1860 railroads were firmly entrenched in our culture, reshaping our cities and steering us through the industrial age towards worldwide prominence. From sleepy post towns to the largest east coast cities, the distant hooting of the locomotive whistle drew ever closer and louder, filling listeners with fascination while brightening the eyes of profit-driven industrialists. But this admirable invention, lavishly adorned in brass and iron trimmings, was about to take on a new and deadly role. America’s regional differences would result in a spectacular collision over slavery, and between 1861–1865, the nation fought a savage war. The “iron horse” became a major weapon in the first war fully dependent on railroads. Moreover railroads would escalate and prolong the war, leading to its terrible carnage. Trains were used to move troops rapidly and over great distances, completely changing military strategy. Trains were also used as mobile artillery, armed with large-caliber cannons that could pound cities and fortifications. Trains were a crucial means for supplying the armies on both sides, and it was the severing of the railway lines providing food and munitions to the Army of Northern Virginia that led to Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House.
In Railroads of the Civil War: An Illustrated History, Michael Leavy uses compelling period photographs and drawings and a rich narrative to reevaluate and illuminate the role of railroads in the Civil War. In addition to identifying details about the various trains and ancillary equipment and buildings in the illustrations, the author explains how trains influenced the outcome of battles and the war in general.
When one thinks of the American Civil War, such names as Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and Chancellorsville come immediately to mind. Few recall the battles in the Trans-Mississippi theater.
Rugged and Sublime goes a long way toward filling regrettable blanks in our memory of Arkansas’s role in Civil War. It explore the major clashes and locales of the war, including the state secession convention, seizure of the Little Rock Arsenal, the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, the Pea Ridge campaign, Marmaduke’s invasion of Missouri, the Battle of Helena, and the fall of Little Rock, as well as other actions. Rounding out this new and very readable account are studies of the devolution of Arkansas society when bands of guerillas and jayhawkers menaced the state, the surrender of the Confederate armies, and an assessment of losses.
In this compelling portrait of interracial activism, Mark A. Lause documents the efforts of radical followers of John Brown to construct a triracial portion of the Federal Army of the Frontier. Mobilized and inspired by the idea of a Union that would benefit all, black, Indian, and white soldiers fought side by side, achieving remarkable successes in the field. Against a backdrop of idealism, racism, greed, and the agonies and deprivations of combat, Lause examines links between radicalism and reform, on the one hand, and racialized interactions among blacks, Indians, and whites, on the other.
Lause examines how this multiracial vision of American society developed on the Western frontier. Focusing on the men and women who supported Brown in territorial Kansas, Lause examines the impact of abolitionist sentiment on relations with Indians and the crucial role of nonwhites in the conflict. Through this experience, Indians, blacks, and whites began to see their destinies as interdependent, and Lause discusses the radicalizing impact of this triracial Unionism upon the military course of the war in the upper Trans-Mississippi.
The aftermath of the Civil War destroyed much of the memory of the war in the West, particularly in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). The opportunity for an interracial society was quashed by the government's willingness to redefine the lucrative field of Indian exploitation for military and civilian officials and contractors.
Assessing the social interrelations, ramifications, and military impact of nonwhites in the Union forces, Race and Radicalism in the Union Army explores the extent of interracial thought and activity among Americans in this period and greatly expands the historical narrative on the Civil War in the West.
The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry, also known as Rush’s Lancers, was a completely volunteer unit and one of the finest regiments to serve in the Civil War. Tracing their history from George Washington’s personal bodyguard during the Revolutionary War, many of the men of the Sixth Pennsylvania were the cream of Philadelphia society, including Richard H. Rush, grandson of Dr. Benjamin Rush, Maj. Robert Morris, Jr., great-grandson of the financier of the Revolutionary War, Capt. Charles Cadwalader, whose great-grandfather was a general under George Washington, Frank H. Furness, architect and Medal of Honor recipient, and George G. Meade, Jr. But it was their actions in battle, not their illustrious family histories, that distinguished Rush’s Lancers. The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry earned a reputation for being a highly trained and reliable unit, despite being armed initially with antiquated weapons, leaving their mark on key battlefields, including Antietam, Fredericksburg, Hanover Court House, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Brandy Station—where they conducted one of the most famous charges of the war—and Appomattox.
