History Commons^™

A Tale Of Two Motherlands: Bridging The Gap Between The American And Korean Identities Of Korean War Adoptees, Lily Zitko

The Great Lakes Journal of Undergraduate History

In 1955, the Harry and Bertha Holt successfully petitioned for the passing of Private Law 475 (Holt Bill) allowing for the adoption of eight orphans from South Korea. This was the beginning of a global revolution in transnational and transracial adoption. Prior to this, the idea of adoption outside of the United States was seldom possible; however, the work of the Holt family rationalized with the pubic and garnered much attention from the government and media. Even more so complicated was the idea of mixed-race Korean children, fathered by American G.I.s stationed in the Korea during the Korean War. Their …

(Special Section) Translating Race: Mission Hymns And The Challenge Of Christian Identity, Philip Burnett

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

“Ye seed of Israel’s chosen race,” “The race that long in darkness pined,” “To heal and save a race undone,” and “Sanctify a ransomed race” are a few examples of many references to “race” that exist in English-language hymnody. Throughout the nineteenth-century, hymns containing lines such as these, were exported from Britain into mission fields where translators had to find new ways to conceptualize notions of race and, in effect, created new group identities. This requires asking critical questions about the implications of what happened when ideas of race, in the Christian sense, interacted with non-religious notions of race in …

Why Africa? Towards A Materialist Understanding Of Racism And The African Slave Trade, Giacomo F. Green

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Common historical interpretations of the Atlantic slave system often lose the position Africa within the political-economic haze of the era, either producing confused accounts or eliding the question of causality altogether. I argue that this tendency stems from the corrosive effects of the historian’s position as an observer from the present, and that to understand why Africa was the prime location for the source of human slaves, one needs to take a materialist approach to the problem of origins. Only through careful examination of empire, the plantation complex, and the genesis of the Atlantic working classes can one arrive at …

Gender, Race, And Religion In An African Enlightenment, Jonathan D. Lyonhart

Journal of Religion & Film

Black Panther (2018) not only heralded a new future for representation in big-budget films but also gave an alternative vision of the past, one which recasts the Enlightenment within an African context. By going through its technological enlightenment in isolation from Western ideals and dominance, Wakanda opens a space for reflecting on alternate ways progress can—and still might—unfold. More specifically, this alternative history creates room for reimagining how modernity—with its myriad social, scientific, and religious paradigm shifts—could have negotiated questions of race, and, in turn, how race could have informed and redirected some of the lesser impulses of modernity. Similar …

Book Review: Integrations: The Struggle For Racial Equality And Civic Renewal In Public Education, Michael A. Ready

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Race In The 21st Century, A New Approach For Future World-Making: Looking Back To Move Forward, Dylan Tarleton

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Color blindness, the end of race, and white privilege are but a few phrases that begin to capture the messy confusion of a zeitgeist that is 21^st century discussions on race. At a time when race is such a necessary topic to delve into, it seems that there is a lack of history injected into the conversation. Race becomes an external motor of history, racism pathological and immovable. An unthinking decision. In other words, race and racism, from the standpoint of an organizer or academic in the 21^st century, becomes near impossible to break down and work against. …

Colonial Articulations: Race, Violence, And Coloniality In Kafka's "Penal Colony", Marshall Pierce

PSU McNair Scholars Online Journal

Franz Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony” has been widely, even exhaustively studied. However, there is a dearth of analysis which stresses the centrality of the colony as a site, and race as a structure, in this text in a sustained and appropriately nuanced manner. While Kafka’s work is often read as representing universal conditions of domination and alienation, this paper argues that “In the Penal Colony” illustrates specific political processes and relations which belong to colonial and racialized orders of power. Reading “In the Penal Colony” alongside theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, and Saidiya Hartman, this …

Racialized Tax Inequity: Wealth, Racism, And The U.S. System Of Taxation, Palma Joy Strand, Nicholas A. Mirkay

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This Article describes the connection between wealth inequality and the increasing structural racism in the U.S. tax system since the 1980s. A long-term sociological view (the why) reveals the historical racialization of wealth and a shift in the tax system overall beginning around 1980 to protect and exacerbate wealth inequality, which has been fueled by racial animus and anxiety. A critical tax view (the how) highlights a shift over the same time period at both federal and state levels from taxes on wealth, to taxes on income, and then to taxes on consumption—from greater to less progressivity. Both of these …

Undying (And Undead) Modern National Myths: Cannibalism And Racial Mixture In Contemporary Brazilian Vampire Fiction, Jacob C. Brown

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

Contemporary cultural media illustrates the vampire as an important symbolic figure in the Brazilian imaginary. For example, in twentieth and twenty-first century Brazilian fiction, television, and political discourse, vampires have risen from their supposedly European origins as expressions of urban decay, comic excess, and government corruption in Brazil. Beyond these representations, I focus on three contemporary novels in which the vampire also plays a starring role. O vampiro que descobriu o Brasil (1999) by Ivan Jaf, Aventuras do vampiro de Palmares (2014) by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, and Dom Pedro I Vampiro (2015) by Nazarethe Fonseca stand out from other creative reimaginings …

Rewriting History: A Study Of How The History Of The Civil War Has Changed In Textbooks From 1876 To 2014, Skyler A. Campbell

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

History textbooks provide an interesting perspective into the views and attitudes of their respective time period. The way textbooks portray certain events and groups of people has a profound impact on the way children learn to view those groups and events. That impact then has the potential to trickle down to future generations, fabricating a historical narrative that sometimes avoids telling the whole truth, or uses selective wording to sway opinions on certain topics. This paper analyzes the changes seen in how the Civil War is written about in twelve textbooks dated from 1876 to 2014. Notable topics of discussion …

Gettysburg College Journal Of The Civil War Era 2018

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

No abstract provided.

