This archaeological study of the interactions between Western Shoshone families and Euro-American ranchers in the late nineteenth century helps fill the gap between what is known regarding Late Prehistoric foragers of the American West and ethnohistoric understanding of Native American peoples of the Great Basin.
Pottery Hill, an archaeological site located in Grass Valley, Nevada, northeast of the historic mining town of Austin, represents a small settlement of Native Americans who lived there in the late 1800s. The Grass Valley Shoshone, whose environment and traditional lifeways were disrupted by the arrival of miners and settlers in the 1860s, found work on the ranches and farms in the valley.
Archaeological fieldwork conducted in the 1970s investigated house remains, hearths, and artifacts. A recent analysis of these data, enhanced by the use of archival documents and oral history, provides new insights into the dynamics of late nineteenth-century life in central Nevada. The Pottery Hill Site addresses a critical period in the history of the Grass Valley Shoshone, who adopted and modified Euro-American artifacts and materials while maintaining important aspects of their traditional culture. It gives readers a deeper understanding of the effects of Euro-American settlement on the Shoshone, the history of the western United States, and the reciprocal impacts of cultural contact.
Inside the Sioux Nation's pursuit of recognition and justice
This book is the powerful story of the ongoing struggle of indigenous Americans in the twentieth century United States and of its shift in focus from traditional battlefield and massacre sites to federal courtrooms and the halls of Congress.
The Politics of Hallowed Ground includes excerpts from the diary kept by Mario Gonzalez, the attorney for the Sioux Nation in its struggle for recognition of the Wounded Knee Massacre site as a national monument. Gonzalez's personal record of the struggle is coupled with commentary by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a Native American writer who places the work in its historical context. Together, the two voices will draw the reader into far more than the continuing struggle of the Sioux people to achieve justice.
The book covers Sioux history from before the Wounded Knee tragedy to modern times, through the Sioux Nation's long and often rancorous dialogue with the U.S. government over control of South Dakota's Black Hills, traditional Sioux lands recognized by treaty in 1877 and never forfeited or sold. After reading a 13-year-old survivor's narrative of what happened at Wounded Knee and the list of the dead and wounded, readers will find it difficult not to share the Sioux perspective.
People of the Big Voice tells the visual history of Ho-Chunk families at the turn of the twentieth century and beyond as depicted through the lens of Black River Falls, Wisconsin studio photographer, Charles Van Schaick. The family relationships between those who “sat for the photographer” are clearly visible in these images—sisters, friends, families, young couples—who appear and reappear to fill in a chronicle spanning from 1879 to 1942. Also included are candid shots of Ho-Chunk on the streets of Black River Falls, outside family dwellings, and at powwows. As author and Ho-Chunk tribal member Amy Lonetree writes, “A significant number of the images were taken just a few short years after the darkest, most devastating period for the Ho-Chunk. Invasion, diseases, warfare, forced assimilation, loss of land, and repeated forced removals from our beloved homelands left the Ho-Chunk people in a fight for their culture and their lives.”
Pedro Pino, or Lai-iu-ah-tsai-lu (his Zuni name) was for many years the most important Zuni political leader. He served during a period of tremendous change and challenges for his people. Born in 1788, captured by Navajos in his teens, he was sold into a New Mexican household, where he obtained his Spanish name. When he returned to Zuni, he spoke three languages and brought with him a wealth of knowledge regarding the world outside the pueblo. For decades he ably conducted Zuni foreign relations, defending the pueblo's sovereignty and lands, establishing trade relationships, interacting with foreigners-from prominent military and scientific expeditions to common emigrants-and documenting all in a remarkable archive. Steeped in Zuni traditions, he was known among other things for his diplomatic savvy, as a great warrior, for his oratory, and for his honesty and hospitality.
More than a biography, Richard Hart's work provides a history of Zuni during an especially significant period. Also the author of Zuni and the Courts: A Struggle for Sovereign
Land Rights and the co-author of A Zuni Atlas, Hart originally wrote the manuscript in 1979 after a decade of historical work for Zuni Pueblo. He then set it aside but continued to pursue research about and for Zuni. Its publication, at last, inscribes an important contribution to Pueblo history and biography and a testimonial to a remarkable Native American leader. In an afterword written for this publication, Hart discusses his original intentions in writing about Pedro Pino and Zuni and situates the biography in relation to current scholarship.
