Browse

By the 1920s, Abraham Lincoln had transcended the lingering controversies of the Civil War to become a secular saint, honored in North and South alike for his steadfast leadership in crisis. Throughout the Great Depression and World War II, he was invoked countless times as a reminder of America's strength and wisdom, a commanding ideal against which weary citizens could see their own hardships in perspective. But as revealed in this book, those years represent the apogee of Lincoln's prestige. The decades following World War II brought radical changes to American culture, changes that led to the diminishing of all heroes. As the author explains, growing sympathy for the plight of racial minorities, disenchantment with the American state, the lessening of patriotism in the wake of the Vietnam War, and an intensifying celebration of diversity all contributed to a culture in which neither Lincoln nor any single person could be a heroic symbol for all Americans. Paradoxically, however, the very culture that made Lincoln an object of indifference, questioning, criticism, and even ridicule was a culture of unprecedented beneficence and inclusion, where racial, ethnic, and religious groups treated one another more fairly and justly than ever before. Thus, as the prestige of the Great Emancipator shrank, his legacy of equality continued to flourish. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the book documents the decline of Lincoln's public standing, asking throughout whether there is any path back from this post-heroic era. Can a new generation of Americans embrace again their epic past, including great leaders whom they know to be flawed?

Since the inception of the Atlantic Coast Conference, intense rivalries, legendary coaches, gifted players, and fervent fans have come to define the league's basketball history. This book traces the traditions and the dramatic changes that occurred both on and off the court during the conference's rise to a preeminent position in college basketball between 1953 and 1972. It re-creates the action of nail-biting games and the tensions of bitter recruiting battles without losing sight of the central off-court questions the league wrestled with during these two decades. As basketball became the ACC's foremost attraction, conference administrators sought to field winning teams while improving academic programs and preserving academic integrity. The ACC also adapted gradually to changes in the postwar South, including, most prominently, the struggle for racial justice during the 1960s. The book is an account of coaches' flair (and antics), players' artistry, a major point-shaving scandal, and the gradually more evenly matched struggle for dominance in one of college basketball's strongest conferences.

Arguably one of the most important American writers working today, Wendell Berry, is the author of more than fifty books, including novels and collections of poems, short stories, and essays. A prominent spokesman for agrarian values, Berry frequently defends such practices and ideas as sustainable agriculture, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of work, and the interconnectedness of life. This book provides a sweeping engagement with Berry's entire corpus. It introduces the reader to Berry's general philosophy and aesthetic through careful consideration of his essays. It also pays particular attention to Berry as an agrarian, citizen, and patriot, and examines the influence of Christianity on Berry's writings. Much of the book is devoted to lively close readings of Berry's short stories, novels, and poetry.

This book examines the philosophies, experiences, and instructional programs of white and black female physical educators who taught in public schools and diverse colleges and universities, including coed and single-sex, public and private, and predominantly white or black institutions. Working primarily with female students, women physical educators had to consider what an active female could and should do compared to an active male. Applying concepts of sex differences, they debated the implications of female anatomy, physiology, reproductive functions, and psychosocial traits for achieving gender parity in the gym. Teachers’ interpretations were contingent on where they worked and whom they taught. They also responded to broad historical conditions, including developments in American feminism, law, and education, society’s changing attitudes about gender, race, and sexuality, and scientific controversies over sex differences and the relative weight of nature versus nurture. While deliberating fairness for female students, white and black women physical educators also pursued equity for themselves, as their workplaces and nascent profession often marginalized female and minority personnel. Questions of difference and equity divided the field throughout the twentieth century; while some women teachers favored moderate views and incremental change, others promoted justice for their students and themselves by exerting authority at their schools, critiquing traditional concepts of “difference,” and devising innovative curricula. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book sheds new light on physical education’s application of scientific ideas, the politics of gender, race, and sexuality in the domain of active bodies, and the enduring complexities of difference and equity in American culture.

