History Commons^™

Malestar En El Eje Horizontal: Iconografía De Ruptura En Neuva Corónica Y Buen Gobierno (1615), De Felipe Guaman Poma De Ayala, Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Durante la última década, los estudios coloniales producidos en el contexto de la academia norteamericana han abogado por llevar adelante una agenda descolonizadora. Este cambio de perspectiva ha propiciado la incorporación de textos marginales al canon literario colonial, así como la revisión de los presupuestos ideológicos y culturales que subyacen en los análisis críticos. Este nuevo rumbo tiene coma propósito abordar la experiencia de la conquista y la colonia considerando sus secuelas en las políticas culturales y territoriales que los Estados-Nación posteriores aplicaron sobre las comunidades indígenas. El texto de Guaman Poma ingresa al campo de los estudios coloniales en …

Voting Blocks, Julian Maxwell Hayter

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

In 1971, Creighton Court resident Curtis Holt filed a monumental lawsuit against the city. His suit attacked an increasingly problematic, yet subtle form of institutionalized racism — the dilution of African-Americans’ growing voting power. Richmond had annexed 23 square miles of Chesterfield County a year earlier to head off the city’s growing black electorate and keep City Council predominantly white. Holt’s suit charged that blacks would have won a council majority in 1970 had Richmond not added 47,000 suburbanites, only 3 percent of whom were black.

"Go In De Wilderness": Evading The "Eyes Of Others" In The Slave Songs, Erik Nielson

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

This essay explores the trope of the wilderness in the slave spirituals, arguing that it functions to recreate symbolically the natural landscape into which slaves regularly took refuge in order to elude white surveillance. Drawing on a variety of sources, it considers the unique surveillance culture in the antebellum South, its effect on the everyday lives of the slaves, and the ways in which the slaves used their natural surroundings to avoid it. It then uses a close analysis of the song "Go in the Wilderness " as a point of departure for a broader discussion of the way the …

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.

‘Broken Brotherhood: The Rise And Fall Of The National Afro-American Council,’ By Benjamin R. Justesen, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

The dominance of Booker T. Washington and the loyalty of most African Americans to the Republican Party are often mistaken as markers of black political unanimity at the turn of the twentieth century. Even worse, they are assumed to stand for the whole of African American political life. Benjamin R. Justesen’s story of the struggles to establish and sustain the National Afro-American Council should serve as an important reminder of the tensions, diversity, and energy within black politics in this period. The reminder is so important, and so potential productive, that one wishes that Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall …

Saving Savannah: The City And The Civil War (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War by Jacqueline Jones. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Racing Jesse Jackson: Leadership, Masculinity, And The Black Presidency, Paul Achter

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In June of 1983, the New York Times published a survey revealing that nearly one in five white voters would not vote for a black candidate for president, even if that candidate was qualified and was the party nominee.² For some readers, such a revelation might have induced shock or even outrage; for others the poll would merely reflect an obvious and ugly reality. The survey was prompted by the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s attempt to become the first black, Democratic nominee for president.

A news story exploring the prevalence of white racism in the United States was not uncommon …

'The Senator And The Socialite: The True Story Of America's First Black Dynasty,' By Lawrence Otis Graham, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

Lawrence Otis Graham attempts to tell the important story of the Bruces and their legacy in The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty. Starting his story before the Civil War, Graham follows the “First Black Dynasty” through its ultimate fall from grace in mid-twentieth-century New York City. As with his previous bestseller, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (1999), Graham takes on the ambitious task of capturing the meaning and importance of an underappreciated group of American’s.

Colin Powell's Life Story As A 'Good Black' Narrative, Mari Boor Tonn

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

The versions of Powell’s life examined in this chapter contain two overarching features ethnographers claim are means by which immigrant blacks work to accrue “good” black status. First, their emphasis on Powell as the son of industrious Jamaican immigrants comports with the common practice ethnographers locate among second-generation black immigrants of consciously telegraphing their ethnic heritage as a means of “filtering” themselves for the dominant culture so that they can ward off downward social mobility still linked to a black racial identity in the United States. The inclusion of ancestry in life stories by political hopefuls is not in itself …

Metáforas Poscoloniales: Restauración, Desarraigo Y Construcción Del Artefacto Del Cuarto Mundo En La Antigua Guatemala, Claudia Ferman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

¿Por qué preservamos "ruinas"? ¿Por qué restauramos, reactivamos, exhibimos edificios del pasado? El presupuesto que subyace a este trabajo es que toda restauración constituye siempre una activa apropiación del espacio tanto material como simbólico, y que siempre es intencional, aunque no necesariamente de intención simple o unívoca. Desde un depósito de basura hasta un monumento de orgullo nacional, toda utilización intencional del espacio es también complicada por los modos mediante los cuales una determinada comunidad interactúa con los vestigios de su pasado, restaurados o no. Cuando consideramos el espacio público como recurso, producto y práctica--sensual, social, politica y simbólica--(Remedi, p. …

Colonial Lessons: Africans' Education In Southern Rhodesia, 1918-1940, Carol Summers

Bookshelf

Studying of the meanings of education, mission identities, and cultural change in Southern Rhodesia, Summers shows how mission-educated Africans negotiated new identities for themselves and their communities within the confines of segregation. From the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the Second World War, Africans in Southern Rhodesia experienced massive changes. Colonialism was systematized, segregation grew rigid and intensive, and economic changes affected every aspect of life from assembling bridewealth to entrepreneurial opportunities. This book provides a challenging portrayal of the possibilities and limits of African agency within the colonial context.

Mission-educated Africans who aspired to elements …

Why Were The Railroads The "Contested Terrain" Of Race Relations In The Postwar South?, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Most of the debates about race relations focused on the railroads of the New South. Travel was a different story, for members of both races had no choice but to use the same railroads. As the number of railroads proliferated in the 1880s, as the number of stations quickly mounted, as dozens of counties got on a line for the first time, as previously isolated areas found themselves connected to towns and cities with different kinds of black people and different kinds of race relations, segregation became a matter of statewide attention.

The Great Valley And The Meaning Of The Civil War, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

To understand the coming of the Civil War, then, we need to pick up the story before Fort Sumter and to carry it deeper than national events. We need to understand both the advocated of conflict and those who sought to avoid it regardless of the cost. We need to understand the communities people fought to defend, the institutions that held them together and that drove them apart.

[Introduction To] Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators And American Identities, Laura Browder

Bookshelf

In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities.

Significantly, notes …

Rethinking Slavery And Freedom (Book Reviews), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review essay of the following books:

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America by Ira Berlin.

Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War edited by Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland.

When The North Is The South: Life In The Netherlands, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

After years of watching colleagues fly to Paris, Johannesburg, Beijing, or Bogota for research trips and speaking engagements, I decided to apply for a posting abroad. Holding only the vaguest and most stereotyped visions, I chose the Netherlands. My application stressed, perhaps impolitely, the direct Dutch involvement in the slave trade and their indirect connection to South African apartheid. Such commonalities with white southerners, I suggested, might serve as the basis for interesting discussions of race and region.

Referees' Reports, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Response to the essay, Wounds Not Scars: Lynching, the National Conscience, and the American Historian by Joel Williamson. Indiana: Organization of American Historians, 1997.

Narrative Form In Origins Of The New South, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Because I came to southern history late and somewhat reluctantly, that last graduate seminar class taught by C. Vann Woodward, was the only class I ever took on the subject. But that seminar and book I read for the first time that semester -- Origins of the New South -- made me an aspiring southernist.

Blues For You Johnny: Johnny Dodds And His "Wild Man Blues" Recordings Of 1927 And 1938, Gene H. Anderson

Music Faculty Publications

Shortly after Johnny Dodd's death Sidney Bechet invited Johnny's brother to join his New Orleans Feetwarmers in a recording honoring Bechet's hometown musical colleague and lifelong friend. Although Baby Dodds pronounced "Blues for You, Johnny," recorded in Chicago on September 6, 1940, a "fine tribute," Down Beat found vocalist Herb Jeffries "from hunger on blues." A more fitting memorial would have been "Wild Man Blues" cut by Bechet a few months previously. Said to be his favorite number, "Wild Man Blues" was recorded by Dodds three times in 1927 and once again in 1938. This study examines Johnny Dodds's style …

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.

W.J. Cash, The New South And The Rhetoric Of History, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Despite the attention devoted to the fiery early chapters of The Mind of the South, where Cash's language and audacity take us by surprise, the heart of the book lies in the New South. Cash wrote above all, I think, to explain why the white Southerners he knew--those in the cotton mill country of the Carolina Piedmont--behaved the way they did. The years after Reconstruction consume two-thirds of Cash's book because those are the years that troubled him, that posed the problems he felt most acutely.

Baptized In Blood: The Religion Of The Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 by Charles Reagan Wilson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.