Digital Commons Network^™

Through The Ivory Curtain: African Americans In Cleveland Heights, Ohio, Before The Fair Housing Movement, J. Mark Souther

History Faculty Publications

This article examines the largely neglected history of African American struggles to obtain housing in Cleveland Heights, a first-ring suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, between 1900 and 1960, prior to the fair housing and managed integration campaigns that emerged thereafter. The article explores the experiences of black live-in servants, resident apartment building janitors, independent renters, and homeowners. It offers a rare look at the ways that domestic and custodial arrangements opened opportunities in housing and education, as well as the methods, calculations, risks, and rewards of working through white intermediaries to secure homeownership. It argues that the continued black presence laid …

Warriors In Drag: Performing Gender And Remaking Men In Prisoner Of War Theater, Yücel Yanikdağ

History Faculty Publications

This chapter examines Ottoman prison camp theaters in Egypt, from where more sources have survived. With the exception of some passing mentions in scholarship, entertainment in general, and theatre in particular in the Ottoman military is a neglected subject. Scholars of European history studying troop and prisoner of war entertainment during the two world wars have produced a noteworthy amount of material. Many have even focused specifically on soldiers’ cross-dressing or female impersonation in theater on various fronts and prisoner of war camps. Older scholarship viewed female impersonation as mere entertainment, but more recent studies have taken up gender related …

Strengths Hidden In Plain Sight, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

I knew from teaching that the lifeblood of education travels through capillaries, small vessels that reach into small classrooms, quiet conversations, silent reading. But when I became dean, I saw that those capillaries flow only because of the arteries and veins of admissions, finance, student affairs, and advancement. People far removed from the classroom make it possible for other people to be teachers and students.

Ethnic Historians And The Mainstream: Shaping America's Immigration Story, Elizabeth Zanoni

History Faculty Publications

Historians rarely reflect publicly on how lived experiences in families and communities influence academic trajectories. For this reason, Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping America’s Immigration Story is a welcome and invaluable collection for scholars and students of immigration and US history. Editors Alan Kraut and David Gerber recognize that “historians often seem to write their autobiographies with the subjects they address in their books and articles” (189). This speaks especially to immigration historians writing about their own ethnic communities; for them, concerns about navigating the rich, but oftentimes difficult, terrain of family life and identity politics are particularly pronounced.

The Disappearing Mestizo, Book Review, Andrew Rosa

History Faculty Publications

The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Grenada. Joanne Rappaport. Duke University Press, 2014, 368 pp., $25.99, paper. By probing “when and how” an individual was considered a mestizo (a person of mixed heritage) in the early colonial New Kingdom of Grenada (modern-day Columbia), Joanne Rappaport’s Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada (Duke University Press, 2014) adds to the growing scholarship on racial difference in colonial Spanish America.

To Make A Better World Tomorrow: St. Clair Drake And The Quakers Of Pendle Hill, Andrew Rosa

History Faculty Publications

This article is part of a larger project by the author to record St. Clair Drake’s contribution to the black radical tradition. Here he examines Drake’s involvement with the Quakers in the early years of the Depression. Drawing on writings in African American and Popular Front periodicals of the time, it considers how a Quaker community shaped Drake’s identity as an intellectual activist and how his encounter suggests the ways in which black intellectuals engaged with non-violence as a philosophy and strategy for social change before he civil rights movement. Drake’s participation in non-violent campaigns for workers’ rights, world peace …

The Roots And Routes Of "Imperium In Imperio": St. Clair Drake, The Formative Years, Andrew Rosa

History Faculty Publications

Marking the centenary of St. Clair Drake's birth, this examination begins the project of recovering one of the most underrated minds of the twentieth century by situating him within the community(s) that initially served to form him. Illustrative of the social theory of a black community outlined in Black Metropolis, Drake's lineage and formative years suggests that his was a cultural identity rooted in and routed through a series of racially constructed, semi-autonomous black life worlds, each held together by the collective desires of those made most vulnerable by the upheavals of capitalism and the caste-enforcing structures of segregation …

Church Burnings, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

On 15 September 1963 a bomb exploded in the basement of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The ensuing fire and death of four little girls placed the violence of white supremacy on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. It also entered the 16^th Street Church into a long history of attacks against houses of worship in the American South. Though churches burn for any number of reasons, including accident and insurance fraud, church arson in southern culture has frequently been associated with a symbolic assault on a community’s core institution.