Drawing upon letters, diaries, memoirs, service and pension files, contemporary newspaper coverage, official records, and other primary sources, Rush’s Lancers: The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry in the Civil War by distinguished military historian Eric J. Wittenberg is an engrossing account of these young men from both Philadelphia’s social elite and the city’s working classes who, despite not being professional soldiers, answered the Nation’s call to war.
From 1863 through 1868, Fauconnet maintained a copybook of his official correspondence with the French Ministry of State. These confidential dispatches, collected for the first time in this valuable volume, provide not only a panoramic view of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Gulf Coast but also new and important information on the transnational aspects of America’s Civil War.
Eager to explain complicated issues to a French government concerned over the fate of one of its former territories, Fauconnet painstakingly laid out what was happening in New Orleans by drawing on war news, newspaper columns, and summaries of speeches and promises of Union commanding officers. His commentary peeled away the layers of contradiction and moral dilemmas that confronted citizens of Southern, Northern, and French heritages during the war years and early postwar period. Among the topics he considered were whether emancipated slaves deserved the same rights as naturalized citizens, the state of the cotton market, and the harassment of French-speaking immigrants by both Union and Confederate authorities. Informative and detailed, Fauconnet’s communications became increasingly acerbic and uneasy as he documented and explained the Civil War to officials in his faraway homeland.
Breathtaking in its geographic scope and topical breadth, thanks in part to the acute observational and reporting skills of its author, Fauconnet’s correspondence offers a unique and thoroughly fascinating francophone perspective on New Orleans during some of the most tumultuous years in U.S. history.
CARL BRASSEAUX is the author of over thirty books related to the French presence in the Gulf Coast, including Refuge for All Ages: Immigration in Louisiana History; French Cajun, Creole, Houma: A Primer on Francophone Louisiana; and Stir the Pot: The History of Cajun Cuisine. Until his recent retirement, he was director of the Center for Louisiana Studies and professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
KATHERINE CARMINES MOONEY, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, is a specialist in nineteenth-century history. Her research includes the history of thoroughbred horse-racing culture from 1820 to 1910.
"To tell my own story is to tell that of my famous husband, General John A. Logan," explains Mary S. Logan in the preface to her autobiography.
Married to John A. Logan for thirty-one years, Mary Logan shared in her distinguished husband’s career as a prosecutor in southern Illinois, as a Civil War general, and as a senator from Illinois. She observed firsthand the extraordinary events before, during, and after the Civil War, and she knew personally those world leaders who held the power to shape history. After the death of her husband, she maintained her influence in Washington, D.C. "Under the brightest and darkest skies," she explains, "I have passed than a half-century at the national capital."
Born in 1838, Logan writes of her early days growing up in southern Illinois through 1913, when this book was first published. A skillful observer, she recounts events that are personal, regional, and national in scope. In charming detail, she shares her courtship and subsequent marriage to a young prosecutor from Jackson County and the births of their children. She writes proudly of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 and her husband’s election to the Thirty-seventh Congress that same year. Logan tells of the coming of the Civil War and of her husband—formerly a Democrat and an enemy of Lincoln—casting his fate with the Union and raising a regiment in southern Illinois. She poignantly describes her brother’s defection to the Confederate Army, her life in war-torn Cairo, Illinois, and her horror at her husband’s severe war wounds. She recounts the battles, the political campaigns, and Lincoln’s reelection and subsequent assassination from her point of view—and, as the wife of a politician and general, hers is a decidedly privileged perspective.
In a position to observe and to participate in events ranging from momentous to minute throughout the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she reports the essential episodes of history with the flair of journalism, a career she in fact embraced after the death of her husband. She writes movingly of a wounded captain on the road to recovery who suddenly died when the minié shifted next to his lung, amusingly of the excuses soldiers invented to wrangle a pass to town, and elegantly of her trips to Europe and of the pomp and circumstance of the parties attended by the great men and women of the time. Drawing on events grand and small, she re-creates history as only a skillful writer who was in the right place at the right time could.
"Gus" McClendon joined the 15th Alabama Infantry Regiment, and served in many of the Eastern Theater engagements. More than fifty years later, he sent down his reminiscences, still an unreconstructed Southern patriot, although able to look back with some amusement on his younger self.