Because nearly all aspects of culture depend on the movement of bodies, objects, and ideas, mobility has been a primary topic during the past forty years of archaeological research on small-scale societies. Most studies have concentrated either on local moves related to subsistence within geographically bounded communities or on migrations between regions resulting from pan-regional social and environmental changes. Gregson Schachner, however, contends that a critical aspect of mobility is the transfer of people, goods, and information within regions. This type of movement, which geographers term "population circulation," is vitally important in defining how both regional social systems and local communities are constituted, maintained, and—most important—changed.
Schachner analyzes a population shift in the Zuni region of west-central New Mexico during the thirteenth century AD that led to the inception of major demographic changes, the founding of numerous settlements in frontier zones, and the initiation of radical transformations of community organization. Schachner argues that intraregional population circulation played a vital role in shaping social transformation in the region and that many notable changes during this period arose directly out of peoples' attempts to create new social mechanisms for coping with frequent and geographically extensive residential mobility. By examining multiple aspects of population circulation and comparing areas that were newly settled in the thirteenth century to some that had been continuously occupied for hundreds of years, Schachner illustrates the role of population circulation in the formation of social groups and the creation of contexts conducive to social change.
How to lead the people and be one of them? What's a democratic intellectual to do? This longstanding dilemma for the progressive intellectual, how to bridge the world of educated opinion and that of the working masses, is the focus of Leon Fink's penetrating book, the first social history of the progressive thinker caught in the middle of American political culture.
In a series of vivid portraits, Fink investigates the means and methods of intellectual activists in the first part of the twentieth century--how they served, observed, and made their own history. In the stories of, among others, John R. Commons, Charles McCarthy, William English Walling, Anna Strunsky Walling, A. Philip Randolph, W. Jett Lauck, and Wil Lou Gray, he creates a panorama of reform of unusual power. Issues as broad as the cult of leadership and as specific as the Wisconsin school of labor history lead us into the heart of the dilemma of the progressive intellectual in our age.
The problem, as Fink describes it, is twofold: Could people prevail in a land of burgeoning capitalism and concentrated power? And should the people prevail? This book shows us Socialists and Progressives and, later, New Dealers grappling with these questions as they tried to redress the new inequities of their day--and as they confronted the immense frustrations of moving the masses. Fink's graphic depiction of intellectuals' labors in the face of capitalist democracy's challenges dramatizes a time in our past--and at the same time speaks eloquently to our own.
The period between 1920 and 1950 saw an epochal shift in the American cultural economy. The shocks of the 1929 market crash and the Second World War decimated much of the support for high modernist literature, and writers who had relied on wealthy benefactors were forced to find new protectors from the depredations of the free market. Private foundations, universities, and government organizations began to fund the arts, and in this environment writers were increasingly obliged to become critics, elucidating and justifying their work to an audience of elite administrators.
In Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, Evan Kindley recognizes the major role modernist poet-critics played in the transition from aristocratic patronage to technocratic cultural administration. Poet-critics developed extensive ties to a network of bureaucratic institutions and established dual artistic and intellectual identities to appeal to the kind of audiences and entities that might support their work. Kindley focuses on Anglo-American poet-critics including T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Sterling A. Brown, and R. P. Blackmur. These artists grappled with the task of being “village explainers” (as Gertrude Stein described Ezra Pound) and legitimizing literature for public funding and consumption.
Modernism, Kindley shows, created a different form of labor for writers to perform and gave them an unprecedented say over the administration of contemporary culture. The consequences for our understanding of poetry and its place in our culture are still felt widely today.
This book takes another look at politics and popular culture. The author has tried to explain the politics of popular culture as part of historical and cultural processes, helping the reader understand not only how popular culture has affected our politics, but also where it is taking us.
Popular Culture in America was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This book collects some of the best work from the journal Cultural Correspondence (1975–83), which editor Paul Buhle calls "the first political journal of culture to assume its readers (and writers) watched television." The twenty-four contributors are part of a new generation of cultural critics and historians who are self-conscious products of the mass culture of the fifties and sixties. Their work attempts to update an elementary democratic principle - that people seek understanding and solutions, real or fanciful, through the mechanisms available to them. Although these writers condemn the manipulative qualities of commercial culture, they just as vehemently reject most of what has passed for Marxist (or liberal or conservative) orthodoxy on popular culture. Americans, they argue, have had a unique opportunity as well as a unique need to make the most of popular culture; the collective cultural experience is our only shared past. The richness and vitality of that culture is the focus of this book.
The thirty-four essays work toward an understanding of American mass culture not through abstraction but by exploring the real pleasures of ordinary people's lives. Pulp literature (utopian and horror themes, sports and nurse novels, and contemporary science fiction); radio thrillers; TV horror movies: television evangelists; sitcoms; music (polka, country-western, blues, jazz, and rock 'n roll); comic strips (Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, Zippy); women's humor—these and other topics are given sensitive, detailed—sometimes humorous—attention. Paul Buhle's essay, "The 1960s Meet the 1980s," discusses popular culture scholarship, drawing on a wide range of theory—the Frankfort School, art history, literary criticism, and social science approaches. Buhle argues for the importance of this scholarship as a way of understanding "that missed connection between the cultural promise of a richly diverse, democratic society and the reality at hand."
Practicing Transnationalism explores the challenges of teaching American studies in the Middle East during a time of tension and conflict between the United States and the region.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, American studies programs began to spread in the Middle East. During a time of rising anti-American sentiment, ten major programs were established in the region. What impulses propelled universities in the Middle East to establish these centers and programs? What motivated students to take courses and pursue degrees in American studies? In part, American studies programs developed as a way to “know the enemy,” to better understand America’s ubiquitous influence in foreign relations, technology, and culture; however, some programs grew because residents admired the ideals set forth as American, including democracy and free speech.
Practicing Transnationalism investigates these issues and others, using the experiences and research of the editors and contributors, who worked either directly in these programs or as adjunct to them. These scholars seek to understand what American power means to people in the Middle East. They examine the challenge of developing American studies programs in a transnational paradigm, striving to build programs that are separate from and critical of American imperialism without simply becoming anti-American. In the essays, the contributors provide context for how the field of American studies has grown and developed, and they offer views of cultural interactions and classroom situations, demonstrating the problems instructors faced and how they worked to address them.
Since World War II, the United States has been engaged in near-constant military conflict abroad, often with ill-defined objectives, ineffectual strategy, and uncertain benefits. In this era of limited congressional oversight and “wars of choice,” the executive and the armed services have shared the primary responsibility for making war. The negotiations between presidents and their generals thus grow ever more significant, and understanding them becomes essential.
Matthew Moten traces a sweeping history of the evolving roles of civilian and military leaders in conducting war, demonstrating how war strategy and national security policy shifted as political and military institutions developed, and how they were shaped by leaders’ personalities. Early presidents established the principle of military subordination to civil government, and from the Civil War to World War II the president’s role as commander-in-chief solidified, with an increasingly professionalized military offering its counsel. But General Douglas MacArthur’s insubordination to President Harry Truman during the Korean War put political-military tensions on public view. Subsequent presidents selected generals who would ally themselves with administration priorities. Military commanders in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan did just that—and the results were poorly conceived policy and badly executed strategy.
The most effective historical collaborations between presidents and their generals were built on mutual respect for military expertise and civilian authority, and a willingness to negotiate with candor and competence. Upon these foundations, future soldiers and statesmen can ensure effective decision-making in the event of war and bring us closer to the possibility of peace.
An original journey through political history, Photographic Presidents reveals the intertwined evolution of an American institution and a medium that continues to define it.
