New Books In African American Studies

John Morrow and Jeffrey Sammons share their insights on the story of the fabled 369th Infantry Regiment in their book, Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War: The Undaunted 369th Regiment and the African American Quest for Equality (University Press of Kansas, 2014). Our guests reveal a great deal about the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Seeking to fill the gap in scholarship focused on African American artisans in the American South, Catherine W. Bishir uses the very specific location of New Bern, North Carolina to “dig a deep hole” and produce a longitudinal study of black artisans that moves chronologically from the colonial period, through the early national period to the period following the Civil War. Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) looks at how artisans, enslaved and free, negotiated a complex social landscape that relied on their skills but circumscribed their lives. Specifically, Bishir examines the broader American artisan-citizen identity, the hallmarks of which are independence, mastery and self-determination and how the racial mores of the South made the enactment of this identity a problematic proposition for black artisans in New Bern despite its relatively lenient racial laws. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoic

In Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (Vintage Books, 2004), Melvin Ely uses a trove of documents primarily found in the county court records of Prince Edward County, Virginia to unravel a rich story about the free blacks who inhabited “the gentle slope of Israel Hill.” The story begins in 1796 when Richard Randolph, a prominent Virginian and cousin to Thomas Jefferson, left a will full of fiery abolitionist sentiment that emancipated his slaves and parceled 350 acres of his land among them. Ely explores the lives of the freed people who used this land to cultivate small farms and launch successful entrepreneurial ventures. Israel on the Appomattox demonstrates that historians can gain a deep understanding of a society using legal documents as their window into the past. Ely’s research exposes the little known fact that Afro-Virginians could file (and often successfully filed) civil suits, despite not being allowed to testify in criminal cour

There was once a notion that black people had no meaningful history. It’s a notion Dorothy Porter Wesley spent her entire career debunking. Through her 43 years at Howard University, where she helped create the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, her own publishing endeavors and collecting, and her unfettered support of the researchers she encountered, Wesley devoted her entire life to the preservation of black history. Her career was once summed up as that of a “historical detective”, and the characterization is apt. As Dr. Janet Sims-Wood writes in her excellent study, Dorothy Porter Wesley at Howard University: Building a Legacy of Black History (The History Press, 2014) she was unrelenting in her mission: “To supplement her meager acquisitions budget, Porter appealed to faculty to donate manuscripts of their published works as well as any letters from noted individuals. […] she appealed to publishers, authors and friends who were collectors to donate their materials. She also rummaged through the attics a

Adam Ewing acknowledges the enduring, if reductive, image of Garveyism – “the parades and shipping lines and colonization schemes” – in its early, Harlem-based incarnation, but focuses The Age Of Garvey: How A Jamaican Activist Created A Mass Movement And Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton University Press, 2014) on tracing the myriad manifestations of this “organic mass politics” beyond the larger-than-life figure at its center, to shed scholarly light on a diffuse movement observable throughout the African diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ewing explains why Garveyism is so much more than Marcus Garvey, not an ordinary strain of pan-Africanism nor merely an extension of (Booker T.) Washingtonianism. In fact, he asserts, it is precisely when the more notorious initiatives of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) fail, that the age of Garvey truly begins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://ne

Co-founded in 1962 by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, the National Farm Workers Association would eventually become the United Farm Workers (UFW), the landmark labor union dedicated to achieving better wages and working conditions for rural California agricultural workers. In To March for Others: The Black Freedom Struggle and the United Farm Workers (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Lauren Araiza uses the UFW as a lens through which to examine the factors that contribute to the viability of cross-racial coalitions in achieving civil and economic rights. Specifically, Araiza looks at the UFW’s alliances with “five organizations that represented a wide spectrum of black activism”, namely the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Black Panther Party. In this interview, the author discusses, among other things, her deliberate departure from the black/white and Nor

Our taken for granted assumptions are questioned in a new book by Karl Spracklen, a professor of leisure studies at Leeds Metropolitan University in England. Whiteness and Leisure (Palgrave, 2013) combines two bodies of theoretical literature to interrogate leisure activities which seem innocuous or inoffensive. The book deploys insights from critical race theory along with the work of Jurgen Habermas to at once critique leisure as a site for the continued reproduction of inequality, but at the same time consider the utopian or transformative possibilities offered by leisure activity. The central inequality concerning Whiteness and Leisure is that of the socially constructed, but socially powerful, idea of race. Spracklen argues that whilst there is no scientific evidence for the vast swathes of claims made about race, the idea is influential in modern life. Most notably, ideas of race create categories of normal or taken for granted, in the case of whiteness, and other, exotic and different in the case of b