Informed by more than one hundred diaries, this study provides insight into how women cultivated rhetorical agency, challenging traditional gender expectations while also upholding a cultural status quo. Author Kimberly Harrison analyzes the rhetorical choices these women made and valued in wartime and postwar interactions with Union officers and soldiers, slaves and former slaves, local community members, and even their God. In their intimate accounts of everyday war, these diarists discussed rhetorical strategies that could impact their safety, their livelihoods, and those of their families. As they faced Union soldiers in attempts to protect their homes and property, diarists saw their actions as not only having local, immediate impact on their well-being but also as reflecting upon their cause and the character of the southern people as a whole. They instructed themselves through their personal writing, allowing insight into how southern women prepared themselves to speak and act in new and contested contexts.
The Rhetoric of Rebel Women highlights the contributions of privileged white southern women in the development of the Confederate national identity, presenting them not as passive observers but as active participants in the war effort.
The 1890s saw the closing of the American frontier and a shift toward imperialist ambitions. Populists and muckrakers grappled with robber barons and gold-bugs. Americans addressed the unfinished business of Reconstruction by separating blacks and whites. Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other black leaders clashed over the proper response to continuing racial inequality. Those on top of the economic heap—Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan—created vast empires of wealth, while those at the bottom worked for dimes a day. Brands brings all this to life in a vivid narrative filled with larger-than-life characters facing momentous challenges as they worked toward an uncertain future.
The work adds new insights into the role religion and the secular played in the shaping of US political institutions and national policies. Chapters also look at the history of anti-polygamy laws, the persistence of post-1890 plural marriage, the continuation of anti-Mormon sentiment, the intimacies and challenges of religious privatization, the dynamic of federal power on religious reform, and the more intimate role individuals played in effecting these institutional and national developments.
The Smoot hearings stand as an important case study that highlights the paradoxical history of religious liberty in America and the principles of exclusion and coercion that history is predicated on. Framed within a liberal Protestant sensibility, these principles of secular progress mapped out the relationship of religion and the nation-state for the new modern century. The Reed Smoot Hearings will be of significant interest to students and scholars of Mormon, western, American, and religious history.
Publication supported, in part, by Gonzaba Medical Group.
Contributors: Gary James Bergera, John Brumbaugh, Kenneth L. Cannon II, Byron W. Daynes, Kathryn M. Daynes, Kathryn Smoot Egan, D. Michael Quinn
Now Franklin has updated his work to acknowledge the enormous body of research and scholarship that followed in the wake of the first edition. New are Franklin’s references to important, later texts that enrich the original narrative. In addition, the extensive bibliography has been thoroughly revised.
What has not changed, however, is the foundation Franklin has laid. Still compelling are his arguments concerning the brevity of the North’s military occupation of the South, the limited amount of power wielded by former slaves, the influence of moderate southerners, the flaws of the constitutions drawn up by the Radical state governments, and the reasons for the downfall of Reconstruction.
Reconstruction after the Civil War explores the role of former slaves during this period in American history. Looking past popular myths and controversial scholarship, John Hope Franklin uses his astute insight and careful research to provide an accurate, comprehensive portrait of the era. His arguments concerning the brevity of the North’s occupation, the limited power wielded by former slaves, the influence of moderate southerners, the flawed constitutions of the radical state governments, and the downfall of Reconstruction remain compelling today. This new edition of Reconstruction after the Civil War also includes a foreword by Eric Foner and a perceptive essay by Michael W. Fitzgerald.
In her probing and engaging book, Red War on the Family, Erica Ryan traces the roots of sexual modernism and the history of antiradicalism and antifeminism. She illuminates how Americans responded to foreign and domestic threats and expressed nationalism by strengthening traditional gender and family roles-especially by imposing them on immigrant groups, workers, women, and young people.
Ryan argues that the environment of political conformity in the 1920s was maintained in part through the quest for cultural and social conformity, exemplified by white, middle-class family life. Red War on the Family charts the ways Americanism both reinforced and was reinforced by these sexual and gender norms in the decades after World War I.