Domesticating The Diaspora: Memory And The Life Of Sister Katie, Caroline Waldron Merithew

History Faculty Publications

Three shrines in Illinois honor heroes of the working class: one for the legendary Mother Jones; one for the Virden martyrs, who died for coal mining unionism, and whose memory is kept alive by labor organizers around the world; and one for Catherine (Katie) Bianco DeRorre. Katie's monument, unlike the others, draws few visitors today. But when it was dedicated in 1961, men and women — on the floor of the U.S. Congress, in the neighborhood where Katie grew up, at American universities, in union halls, on the streets of New York City, and in Milan — took notice and …

Where The Humanities Live, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

The humanities play an important role at every kind of institution. Approximately 40 percent of all undergraduate humanities degrees come from large research universities, where they account for about 15 percent of all bachelor's degrees. The United States stands in the top third of the percentage of degrees awarded in the humanities and the arts internationally, ranking with Germany and Denmark. English remains the dominant major, producing about a third of all bachelor's degrees in the humanities, followed by general humanities and liberal studies with 26 percent, and history with 18 percent.

Open Adoption And The Politics Of Transnational Feminist Human Rights, Karen Sotiropoulos

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Making The Italian Other: Blacks, Whites, And The In Between In The 1895 Spring Valley, Illinois, Race Riot, Caroline Waldron Merithew

History Faculty Publications

This essay takes the Spring Valley, Illinois, race riot and observes how blacks, Italians, and other new immigrants attempted to empower themselves and lay claim to status at the "nadir" of race relations ill this country. The events leading up to the riot, the assault on the African-American community, and the aftermath of the attack led to vocal outcries against oppression. What constituted oppression, however, was open to interpretation. Furthermore, no group defined itself, or its other, in isolation. Rather, each side responded to the rhetoric of its "opponents" as well as of middle-class whites who became involved in the …

Columbine School Massacre, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

On 20 April 1999, in one of the deadliest school shootings in national history, two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Jefferson County, Colorado, killed twelve fellow students and a teacher and injured twenty-three others before committing suicide. Eric Harris, age eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, age seventeen, used homemade bombs, two sawed-off twelve-gauge shotguns, a nine-millimeter semiautomatic rifle, and a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol in a siege that began shortly after 11 A.M.

An Overview: The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis Of Two American Communities, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Using digital media, we wanted to give readers full access to a scholarly argument, the historiography about it, and the evidence for it. Our early models of the article contained neat squares and lines and carefully arranged explanations of the links from one part to another. Through two sets of readings by peer reviewers and presentations to a range of audiences, we have revised our presentation and our argument while maintaining the original purpose of the article. This essay introduces the electronic article and explains its development, as well as our intentions for it.

A Southern Chronicle: The Virginia Quarterly Review And The American South, 1925-2000, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Since the founding of The Virginia Quarterly Review, one topic has turned up again and again: the journal's native region. The culture, economy, past, and future of the American South have presented the Review with a constantly changing and yet stubbornly persistent set of anxieties and hopes. To survey the essays on the South that have appeared in these pages is to survey much of the region's history in the 20th century.

Giving Orders In Rural Southern Rhodesia: Controversies Over Africans’ Authority In Development Programs, 1928-1934, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

This article focuses on the period from 1928 to 1935, Depression years, when Harold Jowitt was director of native development. During these years, debates over the Jeanes teacher program, and specifically over the careers of Matthew Magorimbo and Lysias Mukahleyi, exposed both the needs that drew the administration and missions toward community-based development, and the questions of power, authority, and resources that blocked community development, and more specifically the Jeanes teacher program, from achieving its stated aims.

