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The migrations of Manilamen, Bengali Muslim peddlers, and Chinese merchants and coolies extend the history of Asian Americans in the South into the early nineteenth and twentieth century. Between 1950 and 2000, the Asian American population in the American South increased more than one hundred times, much higher than the national average and the greatest increase among all regions of the United States. Extending the understanding of race and ethnicity in the South beyond the prism of black–white relations, this book explores the growth, impact, and significance of rapidly growing Asian American populations in the American South, and discusses the formation of past and emerging Asian American communities in the region. As the chapters illustrate, Asian Americans have remade the Southern landscape with a visible, vital presence in many towns, suburbs, and cities. Avoiding the usual focus on the East and West Coasts, the book examines the historical and contemporary significance of Asian American migration, religious identities, and racial formations in the South. several chapters attend to the nuanced ways in which Asian Americans negotiate the dominant black and white racial binary, while others provoke readers to reconsider the supposed cultural isolation of the region, reintroducing the South within a historical web of global networks across the Caribbean, Pacific, and Atlantic.

This book is a general history of the legal system of the United States, beginning in the colonial period, and continuing up to the present. The work was originally published in 1973; this is the fourth edition, which brings the material up to date and incorporates recent research. The book covers the changing configurations of commercial law, criminal law, and family law, and the law of property; lays great stress on race relations, especially black-white relations; it deals also with the legal profession and legal education. The approach throughout is geared toward an intelligent lay audience. Legal jargon is avoided. The underlying theory of the book is that law is the product of society, so that what is attempted, in essence, is a more or less sociological history of the legal system, as it evolved over the years.

This book examines the movement of American social dances between black and white cultural groups and immigrant and migrant communities during the early twentieth century. It is structured by five overlapping case studies drawn from the disparate and yet related dance scenes of Manhattan, a black Atlantic capital into which diverse people and dances flowed and intermingled, and out of which new dances were marketed globally. By looking at dance as social practice across conventional genre and race lines, this book demonstrates that modern social dancing, like Western modernity itself, was dependent on the cultural production and labor of African diasporic peoples—even as they were largely excluded from its rewards. The book builds upon prior scholarship on the topic, and in so doing, revises the African American and popular dance history of this period. Recognizing the racial thinking at the heart of contemporary American dancing, it offers a window into the ways in which social dancing throughout the twentieth century has provided a key means by which diverse groups of people have navigated shifting sociopolitical relations through their bodily movement. The book asserts that the social practice of modern dancing ultimately empowered displaced people like migrants and immigrants to grapple with the effects of industrialization, urbanization, and indeed the rise of North American modernity.