When the dust settled after World War II, the United States stood as the world’s unquestionably pre-eminent military and economic power. In the decades that followed, the country exerted its dominant force in less visible but equally powerful ways, too, spreading its trade protocols, its media, and—perhaps most importantly—its alleged values. In A Righteous Smokescreen, Sam Lebovic homes in on one of the most prominent, yet ethereal, of those professed values: the free flow of information. This trope was seen as capturing what was most liberal about America’s self-declared leadership of the free world. But as Lebovic makes clear, even though diplomats and public figures trumpeted the importance of widespread cultural exchange, these transmissions flowed in only one direction: outward from the United States. Though other countries did try to promote their own cultural visions, Lebovic shows that the US moved to marginalize or block those visions outright, highlighting the shallowness of American commitments to multilateral institutions, the depth of its unstated devotion to cultural and economic supremacy, and its surprising hostility to importing foreign cultures. His book uncovers the unexpectedly profound global consequences buried in such ostensibly mundane matters as visa and passport policy, international educational funding, and land purchases for embassies. Even more crucially, A Righteous Smokescreen does nothing less than reveal that globalization was not the inevitable consequence of cultural convergence or the natural outcome of putatively free flows of information—it was always political to its core.
Babcock’s original manuscript has been shortened by Robert H. Ferrell into eight chapters which illustrate the tremendous shift in warfare in the years surrounding the turn of the century. The first part of the book describes small actions against Filipinos and such assignments as taking a cavalry troop into the fire-destroyed city of San Francisco in 1906 or duty in the vicinity of Yuma in Arizona when border troubles were heating up with brigands and regular troops. The remaining chapters, beginning in 1918, set out the battles of Soissons (July 18–22) and Saint-Mihiel (September 12–16) and especially the immense battle of the Meuse-Argonne (September 26–November 11), the largest (1.2 million troops involved) and deadliest (26,000 men killed) battle in all of American history.
By the end of his career, Babcock was an adroit battle commander and an astute observer of military operations. Unlike most other officers around him, he showed an ability and willingness to adapt infantry tactics in the face of recently developed technology and weaponry such as the machine gun. When he retired in 1937 and began to write his memoirs, another world war had begun, giving additional context to his observations about the army and combat over the preceding forty years.
Until now, Babcock’s account has only been available in the archives of the Hoover Institution, but with the help of Ferrell's crisp, expert editing, this record of army culture in the first decades of the twentieth century can now reach a new generation of scholars.
The longtime political columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, Neal covered Jane M. Byrne's election in 1979 as the city's first woman mayor and Harold Washington's 1983 triumph as Chicago's first African American mayor. Even people who are not interested in politics are drawn to Neal's column because of his hard-hitting style and lucid insights. Rolling on the River is the first published collection of his work.
In these pages, you'll meet the state legislator who never met a special interest he did not like, an alderman groveling to a mob boss, and the prosecutor who gained notoriety as a publicity hound. Of a junketing congressman, Neal writes: "Instead of sending out a congressional newsletter, [he] ought to be sending his constituents 'Wish you were here' postcards of sandy beaches."
Neal's beat is politics, but his interests are rich and varied. He also writes about sports, music, literature, and film with a point of view that is fresh and original. Neal shows how Muhammad Ali became the heavyweight champion who transcended sports and how Sid Luckman changed football. He writes of Kenny Washington's importance in breaking professional football's color barrier and Steve Prefontaine's courage in taking on the little gray men of the sports establishment. Neal chronicles Paul Robeson's struggles: "His name became a great whisper. . . . The injustices against Paul Robeson have not been righted."
Nobel laureate Saul Bellow tells Neal that comedy is the bright hope of American fiction because it is too difficult for writers in this country to grasp the worst of the human condition. Neal tells why Frank Sinatra called Chicago his kind of town and also shows how the city inspires the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks.
Neal, a former White House correspondent, shares his perspective as one of the few reporters to have interviewed Ronald Reagan in four different decades. He recalls spending an evening with Richard M. Nixon, defends Harry Truman's most controversial decision, and writes from Ireland of John F. Kennedy's enduring legacy in the nation of his ancestors. Neal portrays William Jefferson Clinton as the "world's oldest teenager."
With vivid imagery, Neal makes his subjects come alive. Mayor Richard M. Daley is likened to Forrest Gump, and the legendary boxing announcer Ben Bentley is hailed as the last of the Damon Runyon characters.
Tough but fair. Illuminating. Compassionate. That's the best of Steve Neal.
Bunche was a pioneer in every sense of the word. The first black American to hold a doctorate in political science, Bunche established the political science department at Howard University and co-founded the National Negro Congress. He served as the first African- American section head in the Office of Strategic Services and later moved to the State Department. He played a major part in the delegation that established the United Nations and, when he retired as Under Secretary General, was the highest- ranking black in that organization. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and thus became the first black Nobel laureate.