An unflinching examination of the trauma, violence, opportunism, and vision that combined to create the empire for slavery that was the Old South, Ed Baptist‘s new book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014) challenges popular conceptions of that region that imagine it as a land of proud men, genteel ladies, and an antiquated, inefficient system of labor. The slavery that Baptist uncovers is dynamic, relentless, brutal, and extremely profitable. Surviving it, he shows, was an impressive accomplishment all its own. And its role in driving the development of American capitalism in the formative years of the republic raises troubling questions about the legacy of slavery in contemporary times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

On November 29, 1957, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holliday, Zoot Sims, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, and a multi-talented young R&B player who played jazz that night, Ray Charles, and others played a benefit concert for the Morningside Recreation Center at Carnegie Hall. Almost a half a century later, these recordings, intended to be played on radio Voice of America, were found in the Library of Congress. The aforementioned artists’ performances were never made available and yet, one set from that night was released, featuring a quartet with pianist Thelonious Monk, saxophonist John Coltrane with Shadow Wilson on drums and Abdul-Ahmed Malik on bass. That recording, on Blue Note records, released in 2005, was a critical and commercial sensation. Monk and Coltrane had played more than 100 shows together the previous five months at the Five Spot Club in New York City and, as Gabriel Solis writes in his thought-provoking multi-disciplinary analysis of their program, that Carnegie Hall concert was “a compendium of what

Bruce Ackerman is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. His book, We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard UP, 2013) fills out the constitutional history of America’s “Second Reconstruction” period and makes a powerful argument that traditional understandings of the constitutional canon must be expanded to accurately reflect the American lawmaking process. The official constitutional canon is composed of the 1787 Constitution and the formal amendments to this document. However, Ackerman argues that the Supreme Court should give more deference to an operational canon that includes the landmark statutes, which are the legacy of the civil rights revolution. Ackerman reveals that the leaders of the civil rights movement actively avoided altering the Constitution through an Article V amendment because this method had failed during the first Reconstruction period. Instead, he lays out how they relied on constitution-altering techniques established during the N

Slavery was pervasive in the Ancient World: you can find it in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In Late Antiquity , however, slavery went into decline. It survived and even flourished in the Byzantine Empire and Muslim lands, yet it all but disappeared in Medieval Western and Central Europe. Then, rather suddenly, slavery reappeared in the West, or rather in Western empires. By the early sixteenth century, Portuguese traders had laid the foundations of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They bought or captured slaves in West Africa and then transported and sold those slaves to plantation owners in European-controlled regions in the New World (especially Brazil, the Caribbean Basin, and Mexico). How, one might well ask, did the trans-Atlantic slave trade emerge so quickly, seemingly from nothing? In his fascinating book The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), historian Toby Green addresses this question. His answer is subtle and multi-

During his lifetime, Michael Jackson became a global icon. Michael Jackson was beloved by millions; his journey began as he became a boy star with The Jackson Five and it culminated with his being crowned the King of Pop, While some of the controversy of his later years along diminished his popularity, Jackson’s status as an icon of American music has never wavered. When he died, there was a tremendous outpouring of affection. In the new book, The Michael Jacksons (Little Moth Press, 2014) explores the world of Michael Jackson representers, especially since Jackson’s passing. A photographer and a cultural critic, Turner photographs and examines these Michael Jackson representers and tribute artists to help us better understand Michael Jackson and the world of impersonators. The book offers a fascinating look of an oft-neglected aspect of popular music and popular culture. Lorena Turner teaches in the Communications Department at California State Polytechnical University in Pomona. Turner is a former freelan

Sitting in my home office this morning, I’ve periodically looked up from my computer screen and out the window to see who the dog is barking at. Sometimes it’s a young mother pushing a stroller, sometimes an older man walking his dogs, occasionally a young woman jogging. Regardless of age, gender or agenda, all of the people I’ve seen have one thing in common. They are white. This is not unusual, of course. Blacks and whites throughout America live separate lives. They attend separate schools. They worship in separate sanctuaries. And, most obviously, they live in different neighborhoods. This remains true despite the dramatic migrations of the mid-Twentieth Century. The racial identity of specific neighborhoods changed. But the persistence of segregation even after the gradual dismantling of legal and extralegal barriers to black mobility and choice is striking. However, there are a few neighborhoods that chose strategically to invite certain black families to put down roots in their part of the city. This