Decades before Americans cheered on Ichiro Suzuki, Japanese baseball fans swooned over Babe Ruth. And a century prior to the craze for anime and manga, American art collectors hoarded Japanese woodblock prints. Few relationships can match the depth, or importance, of the cultural ties between America and Japan over the past two hundred years. In Pacific Cosmopolitans, Michael Auslin tells this absorbing history in full for the first time.
From the moment adventurers reached each other's shores in the early 1800s, cultural encounter formed the bedrock of U.S.–Japan ties. Such casual connections turned into formal cultural exchange within the emerging global society of the late nineteenth century. As both countries became great powers, new cultural institutions supplemented political ties and helped promote economic trade, shaping the Pacific world yet becoming entangled in controversy. These trans-Pacific activities faced critics in both countries and were overwhelmed by rising nationalism and geopolitical crisis in the early twentieth century.
In the decades since World War II, however, U.S.–Japan cultural exchange has again been seen as a crucial means to strengthen the bonds between the two nations. Bringing together philanthropists like the Rockefeller family and artists like Akira Kurosawa, along with untold numbers of ordinary Americans and Japanese, the acolytes of exchange continue to believe that cross-cultural understanding will promote a more peaceful future, even in the face of competing national interests.
The shifting meaning of race and class in the age of Trump
The profound concentration of economic power in the United States in recent decades has produced surprising new forms of racialization. In Producers, Parasites, Patriots, Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes show that while racial subordination is an enduring feature of U.S. political history, it continually changes in response to shifting economic and political conditions, interests, and structures.
The authors document the changing politics of race and class in the age of Trump across a broad range of phenomena, showing how new forms of racialization work to alter the economic protections of whiteness while promoting some conservatives of color as models of the neoliberal regime. Through careful analyses of diverse political sites and conflicts—racially charged elections, attacks on public-sector unions, new forms of white precarity, the rise of black and brown political elites, militia uprisings, multiculturalism on the far right—they highlight new, interwoven deployments of race in the ascendant age of inequality. Using the concept of “racial transposition,” the authors demonstrate how racial meanings and signification can be transferred from one group to another to shore up both neoliberalism and racial hierarchy.
From the militia movement to the Alt-Right to the mainstream Republican Party, Producers, Parasites, Patriots brings to light the changing role of race in right-wing politics.
The monumental Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups is the most authoritative single source available on the history, culture, and distinctive characteristics of ethnic groups in the United States. The Dimensions of Ethnicity series is designed to make this landmark scholarship available to everyone in a series of handy paperbound student editions. Selections in this series will include outstanding articles that illuminate the social dynamics of a pluralistic nation or masterfully summarize the experience of key groups.
Written by the best-qualified scholars in each field, Dimensions of Ethnicity will reflect the complex interplay between assimilation and pluralism that is a central theme of the American experience.
George Lipsitz’s classic book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness argues that public policy and private prejudice work together to create a possessive investment in whiteness that is responsible for the racialized hierarchies of our society. Whiteness has a cash value: it accounts for advantages that come to individuals through profits made from housing secured in discriminatory markets, through the unequal educational opportunities available to children of different races, through insider networks that channel employment opportunities to the friends and relatives of those who have profited most from past and present discrimination, and especially through intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations. White Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with structured advantages.
In this twentieth anniversary edition, Lipsitz provides a new introduction and updated statistics; as well as analyses of the enduring importance of Hurricane Katrina; the nature of anti-immigrant mobilizations; police assaults on Black women, the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray; the legacy of Obama and the emergence of Trump; the Charleston Massacre and other hate crimes; and the ways in which white fear, white fragility, and white failure have become drivers of a new ethno-nationalism.
As vital as it was upon its original publication, the twentieth anniversary edition of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness is an unflinching but necessary look at white supremacy.
The United States is rapidly changing from a country monochromatically divided between black and white into a multiethnic society. The Paradoxes of Integration helps us to understand America’s racial future by revealing the complex relationships among integration, racial attitudes, and neighborhood life.