Bunche's thinking and writing was broad, ranging from the political left to the center. Early works flirt with socialist or even Bolshevist ideas, while later works maintained that a flawed American democracy was better than an impending threat of Nazi-influenced fascism. Bunche was one of the first African Americans to do academic work in Africa, forcing him to think through notions of colonialism and class that would influence his work at the United Nations. Although his passion for peace and civil rights never faltered, his relationship with American black movements vascillated from an early embrace of radicalism to a significant distancing during the mid-sixties to a final rapprochement during the last years of his life. A monumental contribution, Ralph J. Bunche: Selected Speeches and Writings reasserts the thinking of a great American whose views are entirely relevant to a generation still striving for the world Bunche envisioned.
Charles P. Henry is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
From the book:
"I abhor racism as a dangerous virus, whether it is spread by white or black peoples. I seek total integration, which to me means the Negro taking his place in the very mainstream of American life . . . . My ancestors have contributed very much to the development of this country and therefore I have a vested interest in it that I intend to realize and protect."
"It seems painfully clear to me that there is no possibility in the affluent, highly industrialized and technological white-majority American society for anyone to be at once black, separate and equal."
"The colonial system in its modern version, implicitly arrogant and self-serving, was instituted and perpetuated chiefly by self-righteous and superior- minded Europeans. Its positive achievements notwithstanding, colonialism's evil legacies will bedevil the world for years to come."
Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Johnson Bunche (1904-71) was one of the twentieth century’s foremost diplomats and intellectuals. In the wake of centennial celebrations of his birth, leading scholars and diplomats assess Bunche’s historical importance and enduring impact on higher education, public policy, and international politics. Their essays reveal not only the breadth of Bunche’s influence, such as his United Nations work to broker peace during times of civil war in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, but also the depth of his intellectual perspectives on race, civil rights, higher education, and international law. Probing his publications, speeches, and public policy initiatives, the volume offers telling insights into the critical roles of universities, public intellectuals, and diplomats in working together to find solutions to domestic and international problems through public and scholarly engagement. In this way, the volume highlights the very connections that Bunche exhibited as an academic, intellectual, and diplomat.
Contributors include Lorenzo DuBois Baber, John Hope Franklin, Jonathan Scott Holloway, Charles P. Henry, Ben Keppel, Beverly Lindsay, Princeton Lyman, Edwin Smith, and Hanes Walton Jr.
Tracing Weaver’s career through the creation, expansion, and contraction of New Deal liberalism, Wendell E. Pritchett illuminates his instrumental role in the birth of almost every urban initiative of the period, from public housing and urban renewal to affirmative action and rent control. Beyond these policy achievements, Weaver also founded racial liberalism, a new approach to race relations that propelled him through a series of high-level positions in public and private agencies working to promote racial cooperation in American cities. But Pritchett shows that despite Weaver’s efforts to make race irrelevant, white and black Americans continued to call on him to mediate between the races—a position that grew increasingly untenable as Weaver remained caught between the white power structure to which he pledged his allegiance and the African Americans whose lives he devoted his career to improving.
In this book, Sarah Watts probes this dark side of the Rough Rider, presenting a fascinating psychological portrait of a man whose personal obsession with masculinity profoundly influenced the fate of a nation. Drawing on his own writings and on media representations of him, Watts attributes the wide appeal of Roosevelt's style of manhood to the way it addressed the hopes and anxieties of men of his time. Like many of his contemporaries, Roosevelt struggled with what it meant to be a man in the modern era. He saw two foes within himself: a fragile weakling and a primitive beast. The weakling he punished and toughened with rigorous, manly pursuits such as hunting, horseback riding, and war. The beast he unleashed through brutal criticism of homosexuals, immigrants, pacifists, and sissies—anyone who might tarnish the nation's veneer of strength and vigor. With his unabashed paeans to violence and aggressive politics, Roosevelt ultimately offered American men a chance to project their longings and fears onto the nation and its policies. In this way he harnessed the primitive energy of men's desires to propel the march of American civilization—over the bodies of anyone who might stand in its way.
Written with passion and precision, this powerful revisioning of an American icon will forever alter the way we see Theodore Roosevelt and his political legacy.