The city of Iowa City’s website promotes its “small-town hospitality” and its focus on “culture.” But a closer look at Iowa City, home to 70,000 and the University of Iowa, reveals a community trying to redefine itself as urban African-Americans relocate to the area. This is the focus of Robert E. “Ted” Gutsche‘s book, A Transplanted Chicago: Race, Place and the Press in Iowa City (McFarland, 2014). In it, he takes on the “Southeast Side” and all its meanings. “Southeast Side” has become a coded term by local press to describe an area of Iowa City it associates with crime and unruliness, sometimes even using the term when the actual crime does not occur on the Southeast Side. “Home to a mixture of white townies and new, black arrivals from Chicago, St. Louis, and other metro regions in the Upper Midwest,” Gutsche writes, “the Southeast Side is known–mythically–as a bastion of affordable housing, black families, and stories of devious behavior.” Through original interviews and research, Gutsche, a former r

Ian Haney Lopez is the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford UP 2014). He is the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and on the Executive Committee of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice. Lopez investigates the often hidden side of racism. He traces the political history of candidates for office using a set of coded phrases, allusions, and references to call attention to race, without ever uttering the word. In the post Brown v. Board era, Lopez argues, candidates learned a new language of strategic racism, substituting anti-government rhetoric for anti-black, anti-Latino, or anti-immigrant. In doing so, the dog whistle was heard as a much wider criticism of the social welfare state, and thus a direct attack not just on minorities, but on the middle class. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newboo

Luke E. Harlow, Religion, Race and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) examines the role of religion, and more specifically, conservative evangelical Protestant theology, in the struggle over slavery and abolition in a crucial period of American history. The book makes an impressive case that we cannot really understand that struggle or the war that grew out of it without fully appreciating the political, cultural, and intellectual history of conservative evangelical theology. Harlow describes a profoundly religious period in American history, where people claimed religious motives for all kinds of political positions, in a slave-holding border state that remained part of the Union. Kentucky was home to a diverse theological climate that nonetheless seemed always to break toward finding a Biblical warrant for slavery. Politically, however, gradualist emancipationists and pro-slavery advocates were often far apart. When the Civil War came, thousands of black Kentuc

Lincoln was very clear–at least in public–that the Civil War was not fought over slavery: it was, he said, for the preservation of the Union first and foremost. So it’s not surprising that when the conflict started he had no firm plan to emancipate the slaves in the borderland or Southern states. He also knew that such a move might prove very unpopular in the North. So why did he issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863? There are many reasons. According to David Williams‘ fascinating new book I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era (Cambridge University Press, 2014), an important and neglected one has to do with African American self-emancipation. After the war began, masses of slaves began to leave the South and head for the Northern lines. The Union forces received them as “contraband” seized from the enemy during wartime. As such, their status was uncertain. Many wanted to fight or at least serve as auxiliaries in the Union armies like freemen, but they were

Recent controversies over integrating the military have focused on issues of gender and sexuality. In the 1940s and 50s, however, the issue was racial integration. As Christine Knauer shows in her new book Let Us Fight as Free Men: Black Soldiers and Civil Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), the persistence of soldiers and activists of color forced the Truman administration to bar discrimination in the military. Even then, however, it took continued agitation — and the military crisis of the early days of the Korean War — to force the army to allow black soldiers to fight alongside their white brothers-in-arms. Let Us Fight as Free Men illuminates how agitation for Civil Rights did not begin with the Brown decision in 1954 or the Montgomery Bus Boycott several years later, but was a long-term struggle with its roots in the Second World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/africa

In linguistics, we all happily and glibly affirm that there is no “better” or “worse” among languages (or dialects, or varieties), although we freely admit that people have irrational prejudices about them. But what do we do about those prejudices? And what do we think the speakers of low-status varieties of language should do to overcome them? Take the case of African American English. An influential approach, code-switching, advises teachers to help their AAE-speaking students to identify the systematic differences between their variety and the prestige variety (“Standard English”), and eventually to be able to switch effectively between both varieties according to the circumstances. However, although code-switching seems to promote communicative effectiveness, Vershawn Young and colleagues argue that that approach is inherently problematic. By effectively labelling AAE as inappropriate for public contexts, code-switching runs the risk of promoting and reinforcing society’s prejudices against the language

How did jazz take shape? Why does jazz have so many styles? Why do jazz songs get longer as the twentieth century proceeds? Marc Myers, in his fascinating book Why Jazz Happened (University of California Press, 2014) examines the social and economic forces affected the growth of jazz between 1942 and 1972. Myers considers how the American Federation of Musicians ban on recording in 1942 changes the terrain for jazz musicians. He looks to how the G.I. Bill and suburbanization bring a new adult sophistication to the music. Myers also explores how changes in recording technology allow jazz artists a greater range of expression and permits the recording of longer songs and extended soloing. The book culminates with considering how jazz musicians responded to the challenge offered by rock music. Marc Myers is a writer for The Wall Street Journal and founder of the blog, JazzWax.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwor