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Bookended by remarks from African American diplomats Walter C. Carrington and Charles Stith, this book uses close readings of speeches, letters, historical archives, diaries, memoirs of policymakers, and newly available FBI files to confront much-neglected questions related to race and foreign relations in the United States. Why, for instance, did African Americans profess loyalty and support for the diplomatic initiatives of a nation that undermined their social, political, and economic well-being through racist policies and cultural practices? The book explores African Americans' history in the diplomatic and consular services and the influential roles of cultural ambassadors like Joe Louis and Louis Armstrong. It concludes with an analysis of the effects on race and foreign policy in the administration of Barack Obama. Groundbreaking and critical, the book expands on the scope and themes of recent collections to offer the most up-to-date scholarship to students in a range of disciplines, including U.S. and African American history, Africana studies, political science, and American studies.

Early twentieth-century Britons thought that they were living in the “age of noise,” sensing the historical changes going on around them as a series of disturbing shifts in the sonic atmosphere. From motorcar engines and wireless loudspeakers to the terrifying interruptions of mechanized warfare, the feeling of living in topsy-turvy times arrived via the ear. Yet historians have not listened to the sounds of early twentieth-century Britain nor unravelled what it meant to live in an “age of noise”. This book turns a critical ear to the “ways of hearing” operating in Britain between 1914 and 1945 and argues that attempts to shape encounters with everyday sound were expressive of hopes and fears for modernity. Competing expert groups – doctors, psychologists, planners, mystics, even – thought differently about how best to attune the individual hearing self to the sounding social body in modernity. Examining noise abatement campaigns, scientific as well as enchanted interventions in the everyday sonic environment, and attempts to manage the auditory culture of total war, the book offers the first auditory history of modern Britain.

Italian anarchists compiled a formidable record of political assassinations during the 1890s: President Marie François Sadi Carnot of France was killed by Santo Caserio in 1894; Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo of Spain by Michele Angiolillo in 1897; Empress Elizabeth of Austria by Luigi Luccheni in 1898; and King Umberto I of Italy by Gaetano Bresci in 1900. No less important were the unsuccessful assassination attempts committed during the same decade: Paolo Lega against Italian Prime Minister Francesco Crispi in 1894; and Pietro Acciarito against King Umberto in 1897. This book, through a specific focus on attentats along with attempted and successful acts of political assassination, provides a full-length study of the historical, economic, social, cultural and political conditions, the social conflicts and left-wing politics along with the transnational experiences in Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland and the United States that led to Italian anarchist violence at the end of the 19^th century.

This book offers an institutional history of the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS), the department tasked with improving the Army's ability to use and defend against chemical weapons during and after World War I. Taking the CWS's story from the trenches to peacetime, the book explores how the CWS's work on chemical warfare continued through the 1920s despite deep opposition to the weapons in both military and civilian circles. As the book shows, the advocates for chemical weapons within the CWS allied with supporters in the military, government, and private industry to lobby to add chemical warfare to the country's permanent arsenal. Their argument: poison gas represented an advanced and even humane tool in modern war, while its applications for pest control and crowd control made a chemical capacity relevant in peacetime. But conflict with those aligned against chemical warfare forced the CWS to fight for its institutional life—and ultimately led to the U.S. military's rejection of battlefield chemical weapons.

This is the first book-length study of Caribbean slavery to make disability its primary focus. The book sets out to answer the following questions: How does colonialism—specifically slavery—challenge the way we think about histories of disability, race, and labor? In what ways might slavery and the expansion of the slave trade have transformed English understandings of supposedly defective bodies and minds in the metropole and colonies? How did disability, disfigurement, and deformity among the enslaved—whether transient, permanent, natural, or inflicted—influence English understandings of race and ability in the colonial period? How did slavery-induced disability shape the embodied reality of enslavement in the British Caribbean? The analysis of disability in the context of Atlantic world slavery is threefold. First, it explores representations of disability as they connect with enslavement and the development of an English antiblack racism from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Second, it moves between the realms of representation and reality in order to examine the embodied, physical, emotional, and psychological impairments produced by the institution of slavery and endured by the enslaved. Third, it examines slave law as an institutionally driven system of enforced disablement. This book illustrates that the histories of disability and slavery overlap in significant ways, and second, that Caribbean bondspeople form an integral part of wider disability history.