"A superb scholarly study of how Roosevelt built his political base on the aspiration and fears of men in a rapidly changing nation and world."—Charles K. Piehl, Library Journal
"A thought-provoking and innovative study of the dark side of Roosevelt's personality. . . . [Watt's] arguments are clear, passionate, and thoroughly supported."—Elizabeth A. Bennion, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Roosevelt the Reformer sheds light on an important chapter in the biography of the flamboyant 26th president of the United States. From 1889 to 1895—before he was a Rough Rider in the Spanish–American War and before he oversaw the building of the Panama Canal and won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize—“Teddy” Roosevelt served as one of three civil service commissioners. This was a significant period of his life because he matured politically and learned how to navigate through Washington politics. He sparred with powerful cabinet officers and congressmen and survived their attempts to destroy him. He cultivated important friendships and allegiances, flourished intellectually, and strengthened his progressive views of social justice, racial theory, and foreign relations. It was a period altogether significant to the honing of administrative talent and intellectual acuity of the future president.
Richard White Jr. situates young Roosevelt within the exciting events of the Gilded Age, the Victorian era, and the gay nineties. He describes Roosevelt's relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and adversaries. Many of these people, such as Henry Cabot Lodge, Cecil Spring-Rice, Alfred Mahan, Henry Adams, and John Hay would significantly influence Roosevelt when he later occupied the White House. White explores TR's accomplishments in civil service reform, the effect of the commission experience on his presidency a decade later, and his administrative legacy.
In addition to Harvard University’s immense collection of Roosevelt
correspondence, White drew from original sources such as the Civil Service Commission files in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the National Park Service Roosevelt Historical Site at Sagamore Hill, and the records of the National Civil Service Reform League.
McMahon shows how FDR's attempt to strengthen the presidency and undermine the power of conservative Southern Democrats dovetailed with his efforts to seek racial equality through the federal courts. By appointing a majority of rights-based liberals deferential to presidential power, Roosevelt ensured that the Supreme Court would be receptive to civil rights claims, especially when those claims had the support of the executive branch.
This autobiography follows United States Senator Robert C. Byrd’s experiences from his boyhood in the early 1920s to his election in 2000, which won him an unprecedented eighth term in the Senate. Along the way, Senator Byrd offers commentary on national and international events that occurred throughout his long life in public service. Senator Byrd’s journey from the hardscrabble coalfields to the marbled halls of Congress has inspired generations of people in West Virginia and throughout the nation. From reading the stories of the Founding Fathers as a young boy by the light of a kerosene lamp to the swearing of an oath for more than a half-century to guard the United States Constitution, Senator Byrd’s life is legendary. Byrd always stands by his principles, earning the affection of the people of his home state and the respect of Americans from all walks of life. With his beloved Erma ever by his side, Robert C. Byrd has never forgotten his roots, harkening back to those early lessons that he learned as a child of the Appalachian coalfields.
This autobiography follows West Virginia senator Robert C. Byrd’s experiences from his boyhood in the early 1920s to his election in 2000, which won him an unprecedented eighth term in the Senate. Within these pages, Senator Byrd offers commentary on national and international events that occurred throughout his long life in public service.
His journey from the hardscrabble coalfields to the marbled halls of Congress has inspired generations of people in West Virginia and throughout the nation. From reading the stories of the Founding Fathers as a young boy by the light of a kerosene lamp to the swearing of an oath for more than a half-century to guard the US Constitution, Senator Byrd’s life is legendary.
Until his death on June 28, 2010, Byrd stood by his principles, earning the affection of the people of his home state and the respect of Americans from all walks of life. With his beloved Erma ever by his side, Robert C. Byrd never forgot his roots, harkening back to those early lessons that he learned as a child of the Appalachian coalfields.
This new paperback edition includes a foreword by Gaston Caperton, governor of West Virginia from 1989–1997.
The centerpiece of the book is the remarkable political partnership that formed between Robert and John. As the manager of John's political campaigns Robert proved himself "hard as nails" (in his father's admiring words), relentless in securing his brother's victory and unforgiving in overseeing his brother's presidency. Hilty marshals a great deal of evidence to show that while they did not always see eye to eye -- Lyndon Johnson's selection as John's running mate being a notable disagreement -- Robert and John discussed virtually every issue, gauging the likely political effects of every position. Robert was so close to the President that insiders called him "number one and a-half"; their consultations were so intimate that they spoke in a kind of code, barely intelligible to those around them. In Hilty's evocative but unsentimental recounting of the political crises of the Kennedy Administration, Robert and John prove to have been more calculating and astute leaders than today's pundits allow. Theirs was a partnership that was unprecedented and, thanks to an act signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, is never to be equaled.
