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Jazz Internationalism argues for the critical significance of jazz in Afro-modernist literature, from the beginning of the Great Depression through the radical social movements of the 1960s. Through consideration of literary texts that feature jazz as a mode of social criticism as well as artistic expression, it examines how jazz functions as a discourse of radical internationalism and Afro-modernism during the Long Civil Rights Movement. This book redefines the importance of jazz for African American literary history, as it relates recent jazz historiography to current theoretical articulations of black internationalism, including articulations of socialist, diasporic, and Black Atlantic paradigms. In discussing how jazz is invoked as a mode of social criticism in radical African American writing, it considers how writers such as Claude McKay, Frank Marshall Davis, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, and Paule Marshall dramatize the possibilities and challenges of black internationalism through their innovative adaptations of black music.

In 1983, black Chicagoans elected Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor. In the process, they overthrew the white Democratic machine and its regime of “plantation politics.” This book details the long-term development of black Chicago’s political culture, beginning in the 1930s, that both made a political insurrection possible in the right context, and informed Mayor Washington’s liberal, interracial, democratic vision of urban governance. Building upon recent studies of the “Long Civil Rights Movement,” which focus largely on a black radical tradition, this book recovers the history of a long tradition of black liberalism at the ground level. Men and women, largely unsung, made history by engaging with – rather than rejecting – the institutions and ambitions of urban life, and by connecting their individual aspirations to the collective interests of the race. They maintained popular critiques of overlapping systems of race, class, and gender inequality and developed local crucibles of black power that made pragmatic reform possible and set the stage for Washington’s victory and – in surprising ways – even the ascendance of Barack and Michelle Obama. The tragedies of incomplete and uneven racial progress are undeniable. Yet, in struggles for decent housing, good jobs, and political power over a half a century people worked to overcome racial segregation and inequality in everyday life. Consequently, this study shows that the image of the Second Great Migration as an inexorably tragic event is no longer tenable, while it also integrates the story of black urban politics into the deeply ambiguous history of American liberalism.

During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. On May 5, 1937, he set out to find it, driving thousands of miles in his trusty Plymouth and ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself. In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels’s unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings and a wealth of archival evidence to put this one man's journey through a South in transition into a larger context. Daniels's well chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s, from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to planters' and industrialists' reactionary worldview and repressive violence. The result is a lively narrative of black and white southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at the start of the nation's long civil rights era. For more information on this book, see www.discoveringthesouth.org.