Mark Heimermann And Brittany Tullis, Eds. Picturing Childhood: Youth In Transnational Comics. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2017., Cristina R. Rivera

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis, eds. Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics. Austin: U of Texas P, 2017.

In The Land Of The Mountain Gods: Ethnotrauma And Exile Among The Apaches Of The American Southwest, M. Grace Hunt Watkinson

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

In the mid to late nineteenth century, two Indigenous groups of New Mexico territory, the Mescalero and the Chiricahua Apaches, faced violence, imprisonment, and exile. During a century of settler influx, territorial changeovers, vigilante violence, and Indian removal, these two cousin tribes withstood an experience beyond individual pain best described as ethnotrauma. Rooted in racial persecution and mass violence, this ethnotrauma possessed layers of traumatic reaction that not only revolved around their ethnicity, but around their relationship with their home lands as well. Disconnected from the ritual resources and sacred geographies that made up every day Apache living, both groups …

A Powerful Generation: Understanding And Overcoming Race Relations On College Campuses, Lyndzey R. Elliott

Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs

This article encourages our generation to have hope in light of the the racial tensions between people of color and white Americans on college campuses. This brief discussion analyzes acts of racism on certain college campuses that have conveyed to African-American students that their lives do not matter. Although these racial acts have been painful, terrifying, and exhausting, the points within this article remind us that our generation is powerful and that a change can occur as long as we stand strong by our beliefs and our right to speak out against injustice.

Collective Amnesia, Boca Floja

South

A wide gap exists between the phenomenon of cultural appropriation and historical claim. How do you justify when you are 12 and at that age you have been programmed by an information structure and culture that has defined every identifying feature?

The migration phenomenon, the informal market, and the constant flow between the idealization of the First World in the northern corner and the underworld in the backyard, made it possible for me one day, while walking with my grandmother in a street market in Mexico, to stumble across a cassette tape with Ice Cube’s face on it that said …

Making It Work Before The Movement: African-American Community And Resistance In 1940s And 1950s Portland, Maine, Justus Hillebrand

Maine History

African Americans in Portland, Maine, in the 1940s and 1950s made up less than 0.5% of the population. As a consequence, discourse on race was more subtle than it was in other parts of the country. The Portland black community, as in other small northern New England cities, lacked the numbers for broad public or political action. Instead, African Americans developed individual and informal strategies of resistance aimed at broadening opportunities in education, employment, and housing. African Americans “made it work” by congregating in their own church, persevering in their own educational goals, operating their own businesses, and owning their …

Supporting Caste: The Origins Of Racism In Colonial Virginia, Patrick D. Anderson

Grand Valley Journal of History

In 17th century Virginia, lower class whites and blacks coordinated on multiple occasions to resist the power of the ruling class elites. By the late 19th century, white laborers viewed the newly freed slaves through racist precepts and the two groups clashed on a regular basis. The aim of this essay is to explain how the shift from racial solidarity to racial antagonism occurred. Racist ideology originated in the minds of the elites and they attempted to separate the restless lower class along racial lines, first, by legal reforms, second, by creating a separate class of enslaved blacks. Anti-black racism …

The Governor’S Gallows: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain And The Clifton Harris Case, Jason Finkelstein

Maine History

In 1867, Auburn was home to one of the most vicious murders committed in the state’s history. Clifton Harris, a southern black teenager, was corralled for questioning and within hours confessed to the crime. He was tried and convicted solely upon his own confession, without any evidence against him. Harris became only the second prisoner ever to be executed in Thomaston State Prison. Indeed, the de facto abolition of the death penalty had taken place nearly three decades earlier, but Governor Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain steadfastly proclaimed that he would carry out Harris’s death sentence in the face of political opposition. …

The Changing Significance Of Race For People Of Color, Juanita Tamayo Lott

Trotter Review

For more than two hundred years, race in the United States has been viewed as a black/white issue. Blacks have been defined not as a people unto themselves, but only in relationship to whites. This relationship is one of power with blacks as a “minority subordinate” group and whites as a “majority dominant” group. Other people of color—whether indigenous to the Americas, settlers who predated Western Europeans, nonwhite settlers with several generations of U.S.-born residents, or newly arrived immigrants and refugees—have been primarily defined as nonexistent. When other people of color have been recognized, it has been in a marginal …

Miscegenation And Acculturation In The Narragansett Country Of Rhode Island, 1710-1790, Rhett S. Jones

Trotter Review

The histories of most New England states view blacks as a strange, foreign people enslaved in southern states, whom New Englanders rescued first by forming colonization and abolitionist societies and later by fighting a Civil War to free them. The existence of a black population in New England as early as the seventeenth century has been pretty much ignored. Indeed Anderson and Marten, of the Parting Ways Museum of Afro-American Ethnohistory, touched off a furor with their discovery that Abraham Pearse, one of the early residents of Plymouth Colony, was black.

The long neglect of New England’s black history has …

Race And Capital Punishment, Michael L. Radelet

Trotter Review

Whether it be lynching or legally-imposed capital punishment, the threat or use of death as a punishment has been a powerful means of class and race intimidation throughout American history. In the nineteenth century, statutes that explicitly considered race were not uncommon; in Virginia, for example, the statutes of 150 years ago listed five capital crimes for whites and 70 for black slaves. Today, historians interested in capital punishment use records of state compensations to slave owners to learn how many slaves were executed.