The Kennedy family's story seems to have been lived in the public eye and Americans apparently never tire of the photographs and familiar anecdotes. Most of the written accounts, however, either highlight the multiple tragedies and scandals, preserve the latter-day Camelot myth, or follow the elusive traces of some conspiracy.
In contrast, Hilty's concern is for historical perspective -- for accuracy, plausibility, and thoroughness. With facts and reasoned conclusions, he challenges the stories about the Kennedys in relation to Marilyn Monroe, J. Edgar Hoover, and Martin Luther King, Jr. that have passed into American folklore. He develops a portrait of Robert Kennedy as a complex public figure, a man of centrist political allegiances and firm moral convictions who easily adapted to the crusader's role in working for Joseph McCarthy or pursuing James Hoffa for racketeering. Hilty's great care in sifting through the evidence and weighing competing theories gives us a sense of Kennedy as a public servant whose dedication to social justice intensified after he was in office and further deepened after his brother's assassination.
Even as he took charge of family matters and supported Jacqueline during the long ordeal of the state funeral, Robert's own crushing pain was evident to the world. It was then that "Bobby" ceased being a disparaging term and became a mark of respect and affection.
Here, in his autobiography, Obey looks back on his journey in politics beginning with his early years in the Wisconsin Legislature, when Wisconsin moved through eras of shifting balance between Republicans and Democrats. On a national level Obey traces, as few others have done, the dramatic changes in the workings of the U.S. Congress since his first election to the House in 1969. He discusses his own central role in the evolution of Congress and ethics reforms and his view of the recent Bush presidency—crucial chapters in our democracy, of interest to all who observe politics and modern U.S. history.
Semifinalist, 22nd Annual Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, 2002
Finalist, Spur Award in western nonfiction biography, Western Writers of America, 2002
Revered by many Texans and other Americans as "the People's Senator," Ralph Webster Yarborough (1903-1996) fought for "the little people" in a political career that places him in the ranks of the most influential leaders in Texas history. The only U. S. Senator representing a former Confederate state to vote for every significant piece of modern civil rights legislation, Yarborough became a cornerstone of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs in the areas of education, environmental preservation, and health care. In doing so, he played a major role in the social and economic modernization of Texas and the American South. He often defied conventional political wisdom with his stands against powerful political interests and with his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War. Yet to this day, his admirers speak of Yarborough as an inspiration for public service and a model of political independence and integrity.
This biography offers the first in-depth look at the life and career of Ralph Yarborough. Patrick L. Cox draws on Yarborough's personal and professional papers, as well as on extensive interviews with the Senator and his associates, to follow Yarborough from his formative years in East Texas through his legal and judicial career in the 1930s, decorated military service in World War II, unsuccessful campaigns for Texas governor in the 1950s, distinguished tenure in the United States Senate from 1957 to 1970, and return to legal practice through the 1980s.
Although Yarborough's liberal politics set him at odds with most of the Texas power brokers of his time, including Lyndon Johnson, his accomplishments have become part of the national fabric. Medicare recipients, beneficiaries of the Cold War G. I. Bill, and even beachcombers on Padre Island National Seashore all share in the lasting legacy of Senator Ralph Yarborough.
Neither a random event nor the act of a lone madman—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was an appalling and grisly conspiracy. This is the unvarnished story.
With deft investigative skill, David Kaiser shows that the events of November 22, 1963, cannot be understood without fully grasping the two larger stories of which they were a part: the U.S. government’s campaign against organized crime, which began in the late 1950s and accelerated dramatically under Robert Kennedy; and the furtive quest of two administrations—along with a cadre of private interest groups—to eliminate Fidel Castro.
The seeds of conspiracy go back to the Eisenhower administration, which recruited top mobsters in a series of plots to assassinate the Cuban leader. The CIA created a secretive environment in which illicit networks were allowed to expand in dangerous directions. The agency’s links with the Mafia continued in the Kennedy administration, although the President and his closest advisors—engaged in their own efforts to overthrow Castro—thought this skullduggery had ended. Meanwhile, Cuban exiles, right-wing businessmen, and hard-line anti-Communists established ties with virtually anyone deemed capable of taking out the Cuban premier. Inevitably those ties included the mob.