This book looks at how the lives of everyday Americans changed because of the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, the counterculture and other “revolutionary” Sixties movements. Its chapters focus on the mainstreaming of new values and ideas through television, journalism, music, and clothing.

Soon after his first inauguration in 1934, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia began appointing women into his administration. By the end of his three terms he had installed almost a hundred women as lawyers, board and commission members and secretaries, deputy commissioners, and judges. No previous mayor had done anything comparable. These “Women of the La Guardia Administration” met frequently for mutual support and political strategizing. This book tells their stories. It begins with the city’s suffrage movement, which prepared them for political action. After they won the vote in 1917, they joined political party clubs and began to run for office. Their plan was to use political platforms to enact feminist and progressive public policies. Circumstances unique to mid-twentieth-century New York City advanced their progress. In 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized an inquiry into alleged corruption in the city’s government, long dominated by the Democratic Party’s machine, Tammany Hall. The inquiry turned first to charges of Vice Squad entrapment of women for sex crimes and their treatment in the city’s Women’s Court. Outraged by the inquiry’s disclosures and impressed by La Guardia’s pledge to rein in Tammany, many New York City women activists supported him for mayor. As appointees in his administration, they then helped him fulfill his plans for modernizing city government. This book argues that La Guardia’s women appointees contributed to his administration’s success and left a rich legacy of experience and political wisdom to oncoming generations of women in politics.

Stolen Borders tells the history of the Jewish illegal immigration occasioned by the nation-based, restrictive immigration quotas implemented by federal laws passed in 1921 and 1924. A chaotic underground of illegal immigration emerged in the wake of these quota laws, which barred nearly all immigrants from Asia and most from southern and eastern Europe, people widely considered inferior and “undesirable.” In the years after the quotas, Jewish migrants sailed into New York with fake German passports and came into Florida from Cuba, hidden in the hold of boats loaded with contraband liquor. This book explores the responses that government officials, journalists, Jewish organizations, alien smugglers, and migrants themselves had to this unsanctioned flow of people over U.S. borders. Ultimately, Stolen Borders challenges a central narrative of U.S. historiography—the narrative of the “closing of the gates” to European immigrants in 1924. It demonstrates that the “gates” did not simply close. Rather, the reordering of the nation’s boundaries in the quota era happened unevenly, confusedly, and with much contention. The book also traces the process through which Jews came to be associated with, and then to be uncoupled from, “illegal alienness.” We know in retrospect that Jews, like other European ethnics, ultimately escaped the category of “illegal alienness”—despite their history of illegal entry—in a way that, for example, Mexicans have not. How this happened has been less well understood. Yet, in its twists and turns this story offers compelling insights into the contingent nature of citizenship, belonging, and Americanness.

Afterimages is a study of the role of photography, more particularly photojournalism, in the documentation and communication of wars and conflicts involving the United States since the Vietnam War. The book focuses on photographers who have worked to push the boundaries of photojournalism, adapting it to new conditions of warfare and media production, and whose work illuminates the geopolitics of the American worldview. These are photographers who have produced a meditative form of conflict photography, an “afterimagery” of conflicts and contexts, bound not to spot news reporting but to a more investigative framing of events which reflects on the contexts and scenery of war. The book will examine the ideological and affective conditions of visuality that attend the American worldview, to consider some of the ways in which photojournalism plays a key role in both supporting and challenging it, particularly with regard to the framing of violence carried out by the state. Running throughout Afterimages is an inquiry into the high value (ethical, socio-political, legalistic) that continues to be placed on the power of the still image to bear witness. It presages a number of questions that echo across the chapters. How has the role of the image-maker as witness evolved? What capacities for critique do images maintain? What new visual vocabularies are emerging to represent new forms of war? Afterimages argues and demonstrates through close analysis that photographic images are important means for critical reflection on war, violence and human rights.

This book tells the story of how internationalist Americans worked between 1938 and 1941 to convince the American government and the American public of the need to stem the rising global tide of fascist aggression. As war approached, the internationalist movement attempted to arouse the nation in order to defeat noninterventionism at home and fascism overseas. This book's examination of this movement undermines the common belief that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor wrenched an isolationist United States into global armed conflict and the struggle for international power. The book focuses on three organizations—the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and Fight For Freedom—that actively promoted a more global role for the United States based on a conception of the “four freedoms” later made famous by FDR. The desire to be free from fear was seen in concerns regarding America's immediate national security. The desire to be free from want was expressed in anxieties over the nation's future economic prosperity. The need for freedom of speech was represented in concerns over the potential loss of political freedoms. Finally, the need for freedom of worship was seen in the emphasis on religious freedoms and broader fears about the future of Western civilization. These groups and their supporters among the public and within the government characterized the growing global conflict as one between two distinct worlds and in doing so, set the tone of American foreign policy for decades to come.

Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem in 1917. By the early 1920s, his program of African liberation and racial uplift had attracted millions of supporters, both in the United States and abroad. This book presents an expansive global history of the movement that came to be known as Garveyism. Offering a groundbreaking new interpretation of global black politics between the First and Second World Wars, this book charts Garveyism's emergence, its remarkable global transmission, and its influence in the responses among African descendants to white supremacy and colonial rule in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Delving into the organizing work and political approach of Garvey and his followers, the book shows that Garveyism emerged from a rich tradition of pan-African politics that had established, by the First World War, lines of communication among black intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. Garvey's legacy was to reengineer this tradition as a vibrant and multifaceted mass politics. The book looks at the people who enabled Garveyism's global spread, including labor activists in the Caribbean and Central America, community organizers in the urban and rural United States, millennial religious revivalists in central and southern Africa, welfare associations and independent church activists in Malawi and Zambia, and an emerging generation of Kikuyu leadership in central Kenya. Moving away from the images of quixotic business schemes and repatriation efforts, the book demonstrates the consequences of Garveyism's international presence and provides a dynamic and unified framework for understanding the movement, during the interwar years and beyond.

In the 1930s and 1940s, rural reformers in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and agricultural productivity. This book tells the story of how these campaigns were conducted in dialogue with one another as reformers in each nation came to exchange models, plans, and strategies with their equivalents across the border. Dismantling the artificial boundaries that can divide American and Latin American history, the book shows how the agrarian histories of both regions share far more than we realize. It traces the connections between the US South and the plantation zones of Mexico, places that suffered parallel problems of environmental decline, rural poverty, and gross inequities in land tenure. Bringing this tumultuous era vividly to life, the book describes how Roosevelt's New Deal drew on Mexican revolutionary agrarianism to shape its program for the rural South. The book also looks at how the US South served as the domestic laboratory for the Rockefeller Foundation's “green revolution” in Mexico—which would become the most important Third World development campaign of the twentieth century—and how the Mexican government attempted to replicate the hydraulic development of the Tennessee Valley Authority after World War II. This book is an innovative history of comparisons and the ways they affected policy, moved people, and reshaped the landscape.

Most scholarship on the mass migrations of African Americans and southern whites during and after the Great Depression treats those migrations as separate phenomena, strictly divided along racial lines. This interdisciplinary work argues instead that we should understand these Depression-era migrations as interconnected responses to the capitalist collapse and political upheavals of the early twentieth century. During the 1930s and 1940s, it shows, writers and artists of both races created migration stories specifically to bolster the black–white Left alliance. Defying rigid critical categories, the author considers a wide variety of media, including literary classics by John Steinbeck and Ann Petry, “lost” novels by Sanora Babb and William Attaway, hobo novellas, images of migrant women by Dorothea Lange and Elizabeth Catlett, popular songs, and histories and ethnographies of migrant shipyard workers. This rereading and recovering of the period's literary and visual culture expands our understanding of the migration narrative by uniting the political and aesthetic goals of the black and white literary Left and illuminating the striking interrelationship between American populism and civil rights.