The Challenge Of Adolescent Health: Views From Catholic Social Teaching And The Social And Medical Sciences, Brenda Wixson Donnelly, Dennis M. Doyle, Una M. Cadegan, Teresa L. Thompson, Patricia Voydanoff, Joan Mcguinness Wagner

History Faculty Publications

This book provides a multidisciplinary examination of the complex social issues surrounding adolescent health and health care delivery. It draws specifically on the resources of Catholic social teaching, presents an overview of the medical problems common among young people, and explores the social and familial contexts in which these problems arise. It provides a framework within which to view the conditions limiting the health and well-being of adolescents and to understand the resultant deterioration of the physical and mental health of adolescents in this country.

The insights gained from Catholic moral teaching are included with those of social science and …

Virginia History As Southern History: The Nineteenth Century, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

This essay briefly surveys some of the best work that has been done over the last ten years or so in the field of nineteenth-century Virginia and southern history in general, hoping to supply inspiration for histories yet to be written.

Black American Intellectuals In The 1990s, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

As everyone who has followed the leading American periodicals in 1995 can tell you, a group of black academics has been much on the country's mind recently. Rather breathless articles have several times announced the arrival of America's New Public Intellectuals. One commentator argues that the recent burst of publishing and attention signals nothing less than the arrival of the Third Black Intellectual Renaissance, fit to be compared with those of the 1920s and the civil rights era.

The South, The West, And The Rest, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

A response to the essay, Constructed Province: History and the Making of the Last American West by David M. Emmons. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

The Strange Career Of Thomas Jefferson: Race And Slavery In American Memory, Edward L. Ayers, Scot A. French

History Faculty Publications

Jefferson's life has come to symbolize America's struggle with racial inequality, his successes and failures mirroring those of his nation. The quest for a more honest and inclusive rendering of the American past has placed a heavy burden on Jefferson and his slaves. Generation after generation of Americans has sought some kind of moral symmetry at Monticello, some kind of reconciliation between slavery and freedom, black and white, past injustice and present compensation.

W.J. Cash: A Life (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book, W.J. Cash: A Life by Bruce Clayton. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1991.

Commentary: Honor And Martialism In The U.S. South And Prussian East Elbia During The Mid-Nineteenth Century, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

A commentary of Shearer Davis Bowman's essay on Honor and Martialism in the U.S. and Prussian East Elbia during the Mid-Nineteenth Century.

Without a second and unarmed, I have no inclination to offer a fundamental challenge to Professor Bowman's argument or his character. In fact, he has served us well by focusing on honor, martialism, and dueling as indices of comparison between the antebellum planters and the pre-1848 Junkers. I would like to build on the wealth of detail he has provided to help clarify the larger comparison between the South and Prussia.

Habits Of Industry: White Culture And The Transformation Of The Carolina Piedmont (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book, Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont by Allen Tullos. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Professionalization In Comparative Perspective: Germany, Mcclelland

History Faculty Publications

critical social-history consciousness has abandoned to some degree the old notion that modern "professions" in the Anglo-Saxon sense could not "really" exist in Central Europe because of the heavy and early bureaucratization and/or the persistence of "feudal" or at least Stand (etat) traditions. Instead, most accept the notion of a process of dialogue between independent professions and bureaucratic authority.

Many Excellent People: Power And Privilege In North Carolina 1850-1900 (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book, Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina 1850-1900 by Paul D. Escott. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

The Southern Enigma: Essays On Race, Class, And Folk Culture (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book, The Southern Enigma: Essays on Race, Class, and Folk Culture, edited by Walter J. Fraser, Jr., and Winfred B. Moore, Jr., Westport,Ct: Greenwood Press, 1983.