The conspiracy to kill JFK took shape in response to Robert Kennedy’s relentless attacks on organized crime—legal vendettas that often went well beyond the normal practices of law enforcement. Pushed to the wall, mob leaders merely had to look to the networks already in place for a solution. They found it in Lee Harvey Oswald—the ideal character to enact their desperate revenge against the Kennedys.
Comprehensive, detailed, and informed by original sources, The Road to Dallas adds surprising new material to every aspect of the case. It brings to light the complete, frequently shocking, story of the JFK assassination and its aftermath.
Although ridiculed by contemporaries for his apparent lack of control over formal party politics and the national committee, Johnson excelled at leading the Democratic Party’s policy agenda. While a senator and as president, Johnson advocated for—and secured—liberal social welfare and civil rights legislation, forcing the party to break with its Southern tradition of elitism, conservatism, and white supremacy. In a way, Johnson set the terms for the continuing partisan battle because, by countering the Democrats’ new ideology, the Republican Party also underwent a transformation.
Since Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, the global community has witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the integration of Europe, the War on Terror and the Arab Spring, a hot Chinese economy and a major international recession. Reagan’s Legacy in a World Transformed brings together scholars from diverse disciplines and persuasions to assess the fortieth president’s policies and their ongoing impact today, and to offer a timely retrospective on his complex legacy.
The authors consider the influence of Reagan’s free-market ideas on economic globalization, showing how deregulation succeeded in spurring economic expansion. In foreign policy, Reagan favored significant increases in military spending (“peace through strength”) and an assertive agenda abroad. His break with détente in dealing with the Soviet Union, notably expressed in his 1982 March of Freedom speech, effectively restored the early Cold War strategy of rolling back communism. More than twenty years later, President George W. Bush invoked this speech in describing his goals in the Middle East—a striking example of how Reagan’s ideas affected the post-9/11 world.
In contrast with his hawkish stance on defense, Reagan’s efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals, negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev, constitute one of his enduring contributions to stability. Although Reagan’s policies soared on rhetoric rooted in ideological conviction, the president engaged in pragmatic internationalism when a multilateral approach served America’s interests. He believed that America had a special mission as a moral leader and beacon of freedom, a view that continues to inform U.S. foreign policy.
Few American politicians have enjoyed greater popularity than Ronald Reagan. Humor, charm, good looks, an intuitive feel for national concerns, and an extraordinary ability to speak persuasively to millions of people were major assets. But his fundamental appeal went deeper: a blend of Catholic and Protestant, small-town boy and famous entertainer, Horatio Alger and P. T. Barnum, traditional moralist and media celebrity, Reagan spoke for old values in current accents.
Robert Dallek presents a sharply drawn, richly detailed portrait of the man and his politics--from his childhood years through the California governorship to the first years of the presidency. It is an essential guide for all observers of the presidential election of 2000, and a starting point for anyone wanting to discover what the Reagan experience really meant.
Few American politicians have enjoyed greater popularity than Ronald Reagan. Humor, charm, good looks, an intuitive feel for national concerns, and an extraordinary ability to speak persuasively to millions of people were major assets. But his fundamental appeal went deeper: a blend of Catholic and Protestant, small-town boy and famous entertainer, Horatio Alger and P. T. Barnum, traditional moralist and media celebrity, Reagan spoke for old values in current accents.
Robert Dallek presents a sharply drawn, richly detailed portrait of the man and his politics--from his childhood years through the California governorship to the first years of the presidency. It is an essential guide for all observers of the presidential election of 2000, and a starting point for anyone wanting to discover what the Reagan experience really meant.
This book is an attempt to make sense out of Ronald Reagan by linking him to various grassroots dimensions of American popular mythology and mind. It attempts to utilize a variety of sources from American and popular culture studies, works on Reagan, and popular materials such as movies to offer an interpretation of reagan as an exemplar of the political relevance and power of popular culture.
The authors show that more than any president since John F. Kennedy, Reagan’s influence flowed from his rhetorical practices. And he is remembered as having reversed certain trends and cast the U.S. on a new course. The contributors to this insightful collection of essays show that Reagan’s rhetorical tactics were matters of primary concern to his administration’s chief political strategists.
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