This book is a study of black women as symbols, and as participants, in the reshaping of the meaning of black racial identity. The meanings and practices of racial identity are continually reshaped as a result of the interplay of actions taken at the individual and institutional levels. In chapters that detail the history of pre-Civil Rights Movement black beauty pageants, later efforts to integrate beauty contests, and the transformation in beliefs and practices relating to black beauty in the 1960s, the book develops a model for understanding social processes of racial change. It places changing black hair practices and standards of beauty in historical context and shows the powerful role social movements have had in reshaping the texture of everyday life. The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements led a generation to question hair straightening and to establish a new standard of beauty that was summed up in the words “black is beautiful.” Through oral history interviews with Civil Rights and Black Power Movement activists and ordinary women, the book documents the meaning of these changes in black women's lives.

During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, thousands of people were incarcerated in southern jails as a result of their involvement with the civil rights movement. This book follows those activists inside the jail cell to explore the trials and tribulations of life as a civil rights prisoner. It highlights the conditions inside southern jails, activists’ interactions with “ordinary” prisoners, and the importance of race and gender in shaping the prisoners’ treatment. It also reveals how, beyond the jail cell, the movement sought to counter such repression via an ideology that embraced imprisonment as a mark of honor and a statement of resistance, while also seeking to fill the jails and thereby place financial pressure upon local government; this was encapsulated in the term “jail-no-bail.” Organizations and individuals regularly testified to the importance of incarceration as a form of induction into the movement. However, after 1963, as activists faced increasingly serious charges and served longer sentences, many struggled to maintain their commitment to the philosophy behind jail-no-bail. Beneath movement rhetoric, activists found that the earlier exuberance for jail sentences did not fit with the conditions under which they worked. Ain’t Scared of Your Jail concludes by examining the shift toward black power in the post-1965 era and demonstrates how activists, now freed from an earlier focus upon integration and respectability, began to challenge mainstream definitions of criminality to claim that black prisoners were not so much criminals as victims of a racist social structure.

Born in humble, rural surroundings in the Jackson Purchase, Barkley grew into a sturdy youth who received an education through parental sacrifices. He graduated from Marvin College as an award-winning speaker and soon moved with his parents to Paducah, where he read law and became an attorney. Barkley entered politics winning elections as county attorney and then county judge: he gained victory through his farmer constituents. In 1913 he moved from courthouse to Congress as a progressive who championed President Wilson’s New Freedom program. During World War I, he favored freedom of the seas to promote agricultural exports and gained national attention by advocating prohibition. In wartime he visited US soldiers on the front lines and in peacetime became a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which enhanced his understanding of international relations. His only electoral loss occurred when he campaigned for governor, but his Kentucky canvass enabled him to win a US Senate seat in 1926. Furious over Republican administrations for their support of high tariffs that hurt agricultural exports and their inability to assist impoverished Americans during the Great Depression, Barkley became a strong supporter and national spokesman for the New Deal. World War II found Senate majority leader Barkley playing a key role in wartime legislation, but he lost favor with President Roosevelt by opposing the president’s expensive revenue bill of 1944. Meanwhile, the senator had maintained close and supportive relations with Truman and joined him as his vice presidential candidate on the 1948 presidential ticket. Barkley became the one and only Veep who turned the vice presidency into an important office. The Paducah politician failed to get his party’s nomination for president in 1952, so he temporarily retired, appearing on his own national television show, and preparing (with help) his autobiography. In 1954 he won election and returned to the US Senate as a junior member.

Until the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the stance of the Roman Catholic Church toward the social, cultural, economic, and political developments of the twentieth century was largely antagonistic. Yet, in and through the period from World War I to Vatican II, the Church did engage with, react to, and even accommodate various aspects of modernity. This book shows how the Church's official position on literary culture developed over this crucial period. The Catholic Church in the United States maintained an Index of Forbidden Books and the Legion of Decency (founded in 1933) lobbied Hollywood to edit or ban movies, pulp magazines, and comic books that were morally suspect. These regulations posed an obstacle for the self-understanding of Catholic American readers, writers, and scholars. But Catholics developed a rationale by which they could both respect the laws of the Church as it sought to protect the integrity of doctrine and also engage the culture of artistic and commercial freedom in which they operated as Americans. Catholic literary figures including Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton are important to the book's argument, particularly as their careers and the reception of their work demonstrate shifts in the relationship between Catholicism and literary culture.