This book maps the interplay of conservative and feminist women in Indiana during the second half of the twentieth century and proposes an alternative framework for understanding the second wave feminist movement. The central theme is that rightwing women’s understanding of one-worldism--a conspiracy theory refined by grassroots anticommunists during the height of the Cold War--shaped conservative women’s response to the second wave feminist movement and circumscribed feminist activism. Over the course of the postwar era, anticommunist organizations like the Minute Women of the U.S.A., Pro America, and the John Birch Society provided a forum for rightwing women to develop their understanding of related forces pushing for a “one-world,” totalitarian supra-government, forces they described as treasonous. While communists often were lumped under the “one-worlder” category, the two were not synonymous. In literature rightwing women described a spectrum of subversion that included a fifth column but also those advocating domestic cooperation through federal regionalism, gender equality as opposed to gender difference, and internationalists advocating stronger authority for the United Nations. The book documents the work of Hoosier feminists to accomplish their goals, especially the Equal Rights Amendment, in a hostile political environment and the work of rightwing women to counter the threat of internationalism or one-worldism, culminating in a showdown at the 1977 International Women’s Year celebration.

Beginning in the 1930s, Black Chicago experienced a cultural renaissance that lasted into the 1950s and rivaled the cultural outpouring of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. This book analyzes this prolific period of African American creativity in music, performance art, social science scholarship, and visual and literary artistic expression. Unlike Harlem, Chicago was an urban industrial center that gave a unique working-class and internationalist perspective to the cultural work being done in Chicago. The chapters discuss the forces that distinguished the Black Chicago Renaissance from the Harlem Renaissance and place the development of black culture in a national and international context. The chapters also provoke explorations of renaissances in other cities. Among the topics discussed in this volume are Chicago writers Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, The Chicago Defender and Tivoli Theater, African American music and visual arts, and the American Negro Exposition of 1940.

This book studies the multi-generational transition of rural and semi-rural southern black migrants to life in the embryonic urban-industrial town of Huntington, West Virginia, between 1871 and 1929. Strategically located adjacent to the Ohio River in the Tri-state region of southwestern West Virginia, southeastern Ohio, and eastern Kentucky, and founded as a transshipment station by financier Collis P. Huntington for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in 1871, Huntington grew from a non-descript village to the state’s most populated city by 1930. Huntington’s black population grew in concert: by 1930, the city’s black population comprised the second largest in the state, behind Charleston, the state capital. The urbanization process posed different challenges, burdens, and opportunities to the black migrant than those migrating to the rural-industrial southern West Virginia coal mines. Direct and intensive supervision marked the urban industrial workplace, unlike the autonomy black coal miners’ experienced in the mines. Forced to navigate the socioeconomic and political constraints and dynamics of Jim Crow Era dictates, what state officials euphemistically termed, “benevolent segregation,” Huntington’s black migrants made remarkable strides. In the quest to transition from slave to worker to professional, Huntington’s black migrants forged lives, raised families, build black institutions, purchased property, and become black professionals. This study centers the criticality of their efforts to Huntington’s growth as a commercial, manufacturing, industrial, and cultural center.

This book examines how various black Chicagoans used public history to engage with civil rights struggles. Numerous efforts to promote and teach this history demonstrated how dissident left-wing political currents from previous decades remained relevant to a vibrant and ideologically diffuse African American public sphere despite widespread Cold War dispersions, white-supremacist reactions, and anti-Communist repressions. The argument in this book proceeds by demonstrating how public-history projects strategically coalesced around a series of connected pedagogical endeavors. These endeavors included the work of schoolteachers on Chicago’s South Side who tried to advance curriculum reforms through World War II and afterwards; the activities of important cultural workers, such as Margaret T. G. Burroughs and Charles Burroughs, who politicized urban space and fought for greater recognition of black history in the public sphere through the advancement of their vision for a museum; and the Afro-American Heritage Association, which expressed a politics of black left nationalism that engaged with radical politics through black public-history labors. Collectively, these projects expressed important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labors that engaged closely with the rapidly shifting terrains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights and international anticolonialisms. Ultimately, this book offers a social history about how black left-wing cultural work in public history and similar forms of knowledge production were at the intersections of political realities and lived experience in U.S. urban life.

A leading African American Communist, lawyer William L. Patterson (1891–1980) was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the defeat of Jim Crow by virtue of his leadership of the Scottsboro campaign in the 1930s. This watershed biography shows how Patterson helped to advance African American equality by fostering and leveraging international support for the movement. The book highlights key moments in Patterson's global activism: his early education in the Soviet Union, his involvement with the Scottsboro trials and other high-profile civil rights cases of the 1930s to 1950s, his 1951 “We Charge Genocide” petition to the United Nations, and his later work with prisons and the Black Panther Party. Drawing from government and FBI documents, newspapers, periodicals, archival and manuscript collections, and personal papers, the book documents Patterson's effectiveness at carrying the freedom struggle into the global arena and provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century struggles for racial justice.

