American Studies Commons^™

Media Coverage Of Muslims: Introduction And Overview, Erik Bleich, A. Maurits Van Der Veen

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Existing research largely concurs that coverage of Muslims is negative. Yet this masks how much remains unknown. In particular, there has been no clear or consistent way to gauge precisely how much negativity is present in stories about Muslims. This chapter introduces a systematic way to assess the tone of articles and discusses how this allows for answers to six important questions about coverage of Muslims. The chapter also outlines the structure of the book and summarizes the key findings. In particular, it argues that coverage of Muslims is strikingly negative by every comparative measure examined.

Building The Brafferton: The Founding, Funding And Legacy Of America’S Indian School, Danielle Moretti-Langholtz, Buck Woodard

Arts & Sciences Books

Excerpt from the publication: "Cloaked in the academic regalia of the early history of the College of William & Mary, the story of the founding of Virginia’s Indian school is replete with ecclesiastical and political intrigue as well as financial opacity. Embedded within the seventeenth and eighteenth-century trans-Atlantic colonial encounter, the 1723 Brafferton Indian School building is an artifact with a pedigree worthy of heritage status. However, its origins remain murky; its history is buried in the faded and fragmentary ledger books, legislative acts and church correspondence of the era. One of three structures on William & Mary’s historic campus, …

The New Woman Narrating The Histor(Ies) Of The Feminist Movement, Francesca Sawaya

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

To dip into the scholarship about the New Woman is to be puzzled by the extensive focus on and the strong disagreement about chronology. Why do some scholars offer such a wide range of years for the New Woman, and others such a narrow range? And why do the dates - whatever they may be - diverge so widely? What becomes clear is that date matter not because the New Woman can be easily periodized - after all, there are no legislative or political milestones that mark her entrance or exit from the public stage - but because she herself …

In The Moment Of Violence: Writing The History Of Postemancipation Terror, Hannah Rosen

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did freedom mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Did freedom just mean the absence of constraint and a widening of personal choice, or did it extend to the ballot box, to education, to equality of opportunity? In examining such questions, rather than defining every aspect of postemancipation life as a new form of freedom, these essays develop the work of scholars who are looking at how belonging to an empowered government …

Corporate Capitalism And Racial (In)Justice: Teaching The Colonel’S Dream, Francesca Sawaya

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Growing up in Cleveland after the Civil War and during the brutal rollback of Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow, Charles W. Chesnutt could have passed as white but chose to identify himself as black. An intellectual and activist involved with the NAACP who engaged in debate with Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, he wrote fiction and essays that addressed issues as various as segregation, class among both blacks and whites, Southern nostalgia, and the Wilmington coup d’état of 1898. The portrayals of race, racial violence, and stereotyping in Chesnutt’s works challenge teachers and students …

Introduction To "The Difficult Art Of Giving Patronage, Philanthropy, And The American Literary Market", Francesca Sawaya

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

The Difficult Art of Giving rethinks standard economic histories of the literary marketplace. Traditionally, American literary histories maintain that the post-Civil War period marked the transition from a system of elite patronage and genteel amateurism to what is described as the free literary market and an era of self-supporting professionalism. These histories assert that the market helped to democratize literary production and consumption, enabling writers to sustain themselves without the need for private sponsorship. By contrast, Francesca Sawaya demonstrates the continuing importance of patronage and the new significance of corporate-based philanthropy for cultural production in the United States in the …

Racial Terror And Citizenship, Hannah Rosen

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

There is no denying that race is a critical issue in understanding the South. However, this concluding volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture challenges previous understandings, revealing the region's rich, ever-expanding diversity and providing new explorations of race relations. In 36 thematic and 29 topical essays, contributors examine such subjects as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Japanese American incarceration in the South, relations between African Americans and Native Americans, Chinese men adopting Mexican identities, Latino religious practices, and Vietnamese life in the region. Together the essays paint a nuanced portrait of how concepts of race in the South have …