After a decade of chasing stories around the globe, intrepid travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest followed the magnetic pull home--only to discover that her native South Texas had been radically transformed in her absence. Ravaged by drug wars and barricaded by an eighteen-foot steel wall, her ancestral land had become the nation’s foremost crossing ground for undocumented workers, many of whom perished along the way. Before Elizondo Griest moved to the New York/Canada borderlands, the frequency of these tragedies seemed like a terrible coincidence. Once she began to meet Mohawks from the Akwesasne Nation, however, she recognized striking parallels to life on the southern border. Having lost their land through devious treaties, their mother tongues at English-only schools, and their traditional occupations through capitalist ventures, Tejanos and Mohawks alike struggle under the legacy of colonialism. Toxic industries surround their neighborhoods while the U.S. Border Patrol militarizes them. Combating these forces are legions of artists and activists devoted to preserving their indigenous cultures. Complex belief systems, meanwhile, conjure miracles. In All the Agents and Saints, Elizondo Griest weaves seven years of stories into a meditation on the existential impact of international borderlines by illuminating the spaces in between.

While America's relationship with Britain has often been deemed unique, especially during the two world wars when Germany was a common enemy, the American business sector actually had a greater affinity with Germany for most of the twentieth century. This book examines the triangular relationship between the American, British, and German business communities and how the special relationship that Britain believed it had with the United States was supplanted by one between America and Germany. The book begins with the pre-1914 period and moves through the 1920s, when American investments supported German reconstruction rather than British industry. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 led to a reversal in German–American relations, forcing American corporations to consider cutting their losses or collaborating with a regime that was inexorably moving toward war. Although Britain hoped that the wartime economic alliance with the United States would continue after World War II, the American business community reconnected with West Germany to rebuild Europe's economy. And while Britain thought they had established their special relationship with America once again in the 1980s and 1990s, in actuality it was the Germans who, with American help, had acquired an informal economic empire on the European continent. This book uncovers the surprising and differing relationships of the American business community with two major European trading partners from 1900 through the twentieth century.

The American Counterculture played a major role during a pivotal moment in American history. Post-War prosperity combined with the social and political repression characteristic of middle-class life to produce both widespread disobedience and artistic creativity in the Baby Boomer generation. This book explores the relationship between the counterculture and American popular culture. It looks at the ways in which Hollywood and corporate record labels commodified and adapted countercultural texts, and the extent to which countercultural artists and their texts were appropriated. It offers an interdisciplinary account of the counterculture and an appraisal of the key literary, musical, political and visual texts that were seen to challenge dominant ideologies.

James Henry Breasted (1865–1935) had a career that epitomizes our popular image of the archaeologist. Daring, handsome, and charismatic, he traveled on expeditions to remote and politically unstable corners of the Middle East, helped identify the tomb of King Tut, and was on the cover of Time magazine. But Breasted was more than an Indiana Jones—he was an accomplished scholar, academic entrepreneur, and talented author who brought ancient history to life not just for students but for such notables as Teddy Roosevelt and Sigmund Freud. This book weaves together the disparate strands of Breasted's life, from his small-town origins following the Civil War to his evolution into the father of American Egyptology and the founder of the Oriental Institute in the early years of the University of Chicago. It explores the scholarly, philanthropic, diplomatic, and religious contexts of his ideas and projects, providing insight into the origins of America's most prominent center for archaeology in the ancient Near East. A portrait of the nearly forgotten man who demystified ancient Egypt for the general public, the book restores Breasted to the world and puts forward a case for his place as one of the most important scholars of modern times.