J. Eric Oliver demonstrates that the effects of integration differ tremendously, depending on which geographical level one is examining. Living among people of other races in a larger metropolitan area corresponds with greater racial intolerance, particularly for America’s white majority. But when whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans actually live in integrated neighborhoods, they feel less racial resentment. Paradoxically, this racial tolerance is usually also accompanied by feeling less connected to their community; it is no longer "theirs." Basing its findings on our most advanced means of gauging the impact of social environments on racial attitudes, The Paradoxes of Integration sensitively explores the benefits and at times, heavily borne, costs of integration.
The monumental Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups is the most authoritative single source available on the history, culture, and distinctive characteristics of ethnic groups in the United States. The Dimensions of Ethnicity series is designed to make this landmark scholarship available to everyone in a series of handy paperbound student editions. Selections in this series will include outstanding articles that illuminate the social dynamics of a pluralistic nation or masterfully summarize the experience of key groups.
Written by the best-qualified scholars in each field, Dimensions of Ethnicity titles will reflect the complex interplay between assimilation and pluralism that is a central theme of the American experience.
In Prejudice, the history and psychology of discriminatory policies is contrasted with efforts to overcome discrimination.
In her engaging study, Passing for Perfect,erin Khuê Ninh considers the factors that drove college imposters such as Azia Kim—who pretended to be a Stanford freshman—and Jennifer Pan—who hired a hitman to kill her parents before they found out she had never received her high school diploma—to extreme lengths to appear successful. Why would someone make such an illogical choice? And how do they stage these lies so convincingly, and for so long?
These outlier examples prompt Ninh to address the larger issue of the pressures and difficulties of striving to be model minority, where failure is too ruinous to admit. Passing for Perfect insists that being a “model minority” is not a “myth,” but coded into one’s programming as an identity—a set of convictions and aspirations, regardless of present socioeconomic status or future attainability—and that the true cost of turning children into high-achieving professionals may be higher than anyone can bear.
Ninh’s book codifies for readers the difference between imposters who are con artists or shysters and those who don’t know how to stop passing for perfect.
At the heart of the model minority myth—often associated with Asian Americans—is the concept of civility. In this groundbreaking book, Picturing Model Citizens, Thy Phu exposes the complex links between civility and citizenship, and argues that civility plays a crucial role in constructing Asian American citizenship.
Featuring works by Arnold Genthe, Carl Iwasaki, Toyo Miyatake, Nick Ut, and others, Picturing Model Citizens traces the trope of civility from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Through an examination of photographs of Chinese immigrants, Japanese internment camps, the Hiroshima Maidens project, napalm victims, and the SARS epidemic, Phu explores civility's unexpected appearance in images that draw on discourses of intimacy, cultivation, apology, and hygiene. She reveals how Asian American visual culture illustrates not only cultural ideas of civility, but also contests the contradictions of state-defined citizenship.
Drawing on these documents as well as immigration case files, legislative materials, and transcripts of interviews and court proceedings, Lau reveals immigration as an interactive process. Chinese immigrants and their U.S. families were subject to regulation and surveillance, but they also manipulated and thwarted those regulations, forcing the U.S. government to adapt its practices and policies. Lau points out that the Exclusion Acts and the pseudo-familial structures that emerged in response have had lasting effects on Chinese American identity. She concludes with a look at exclusion’s legacy, including the Confession Program of the 1960s that coerced people into divulging the names of paper family members and efforts made by Chinese American communities to recover their lost family histories.
From the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the 1960s, Mexican American Catholics experienced racism and discrimination within the U.S. Catholic church, as white priests and bishops maintained a racial divide in all areas of the church's ministry. To oppose this religious apartheid and challenge the church to minister fairly to all of its faithful, a group of Chicano priests formed PADRES (Padres Asociados para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos y Sociales, or Priests Associated for Religious, Educational, and Social Rights) in 1969. Over the next twenty years of its existence, PADRES became a powerful force for change within the Catholic church and for social justice within American society.
This book offers the first history of the founding, activism, victories, and defeats of PADRES. At the heart of the book are oral history interviews with the founders of PADRES, who describe how their ministries in poor Mexican American parishes, as well as their own experiences of racism and discrimination within and outside the church, galvanized them into starting and sustaining the movement. Richard Martínez traces the ways in which PADRES was inspired by the Chicano movement and other civil rights struggles of the 1960s and also probes its linkages with liberation theology in Latin America. He uses a combination of social movement theory and organizational theory to explain why the group emerged, flourished, and eventually disbanded in 1989.
Chicana/o history has reached an intriguing juncture. While academic and intellectual studies are embracing new, highly nuanced perspectives on race, class, gender, education, identity, and community, the field itself continues to be viewed as a battleground, subject to attacks from outside academia by those who claim that the discipline promotes racial hatred and anti-Americanism. Against a backdrop of deportations and voter suppression targeting Latinos, A Promising Problem presents the optimistic voices of scholars who call for sophisticated solutions while embracing transnationalism and the reality of multiple, overlapping identities.
Showcasing a variety of new directions, this anthology spans topics such as growth and reassessment in Chicana/o history manifested in a disruption of nationalism and geographic essentialism, the impact of legal history, interracial relations and the experiences of Latino subpopulations in the US South, race and the politics of religious history, transborder feminism in the early twentieth century, and aspirations for a field that increasingly demonstrates the relational dynamics of cultural production. As they reflect on the state of their field, the contributors offer significant insights into sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, education, and literature, while tracing the history of activism throughout the last century and debating the very concepts of “Chicano” and “Chicano history.” Although the political landscape is fraught with closed-off rhetoric, A Promising Problem encourages diversity of thought and opens the possibilities of historical imagination.
Fleeing the social and political turmoil spawned by the Mexican Revolution, massive numbers of Mexican immigrants entered the southwestern United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. But instead of finding refuge, many encountered harsh, anti-Mexican attitudes and violence from an Anglo population frightened by the influx of foreigners and angered by anti-American sentiments in Mexico.
This book examines the response of Mexican immigrants to Anglo American prejudice and violence early in the twentieth century. Drawing on archival sources from both sides of the border, Arturo Rosales traces the rise of "México Lindo" nationalism and the efforts of Mexican consuls to help poor Mexican immigrants defend themselves against abuses and flagrant civil rights violations by Anglo citizens, police, and the U.S. judicial system. This research illuminates a dark era in which civilian and police brutality, prejudice in the courtroom, and disproportionate arrest, conviction, and capital punishment rates too often characterized justice for Mexican Americans.
A Patchwork Shawl sheds light on the lives of a segment of the U.S. immigrant population that has long been relegated to the margins. It focuses on women's lives that span different worlds: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and the United States. This collection of essays by and about South Asian women in America challenges stereotypes by allowing women to speak in their own words. Together they provide discerning insights into the reconstruction of immigrant patriarchy in a new world, and the development of women's resistance to that reconstruction. Shamita Das DasGupta's introduction also acquaints readers with the psychological topography of the South Asian community.
A Patchwork Shawl considers topics from re-negotiation of identity to sexuality, violence to intimacy, occupations to organizing within the community. The essays bear witness to women's negotiations for independent identities, their claim to their own bodies, and the right to choose relationships based on their own histories and truths. They bring new understanding to the intersection of gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and class.
In 1862, in the only instance of a Jewish expulsion in America, General Ulysses S. Grant banished Jewish citizens from the region under his military command. Although the order was quickly revoked by President Lincoln, it represented growing anti-Semitism in America. Convinced that assimilation was their best defense, Jews sought to Americanize by shedding distinctive dress, occupations, and religious rituals.
American Jews recognized the benefit and urgency of bridging the divide between Reform and Orthodox Judaism to create a stronger alliance to face the challenges ahead. With Grant’s 1868 presidential campaign, they also realized they could no longer remain aloof from partisan politics. As they became a growing influence in American politics, both political parties courted the new Jewish vote.
Once in office, Grant took notice of the persecution of Jews in Romania and Russia, and he appointed more Jews to office than any president before him. Indeed, Simon Wolf, a Washington lawyer who became one of Grant’s closest advisers, was part of a new generation of Jewish leaders to emerge in the post–Civil War era—thoroughly Americanized, politically mature, and committed to the modernized Judaism of the Reform movement.
In Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism, Peter Adams recounts the history of the American Jewish Community’s assimilation efforts, organization, and political mobilization in the late 19th century, as political and cultural imperatives crafted a new, American brand of Judaism.
Jewish voting is distinctive and paradoxical. Stereotypes about the voting habits of American Jews include that they vote at unusually high levels, that they’re liberal, that they vote for Democratic candidates without regard to their self-interest, and that Israel is their most important issue. Not only are all of those claims wrong, but they obscure aspects of Jews’ voting behavior that are much more interesting.
The Politics of American Jews uncovers new perspectives on Jews’ political choices by analyzing the unprecedented amount of survey data that is now available, including surveys that permit contrasting the voting of Jews with that of comparable non-Jews. The data suggest several mysteries about Jewish voting. While more Jews are Democrats than are liberals, there has not been a previous exploration of why more politically conservative Jews are not Republicans.
A fresh picture of Jews’ political behaviors shows that Jews are no longer politically monolithic. They vote on the basis of their self-interest and their values, but not all Jews share the same self-interest or the same values. While most Jews have incorporated being Democratic and liberal into their political DNA, growing divisions in their ranks suggest a mutation could occur.
This collection of essays by American philosopher Alain Locke (1885-1954) makes readily available for the first time his important writings on cultural pluralism, value relativism, and critical relativism. As a black philosopher early in this century, Locke was a pioneer: having earned both undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Harvard, he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, studied at the University of Berlin, and chaired the Philosophy Department at Howard University for almost four decades. He was perhaps best known as a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
Locke’s works in philosophy—many previously unpublished—conceptually frame the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro movement and provide an Afro-American critique of pragmatism and value absolutism, and also offer a view of identity, communicative competency, and contextualism. In addition, his major works on the nature of race, race relations, and the role of race-conscious literature are presented to demonstrate the application of his philosophy. Locke’s commentaries on the major philosophers of his day, including James, Royce, Santayana, Perry, and Ehrenfels help tell the story of his relationship to his former teachers and his theoretical affinities.
In his substantial Introduction and interpretive concluding chapter, Leonard Harris describes Locke’s life, evaluates his role as an American philosopher and theoretician of the Harlem Renaissance, situates him in the pragmatist tradition, and outlines his affinities with modern deconstructionist ideas. A chronology of the philosopher’s life and bibliography of his works are also provided. Although much has been written about Alain Locke, this is the first book to focus on his philosophical contributions.
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.
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.
Actor and singer Paul Robeson's performances in Othello, Show Boat, and The Emperor Jones made him famous, but his midcentury appearances in support of causes ranging from labor and civil rights to antilynching and American warmongering made him notorious. When Robeson announced at the 1949 Paris Peace Conference that it was "unthinkable" for blacks to go to war against the Soviet Union, the mainstream American press declared him insane.
Notions of Communism, blackness, and insanity were interchangeably deployed during the Cold War to discount activism such as Robeson's, just a part of an array of social and cultural practices that author Tony Perucci calls the Cold War performance complex. Focusing on two key Robeson performances---the concerts in Peekskill, New York, in 1949 and his appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956---Perucci demonstrates how these performances and the government's response to them are central to understanding the history of Cold War culture in the United States. His book provides a transformative new perspective on how the struggle over the politics of performance in the 1950s was also a domestic struggle over freedom and equality. The book closely examines both of these performance events as well as artifacts from Cold War culture---including congressional documents, FBI files, foreign policy papers, the popular literature on mental illness, and government propaganda films---to study the operation of power and activism in American Cold War culture.
The first in-depth look at white people’s activism in fighting racism during the past fifty years.
Not since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when many white college students went south to fight against Jim Crow laws, has white antiracist activity held the public’s attention. Yet there have always been white people involved in fighting racism. In this passionate work, Becky Thompson looks at white Americans who have struggled against racism, offering examples of both successes and failures, inspirations, practical philosophies, and a way ahead.