This book documents six decades of politically active black women, between the 1910s and the 1970s, in New York City who waged struggles for justice, rights, and equality not through grassroots activism but through formal politics. In tracing the paths of black women activists from women's clubs and civic organizations to national politics—including appointments to presidential commissions, congressional offices, and even a presidential candidacy—the book also articulates the vision of politics the women developed and its influence on the Democratic Party and its policies. Deftly examining how race, gender, and the structure of the state itself shape outcomes, the book exposes the layers of power and discrimination at work in all sectors of U.S. society. The book covers the fights for economic, social, and political rights of black activists, such as Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Irene Moorman Blackstone, Ruth Whitehead Whaley, and Shirley Chisholm. It analyses the great strides made by African American women in the United States during this period and discusses the progress of black activists in more recent years, such as the breaking down of racialized and gendered barriers to political power.

Between 1945 and 1957, West Germany made a dizzying pivot from Nazi bastion to Britain's Cold War ally against the Soviet Union. Successive London governments, though often faced with bitter public and military opposition, tasked the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) to serve as a protecting force while strengthening West German integration into the Western defense structure. This book charts the BAOR's fraught transformation from occupier to ally by looking at the charged nexus where British troops and their families interacted with Germany's civilian population. Examining the relationship on many levels, the book ranges from how British mass media representations of Germany influenced BAOR troops to initiatives taken by the Army to improve relations. It also weighs German perceptions, surveying clashes between soldiers and civilians and comparing the popularity of the British services with that of the other occupying powers. As the book shows, the BAOR's presence did not improve the relationship between British servicemen and the German populace, but it did prevent further deterioration during a crucial and dangerous period of the early Cold War. An incisive look at an under-researched episode, this book sheds new light on Anglo-German diplomatic, political, and social relations after 1945, and evaluates their impact on the wider context of European integration in the postwar era.

Drawing on ten years of interviews and ethnographic and archival research, this book delves into the ways Filipinos in Hawaiʻi have balanced their pursuit of upward mobility and mainstream acceptance with a desire to keep their Filipino identity. In particular, the book speaks to the processes of identity making and the politics of representation among immigrant communities striving to resist marginalization in a globalized, transnational era. Critiquing the popular image of Hawaiʻi as a postracial paradise, the book reveals how Filipino immigrants talk about their relationships to the place(s) they left and the place(s) where they've settled, and how these discourses shape their identities. It also shows how struggles for community empowerment and identity territorialization continue to affect how minority groups construct the stories they tell about themselves, to themselves and others. The book follows the struggles of contemporary Filipino immigrants to build community, where they enact a politics of incorporation built on race, ethnicity, class, culture, and language. It focuses on two sites of building and representation, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Filipino Community Center in Waipahu.

This book examines the entrepreneurial experiences of and contributions by African American entrepreneurs in Chicago. Through a careful examination of black business activity in areas such as finance, media, and the underground economy known as “Policy,” this work illuminates the manner in which blacks in Chicago built a network of competing and cooperative enterprises and a culture of entrepreneurship unique to the city. This network lay at the center of black business development in Chicago as it allowed blacks there greater opportunity to fund and build businesses reliant on other blacks rather than those whose interests lay outside the black community. Further, it examines how blacks’ business enterprises challenged and changed the economic and political culture of the city to help fashion black communities on Chicago’s South and West sides. For much of the 20^th century, Chicago was considered the single best demonstration of blacks’ entrepreneurial potential. From the time the city was founded by black entrepreneur Jean Baptiste DuSable and throughout the 20^th century, business enterprises have been part black community life. From DuSable through black business titans like John H. Johnson, Oprah Winfrey, and Anthony Overton black entrepreneurs called the city home and built their empires there. How they did so and the impact of their success (and failure) is a key theme within this book. Additionally, this work analyzes how blacks in Chicago built their enterprises at the same time grappling with the major cultural, political, and economic shifts in America in the 19^th and 20^th century.

This innovative study examines the development of institutional child care from 1878 to 1929, based on a comparison of two “sister” orphanages in Pittsburgh: the all-white United Presbyterian Orphan's Home and the all-black Home for Colored Children. Drawing on quantitative analysis of the records of more than 1,500 children living at the two orphanages, as well as census data, city logs, and contemporary social science surveys, this study raises new questions about the role of child care in constructing and perpetrating social inequality in the United States.The book explores how working families shaped institutional child care. The term “child care” is used to mean assistance with the daily labor of caring for children; and specifically in the case of orphanages, parents' tactic of placing their children temporarily in institutions with the intention of retrieving them after a relatively short time. The book argues that the development of institutional child care was premised upon and rife with gender, race, and class inequities—these persistent ideologies had consequences for the evolution of social welfare and modern child care.

Though recognized for their work in the mining and railroad industries, the Chinese also played a critical role in the nineteenth-century lumber trade. This book continues an examination of the impact of Chinese immigrants on the American West by bringing to life the tensions, towns, and lumber camps of the Sierra Nevada during a boom period of economic expansion. Chinese workers, like whites, labored as wood cutters and flume-herders, lumber jacks and loggers. Exploding the myth of the Chinese as a docile and cheap labor army, the book shows Chinese laborers earned wages similar to those of non-Asians. Men working as camp cooks, among other jobs, could even make more. At the same time, the book draws on archives and archaeology to reconstruct everyday existence, offering evocative portraits of camp living, small town life, personal and work relationships, and the production and technical aspects of a dangerous trade. The book examines the role of the Chinese in the lumber trade in the American West during the late nineteenth century, with a focus on the Sierra Nevada in the 1870s to 1890s. It looks at Chinese laborers' contribution to the building of the American West by analyzing their migration, their communities and lifestyles, lived experiences, transnationalism, and their work in relationship to mining and railroad construction.

Beloved as the city of light, Paris in the nineteenth-century sparked the acclaim of poets and the odium of the bourgeois with its distinctive sounds. Street vendors bellowed songs known as the Cris de Paris that had been associated with their trades since the Middle Ages; musicians itinerant and otherwise played for change; and flâneurs-writers, fascinated with the city's underside, listened and recorded much about what they heard. This book tours the sonic space that orchestrated the different, often conflicting, sound cultures that defined the street ambience of Paris. Mining accounts that range from guidebooks to verse, the book braids literary, cultural, and social history to reconstruct a lost auditory environment. Throughout, impressions of street noise shape writers' sense of place and perception of modern social relations. As the book shows, the din of the Cris contrasted economic abundance with the disparities of the capital, old and new traditions, and the vibrancy of street commerce with an increasing bourgeois demand for quiet. In time, peddlers who provided the soundtrack for Paris's narrow streets yielded to modernity, with its taciturn shopkeepers and wide-open boulevards, and the fading songs of the Cris became a dirge for the passing of old ways.

In 1909, physician Lawrence A. Nixon fled the racial violence of central Texas to settle in the border town of El Paso. There he became a community and civil rights leader. His victories in two Supreme Court decisions paved the way for dismantling all-white political primaries across the South. This book delves into Nixon's lifelong struggle against Jim Crow. Linking Nixon's activism to his independence from the white economy, support from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the man's own indefatigable courage, the book also sheds light on Nixon's presence in symbolic and literal borderlands—as an educated professional in a time when few went to college, as an African American who made waves when most feared violent reprisal, and as someone living on the mythical American frontier as well as an international boundary. A powerful addition to the literature on African Americans in the Southwest, this book explores seldom-studied corners of the Black past and the civil rights movement.

Few expected politician Abraham Lincoln and Congregational minister Owen Lovejoy to be friends when they met in 1854. One was a cautious lawyer who deplored abolitionists' flouting of the law, the other an outspoken antislavery activist who captained a stop on the Underground Railroad. Yet the two built a relationship that, in Lincoln's words, “was one of increasing respect and esteem.” This book examines the thorny issue of the pragmatism typically ascribed to Lincoln versus the radicalism of Lovejoy, and the role each played in ending slavery. Exploring the men's politics, personal traits, and religious convictions, the book traces their separate paths in life as well as their frequent interactions. It shows how Lincoln and Lovejoy influenced one another and analyzes the strategies and systems of belief each brought to the epic controversies of slavery versus abolition and union versus disunion. The book moves beyond mere politics to a nuanced perspective on the fabric of religion and personal background that underlay the minister's worldview. The book reveals how Lincoln embraced the radical idea of emancipation, and how Lovejoy shaped his own radicalism to wield the pragmatic political tools needed to reach that ultimate goal.

In the 1950s, Milwaukee's strong union movement and socialist mayor seemed to embody a dominant liberal consensus that sought to continue and expand the New Deal. This book explores how business interests and political conservatives arose to undo that consensus, and how the resulting clash both shaped a city and helped redefine postwar American politics. The book focuses on Frank Zeidler, the city's socialist mayor. Zeidler's broad concept of the public interest at times defied even liberal expectations. At the same time, a resurgence of conservatism with roots presaging twentieth-century politics challenged his initiatives in public housing, integration, and other areas. As the book shows, conservatives created an anti-progressive game plan that included a well-funded media and public relations push; an anti-union assault essential to the larger project of delegitimizing any government action; opposition to civil rights; and support from a suburban silent majority. In the end, the campaign undermined notions of the common good essential to the New Deal order. It also sowed the seeds for grassroots conservatism's more extreme and far-reaching future success.