Blacks in the New World - Böcker

In this prize-winning book Thomas Holt is concerned not only with the identities of the black politicians who gained power in South Carolina during Reconstruction, but also with the question of how they functioned within the political system. Thus, as one reviewer has commented, "he penetrates the superficial preoccupations over whether black politicians were venal or gullible to see whether they wielded power and influence and, if they did, how and to what ends and against what obstacles.""Well crafted and well written, it not only broadens our knowledge of the period, but also deepens it, something that recent books on Reconstruction have too often failed to do." --  Michael Perman, American Historical Review." . . . a valuable study of post-Civil War black leaders in a state where Negro control came closest to realization during Reconstruction. . . . Effectively merging the techniques of quantitative analysis with those of narrative history, Holt shatters a number of myths and misconceptions. . . . It should be on the reading list of all students of Reconstruction and nineteenth-century black history." --  William C. Harris, Journal of Southern History"Holt presents his work modestly as a state study of reconstruction politics. But this should not obscure a significant intellectual achievement and a contribution of fundamental importance, demonstrating the value of social-class analysis in understanding the politics of the black community." --  Jonathan M. Wiener, Journal of American History.

"This is the best treatment scholarshave of black life in a southern state at the beginning of the twentieth century."--  Howard N. Rabinowitz,Journal of American History"The author shows clearly and forcefullythe ways in which this [white] system abused and controlled the black lowercaste in Georgia." -- Lester C. Lamon, American Historical Review.  "Dittmer has a faculty for lucid exposition of complicated subjects. This isespecially true of the sections on segregation, racial politics, disfranchisement,woman's suffrage and prohitibion, the neo-slavery in agriculture, and the racialviolence whose threat and reality hung like a pall over all of Georgia throughoutthe period." -- Donald L. Grant, Georgia Historical Quarterly.

Widely regarded as the most comprehensive study of its kind, this volume offers valuable insight into the alleged medical differences between whites and blacks that translated as racial inferiority and were used to justify slavery and discrimination.In Medicine and Slavery, Todd L. Savitt evaluates the diet, hygiene, clothing, and living and working conditions of antebellum African Americans, slave and free, and analyzes the diseases and health conditions that afflicted them in urban areas, at industrial sites, and on plantations.

".. . a well-researched and thoughtful inquiry into the circumstances andsocial forces producing one of the most violent of twentieth-century Americanrace riots."-- American Historical Review"His work fills a seriousgap in the history of racial violence in the United States. Never beforeanalyzed by sociologists in the way that the Chicago and Detroit riotswere, the East St. Louis riot outranked both as measured by the numberof deaths."-- American Journal of Sociology

This is the first annotated edition of a work Eric J. Sundquist has called "a classic text of the American Renaissance." As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has pointed out, My Bondage and My Freedom has been largely ignored by critics, in part because it is longer and less accessible than Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass but also because it has not up to now been "read" by a sensitive critic. "The latter reason is paramount and urgently needed to be addressed, and William Andrews is just the person to introduce Douglass's second autobiography to our generation of readers. He has few peers in nineteenth-century black criticism."

Rediscovering the lives of enslaved people in JamaicaA combination of archaeological and historical study, The Old Village and the Great House examines life within enslaved, and later free, laborer households at a Jamaican sugar plantation. Douglas V. Armstrong draws on excavations in house-yard areas to create a case study comparison between the lives of enslaved workers and the planter class. As Armstrong shows, archaeological analysis and historical research reveal a firsthand record of people's lives and the emergence of an African-Jamaican community. Detailed descriptions of artifacts, structural remains, and dietary refuse combine with written accounts to provide insight into the lives of enslaved people and African-Jamaican transformations.

Reform and racism at the famed industrial schoolFounded in 1868, Hampton Institute educated almost 1400 members of sixty-five Native American peoples. Donal F. Lindsey examines the interactions among Indigenous people, Blacks, and whites at the nation’s premier industrial school for racial minorities.Lindsey's analysis traces the rise and decline of the program for Indigenous Americans while analyzing the program’s impact on the campaign for Native education. Lindsey also examines how the two marginalized races at Hampton viewed each other and white society. Though integration prevailed in much of student life, it resulted in even greater accommodation to a racist society. The weaknesses and strengths attributed to one race were used with “tender violence” to remake the other, in a program in which the powerful and the powerless remained so regardless of segregation or integration.

Lynching was a national crime. But it obsessed the South. W. Fitzhugh Brundage's multidisciplinary approach to the complex nature of lynching delves into the such extrajudicial murders in two states: Virginia, the southern state with the fewest lynchings; and Georgia, where 460 lynchings made the state a measure of race relations in the Deep South. Brundage's analysis addresses three central questions: How can we explain variations in lynching over regions and time periods? To what extent was lynching a social ritual that affirmed traditional white values and white supremacy? And, what were the causes of the decline of lynching at the end of the 1920s? A groundbreaking study, Lynching in the New South is a classic portrait of the tradition of violence that poisoned American life.

The story of jazz is more than a history of the music. The racial and cultural dynamics of American cities created the music, life, and business that was jazz. Burton W. Peretti's classic study charts the life of jazz culture from its origins in the jook joints of sharecroppers and the streets and dance halls of 1890s New Orleans to the eve of bebop and World War II. As Perett shows, jazz was the epic story of players who transitioned from childhood spasm bands to Carnegie Hall and worldwide touring and fame. It became the music of the Twenties, a decade of Prohibition, of adolescent discontent, of Harlem pride, and of Americans hoping to preserve cultural traditions in an urban, commercial age. Finally, jazz was where black and white musicians performed together, as uneasy partners, in the big bands of Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman. Drawing on archives and the firsthand testimony of more than seventy musicians and singers (among them Benny Carter, Bud Freeman, Kid Ory, and Mary Lou Williams), The Creation of Jazz offers a comprehensive analysis of the role of early jazz in American social history.

Extensive archival and anecdotal sources support Michael Mullin's description of slavery as it was practiced in tidewater Virginia, on the rice coast of the Carolinas, and in Jamaica and Barbados. Drawing upon case histories, Mullin offers new and definitive information about how African people met and often overcame the challenges and deprivations of their new lives through religion, family life, and economic strategies.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Lillian Smith Book Award, the Mississippi Historical Society McLemore Prize, the Herbert G. Gutman Prize and the Gustavus Myers Center for Study of Human Rights Outstanding Book Prize.Publication of this book was supported by a grant from DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana.

Once preoccupied with Brazilian slavery as an economic system, historians shifted their attention to examine the nature of life and community among enslaved people. Stuart B. Schwartz looks at this change while explaining why historians must continue to place their ethnographic approach in the context of enslavement as an oppressive social and economic system. Schwartz demonstrates the complexity of the system by reconsidering work, resistance, kinship, and relations between enslaved persons and peasants. As he shows, enslaved people played a role in shaping not only their lives but Brazil’s institutionalized system of slavery by using their own actions and attitudes to place limits on slaveholders. A bold analysis of changing ideas in the field, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels provides insights on how the shifting power relationship between enslaved people and slaveholders reshaped the contours of Brazilian society.

"The origins of the Chicago race riot of 1919 are to be found, not in high-level policy, but in gut-level animosities between black and white people who were generally inarticulate and presentist-oriented, and who did not record their motivations or feelings for posterity. . . To explain the Chicago riot, this evidence has to be found; and though such evidence is not abundant by any means, it does exist."--From the preface

A biography of the pioneering Black leaderPrivileged beyond other members of his race, yet sharing their disadvantages, the young John Mercer Langston stood in an uncertain position in the years before the Civil War. His confrontation with a critical personal question was tempered by a crucial national reality: from what sources could he derive his model of manhood and human dignity? This book explores John Mercer Langston's decisions to work out his destiny through the resources and fortunes of the northern black community. Although Langston, who died in 1897, was a black Politician, orator, lawyer, intellectual, diplomat, and congressman, he has never before been accorded fullscale biographical treatment. Born free on a Virginia plantation, Langston graduated from Oberlin College in 1849, gained admission to the Ohio bar, and by the age of twenty-five, became the first black American to hold elective office. Still in the years of his political apprenticeship, he promoted black civil rights, helped shape the nascent Republican party, aided in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue and John Brown's raid, and recruited black soldier for the Union cause. In 1864 he became the first president of the National Equal Rights League. From an extensive search of primary sources, the authors construct a richly textured picture of the beginnings of Langston's career as a national black leader. More than a biography, the work also incorporates social and political history. Embedded firmly in a study of northern black community life and activism, it reveals the degree to which Langston and his cohorts set the terms of the fight for freedom and citizenship.

"A model study, one of two or three genuinely indispensable bookson that momentous movement historians know as the Great Migration. PeterGottlieb shatters the received portrait of southern migrants as bewildered,premodern folk, 'utterly unprepared' for the complexities of urban life.African Americans in his account emerge as complex, creative agents, exploitingold solidarities and building new ones, transforming the urban landscapeeven as it transformed them." -- James Campbell, Northwestern University"Engagingly written and well organized. . . . A major addition tothe fields of Afro-American, urban, and working-class history." --Howard N. Rabinowitz, Georgia Historical Quarterly "Gottlieb uses oral histories, corporate records, and primary andsecondary scholarship to present a useful picture of an important partof the Great Migration that followed World War I." -- George Lipsitz,Choice "Sensitive and yet also incisive. . . . clear and often compelling.An outstanding study." -- James R. Barrett, Journal of American Ethnic History Publication of this work was supported in part by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Baltimore's African-American population--nearly 27,000 strong and more than 90 percent free in 1860--was the largest in the nation at that time. Christopher Phillips's Freedom's Port, the first book-length study of an urban black population in the antebellum Upper South, chronicles  the growth and development of that community.He shows how it grew from a transient aggregate of individuals, many fresh from slavery, to a strong, overwhelmingly free community less wracked by class and intraracial divisions than were other cities. Almost from the start, Phillips states, Baltimore's African Americans forged their own freedom and actively defended it--in a state that maintained slavery and whose white leadership came to resent the liberties the city's black people had achieved.

Property ownership has been a traditional means for African Americans to gain recognition and enter the mainstream of American life. This landmark study documents this significant, but often overlooked, aspect of the black experience from the late eighteenth century to World War I.

Blacks under Spanish rule in Florida lived in a more complex and international world that linked the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe with a powerful and diverse Indian hinterland. Jane Landers’s pioneering study of people of the African diaspora under Spain’s colonial rule rewrites Florida history and enriches our understanding of the powerful links between race relations and cultural custom. As Landers shows, Spanish Florida was a sanctuary to Blacks fleeing enslavement on plantations. Castilian law, meanwhile, offered many avenues out of slavery. In St. Augustine and elsewhere, society accepted European-African unions, with families developing community connections through marriage, concubinage, and godparents. Assisted by Spanish traditions and ever-present geopolitical threats, people of African descent leveraged linguistic, military, diplomatic, and artisanal skills into citizenship and property rights. Landers details how Blacks became homesteaders, property owners, and entrepreneurs, and in the process enjoyed greater legal and social protection than in the two hundred years of Anglo history that followed.

George E. Stephens, the mostimportant African-American war correspondent of his era, served in thefamed black Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, subject of the film Glory.His letters from the front, published in the New York Weekly Anglo-African,brilliantly detail two wars: one against the Confederacy and one againstthe brutal, debilitating racism within his own Union Army. Together withDonald Yacovone's biographical introduction detailing Stephens's lifeand times, they provide a singular perspective on the greatest crisisin the history of the United States.Stephens chronicled the African-Americanquest for freedom in reports from southern Maryland and eastern Virginiain 1861 and 1862 that detailed, among other issues of the day, the Armyof the Potomac's initial encounter with slavery, the heroism of fugitiveslaves, and the brutality both Southerners and Union troops inflictedon them.From the inception of theFifty-fourth early in 1863 Stephens was the unit's voice, telling of itsstruggle against slavery and its quest to win the pay it had been promised.His description of the July 18, 1863, assault on Battery Wagner near Charleston,South Carolina, and his writings on the unit's eighteen-month campaignto be paid as much as white troops are gripping accounts of continuedheroism in the face of persistent insult.The Weekly Anglo-Africanwas the preeminent African-American newspaper of its time. Stephens'scorrespondence, intimate and authoritative, takes in an expansive arrayof issues and anticipates nearly all modern assessments of the black rolein the Civil War. His commentary on the Lincoln administration's wartimepolicy and his conviction that the issues of race and slavery were centralto nineteenth-century American life mark him as a major American socialcritic.

The lives built by Black Americans in a pair of summer resort townsIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, northern resort towns were in their heyday as celebrated retreats for America's wealthy. Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August documents the experiences of African Americans in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island--towns that provided a recurring season of expanded employment opportunities, enhanced social life, cosmopolitan experience, and, in a good year, enough money to last through the winter. Affirming that the decision to live in their tiny resort communities was conscious and deliberate, Myra B. Young Armstead shows how Afro-Saratogians and Afro-Newporters organized their rhythms, their routines, and their communities to create meaningful identities for themselves. Living on streets close to their churches, developing social organizations that promoted their standards of gentility and respectability, and lobbying for wider opportunities, these African Americans actively shaped their lives within the structures and limitations imposed on them. Armstead situates the resort town between the poles of the rural South and the large industrial cities of the North. She shows how these small northern towns, with their seasonal economic rhythms and domestic wage work, permitted an important continuity between rural and urban lifestyles and a path from rural South to urban North besides the jarring, disruptive journey that often ended in the ghetto. "Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August" tells a story that is at once American and uniquely African American: a story of economic imperatives and enlarged social aspirations culminating in a season--June, July, and August--that brought Blacks as close as they could get to the American Dream.

Along the Color Line is a diverse collection of essays by two of the most accomplished historians of the modern African American experience, first published more than a quarter of a century ago. This informed study addresses such topics as black nationalism, nonviolent action, the changing patterns of interracial violence in the twentieth century, and the ways African American leaders have functioned and coped with racism in their quest to ensure the rights of full citizenship for African Americans. David Levering Lewis’s foreword to this first paperback edition attests to the book’s lasting relevance and importance.“Meier and Rudwick’s intellectual passion, professional integrity, and almost manic involvement in virtually every aspect of their academic specialty were of inestimable value to the coming of age of African American history.” -- from the foreword