A Promise and a Way of Life weaves an account of the past half-century based on the life histories of thirty-nine people who have placed antiracist activism at the center of their lives. Through a rich and fascinating narrative that links individual experiences with social and political history, Thompson shows the ways, both public and personal, in which whites have opposed racism during several social movements: the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, multiracial feminism, the Central American peace movement, the struggle for antiracist education, and activism against the prison industry. Beginning with the diverse catalysts that started these activists on their journeys, this book demonstrates the contributions and limitations of white antiracism in key social justice movements.
Through these stories, crucial questions are raised: Does antiracist work require a repudiation of one’s whiteness or can that identity be transformed through political commitment and alliances? What do white people need to do to undermine white privilege? What would it take to build a multiracial movement in which white people are responsible for creating antiracist alliances while not co-opting people of color?
Unique in its depth and thoroughness, A Promise and a Way of Life is essential for anyone currently fighting racism or wondering how to do so. Through its demonstration of the extraordinary personal and social transformations ordinary people can make, it provides a new paradigm for movement activity, one that will help to incite and guide future antiracist activism.
The First Complete History of the Military Force of Colonial Pennsylvania, a Volunteer Body Created as a Practical Response to the Ideal of Pacifism
Known at various times as the Military Association of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Association, or simply Associators, this long-neglected organization represented a new constituency in Pennsylvania politics and by extension, a new American response to arbitrary rule. Organized on December 7, 1747, at Philadelphia, the Military Association, an all-volunteer military establishment pledged to the defense of Pennsylvania, served as the de facto armed force for Pennsylvania, a colony whose leadership, a loose coalition of Quaker and German pacifists, land barons, and merchants, foreswore military preparedness on religious and ideological grounds. For the Associators, including their most noted supporter, Benjamin Franklin, a defenseless colony was no longer practical. During the War of Austrian Succession and again in the Seven Years’ War, Associators organized defense efforts in defiance of the Pennsylvania colonial leadership. Associators also helped defend American Indian refugees against the infamous Paxton Boys in 1764. By 1775, Associators found themselves as the colony’s only legitimate military leadership and, by capitalizing on electoral gains in the lead up to the American Revolution, Associators assumed offices vacated by former officials. During the critical battles of 1776, the Associators in their distinctive round hats and brown coats proved a decisive asset to the Continental Army.
In The Pennsylvania Associators, 1747–1777, historian Joseph Seymour has painstakingly researched primary source materials in order to write the first comprehensive history of this influential organization. Seymour demonstrates that while the Pennsylvania Associators contributed to success in the campaigns in which they fought, particularly the battles of Trenton and Princeton, a more fascinating and important investigation are the concerns that motivated these men. Associators considered military service in defense of their religious and civil liberties as a natural right. For three decades, Associators demonstrated that belief in and out of uniform. In a colony founded on religious exceptionalism, Associators saw themselves as faithful soldiers and active agents against leadership by entitlement, a principle guiding our government today.
“Huzza for the new World and farewell to the Old One,” John Adams wrote in late 1787, wrapping up a decade’s worth of diplomatic service in Europe. Volume 19 of the Papers of John Adams chronicles Adams’s last duties in London and The Hague. In the twenty-eight months documented here, he petitioned the British ministry to halt impressment of American sailors, toured the English countryside, and observed parliamentary politics. Adams salvaged U.S. credit by contracting two new Dutch loans amid the political chaos triggered by William V’s resurgence. Correspondents like Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette mulled over the Anglo–American trade war that followed the Revolution and reported on the French Assembly of Notables—topics that Adams commented on with trademark candor. He wrote the final two volumes of his work, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.
Adams yearned to return home and see the American republic take shape. “For a Man who has been thirty Years rolling like a stone,” Adams wrote, the choice was whether to “set down in private Life to his Plough; or push into turbulent scenes of Sedition and Tumult; whether be sent to Congress, or a Convention or God knows what.” Back on his native soil of Massachusetts in June 1788, Adams settled into rural retirement with wife Abigail and watched the U.S. Constitution’s ratification evolve. By volume’s end, John Adams again resumes public life, ready to serve as America’s first vice president.
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