Historical Overview Of Africans And African Americans In Yorktown, At The Moore House, And On Battlefield Property, 1635-1867 Colonial National Historical Park (Vol. 2), Julie Richter, Jody L. Allen

Arts & Sciences Books

The situation for African Americans in Yorktown did not improve much during the antebellum period. The possibility of being willed, sold, or mortgaged by a slaveholder remained. William Vail is one example. Vail had over thirty slaves and mongaged some or all of them at some point. When Vail died in 1834, he owned several lots in Yorktown but gave permission in his will to sell Ambrose, Caesar, Lucy, Bob, and Tom Bailey, if necessary to pay his debts. He left his wife, Louisa, William, Alfred, Molly, Carlia, Charlotte, Alice and her three children, as well as his "man Tom," …

Historical Overview Of Africans And African Americans In Yorktown, At The Moore House, And On Battlefield Property, 1635-1867 Colonial National Historical Park (Vol. 1), Julie Richter, Jody L. Allen

Arts & Sciences Books

The following report focuses on the lives and experiences of Africans and African Americans who lived and worked in Yorktown, at the Moore House, and on Battlefield Property between 1635 and 1867. The goal of this study is to highlight the role that Africans and African Americans played in Yorktown and the surrounding rural area. A wide variety of primary documents contain details about the enslaved men, women, and children who labored in the homes of Yorktown's elite residents, worked in the shops of the town's skilled artisans, and tended fields on nearby plantations. In addition, Yorktown was home to …

Introduction To "The Americans Are Coming! Dreams Of African American Liberation In Segregationist South Africa", Robert T. Vinson

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and “American Negroes”—a group that included African Americans and black West Indians—established close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements. Though African Americans suffered under Jim Crow racial discrimination, oppressed Africans saw African Americans as free people who had risen from slavery to success and were role models and potential liberators.

Many African Americans, regarded initially by the South African government as “honorary whites” exempt from segregation, also saw their activities in South Africa as a …

Providential Design: American Negroes And Garveyism In South Africa, Robert T. Vinson

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Transcending geographic and cultural lines, From Toussaint to Tupac is an ambitious collection of essays exploring black internationalism and its implications for a black consciousness. At its core, black internationalism is a struggle against oppression, whether manifested in slavery, colonialism, or racism. The ten essays in this volume offer a comprehensive overview of the global movements that define black internationalism, from its origins in the colonial period to the present. From Toussaint to Tupac focuses on three moments in global black history: the American and Haitian revolutions, the Garvey movement and the Communist International following World War I, and the …

Introduction To "Terror In The Heart Of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, And The Meaning Of Race In The Postemancipation South, Hannah Rosen

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

The meaning of race in the antebellum southern United States was anchored in the racial exclusivity of slavery (coded as black) and full citizenship (coded as white as well as male). These traditional definitions of race were radically disrupted after emancipation, when citizenship was granted to all persons born in the United States and suffrage was extended to all men. Hannah Rosen persuasively argues that in this critical moment of Reconstruction, contests over the future meaning of race were often fought on the terrain of gender.

Sexual violence--specifically, white-on-black rape--emerged as a critical arena in postemancipation struggles over African American …

We Other Victorians: Domesticity And Modern Professionalism, Francesca Sawaya

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Focusing on literary authors, social reformers, journalists, and anthropologists, Francesca Sawaya demonstrates how women intellectuals in early twentieth-century America combined and criticized ideas from both the Victorian "cult of domesticity" and the modern "culture of professionalism" to shape new kinds of writing and new kinds of work for themselves.

Sawaya challenges our long-standing histories of modern professional work by elucidating the multiple ways domestic discourse framed professional culture. Modernist views of professionalism typically told a racialized story of a historical break between the primitive, feminine, and domestic work of the Victorian past and the modern, masculine, professional expertise of the …