The unearthing of the archives renewed fierce debates about history, memory, and justice. In Paper Cadavers, Weld explores Guatemala's struggles to manage this avalanche of evidence of past war crimes, providing a firsthand look at how postwar justice activists worked to reconfigure terror archives into implements of social change. Tracing the history of the police files as they were transformed from weapons of counterinsurgency into tools for post-conflict reckoning, Weld sheds light on the country's fraught transition from war to an uneasy peace, reflecting on how societies forget and remember political violence.
Clarence Mitchell Jr. was the driving force in the movement for passage of civil rights laws in America. The foundation for Mitchell’s struggle was laid during his tenure at the Fair Employment Practice Committee, where he led implementation of President Roosevelt’s policy barring racial discrimination in employment in the national defense and war industry programs. Mitchell’s FEPC reports and memoranda chart the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.
The first two volumes of a projected five-volume documentary edition of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. illuminate the FEPC’s work as a federal affirmative-action agency and the government’s struggle to enforce the nation’s antidiscrimination policy in industry, federal agencies, and labor unions.
Subsequent volumes will trace Mitchell’s successive enlistment of seven presidents in establishing and enforcing a permanent national nondiscrimination policy. Through his efforts, Congress passed the 1957, 1960, and 1964 Civil Rights Acts prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations, federal spending, and employment based on race, color, sex, and national origin; the 1965 Voting Rights Act; and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
Editor Denton L. Watson introduces and annotates Mitchell’s writings, providing context and insight for students and scholars of civil rights history, government, law, and sociology.
Clarence Mitchell Jr. was the driving force in the movement for passage of civil rights laws in America. The foundation for Mitchell’s struggle was laid during his tenure at the Fair Employment Practice Committee, where he led implementation of President Roosevelt’s policy barring racial discrimination in employment in the national defense and war industry programs. Mitchell’s FEPC reports and memoranda chart the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.
The first two volumes of a projected five-volume documentary edition of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. illuminate the FEPC’s work as a federal affirmative-action agency and the government’s struggle to enforce the nation’s antidiscrimination policy in industry, federal agencies, and labor unions.
Subsequent volumes will trace Mitchell’s successive enlistment of seven presidents in establishing and enforcing a permanent national nondiscrimination policy. Through his efforts, Congress passed the 1957, 1960, and 1964 Civil Rights Acts prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations, federal spending, and employment based on race, color, sex, and national origin; the 1965 Voting Rights Act; and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
Editor Denton L. Watson introduces and annotates Mitchell’s writings, providing context and insight for students and scholars of civil rights history, government, law, and sociology.
Volume V of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. records the successful effort to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act: the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875.
Prior to the US Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the NAACP had faced an impenetrable wall of opposition from southerners in Congress. Basing their assertions on the court’s 1896 “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, legislators from the South maintained that their Jim Crow system was nondiscriminatory and thus constitutional. In their view, further civil rights laws were unnecessary. In ruling that legally mandated segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, the Brown decision demolished the southerners’ argument. Mitchell then launched the decisive stage of the struggle to pass modern civil rights laws.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was the first comprehensive lobbying campaign by an organization dedicated to that purpose since Reconstruction. Coming on the heels of the Brown decision, the 1957 law was a turning point in the struggle to accord Black citizens full equality under the Constitution. The act’s passage, however, was nearly derailed in the Senate by southern opposition and Senator Strom Thurmond’s record-setting filibuster, which lasted more than twenty-four hours. Congress later weakened several provisions of the act but—crucially—it broke a psychological barrier to the legislative enactment of such measures.
The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. is a detailed record of the NAACP leader’s success in bringing the legislative branch together with the judicial and executive branches to provide civil rights protections during the twentieth century.
The Civil Rights Act of 1960 aimed to close loopholes in its 1957 predecessor that had allowed continued voter disenfranchisement for African Americans and for Mexicans in Texas.
In early 1959, the newly seated Eighty-Sixth Congress had four major civil rights bills under consideration. Eventually consolidated into the 1960 Civil Rights Act, their purpose was to correct the weaknesses in the 1957 law. Mitchell’s papers from 1959 to 1960 show the extent to which congressional resistance to the passage of meaningful civil rights laws contributed to the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and to subsequent demonstrations. The papers reveal how the repercussions of these events affected the NAACP’s work in Washington and how, despite their dislike of demonstrations, NAACP officials used them to intensify the civil rights struggle.
Among the act’s seven titles were provisions authorizing federal inspection of local voter registration rolls and penalties for anyone attempting to interfere with voters on the basis of race or color. The law extended the powers of the US Commission on Civil Rights and broadened the legal definition of the verb to vote to encompass all elements of the process: registering, casting a ballot, and properly counting that ballot. Ultimately, Mitchell considered the 1960 act unsuccessful because Congress had failed to include key amendments that would have further strengthened the 1957 act. In the House, representatives used parliamentary tactics to stall employment protections, school desegregation, poll-tax elimination, and other meaningful civil rights reforms. The fight would continue.
The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. series is a detailed record of the NAACP leader’s success in bringing the legislative branch together with the judicial and executive branches to provide civil rights protections during the twentieth century.
Antiquarian, lawyer, and cat lover Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) was a “prince” of the Republic of Letters and the most gifted French intellectual in the generation between Montaigne and Descartes. From Peiresc’s study in Aix-en-Provence, his insatiable curiosity poured forth in thousands of letters that traveled the Mediterranean, seeking knowledge of matters mundane and exotic. Mining the remarkable 70,000-page archive of this Provençal humanist and polymath, Peter N. Miller recovers a lost Mediterranean world of the early seventeenth century that was dominated by the sea: the ceaseless activity of merchants, customs officials, and ships’ captains at the center of Europe’s sprawling maritime networks. Peiresc’s Mediterranean World reconstructs the web of connections that linked the bustling port city of Marseille to destinations throughout the Western Mediterranean, North Africa, the Levant, and beyond.
“Peter Miller’s reanimation of Peiresc, the master of the Mediterranean, is the best kind of case study. It not only makes us appreciate the range and richness of one man’s experience and the originality of his thought, but also suggests that he had many colleagues in his deepest and most imaginative inquiries. Most important, it gives us hope that their archives too will be opened up by scholars skillful and imaginative enough to make them speak to us.”
—Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books
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