William Hannibal Thomas (1843-1935) served with distinction in the U.S. Colored Troops in the Civil War (in which he lost an arm) and was a preacher, teacher, lawyer, state legislator, and journalist following Appomattox. In many publications up through the 1890s, Thomas espoused a critical though optimistic black nationalist ideology. After his mid-twenties, however, Thomas began exhibiting a self-destructive personality, one that kept him in constant trouble with authorities and always on the run. His book The American Negro (1901) was his final self-destructive act. Attacking African Americans in gross and insulting language in this utterly pessimistic book, Thomas blamed them for the contemporary "Negro problem" and argued that the race required radical redemption based on improved "character," not changed "color." Vague in his recommendations, Thomas implied that blacks should model themselves after certain mulattoes, most notably William Hannibal Thomas. Black Judas is a biography of Thomas, a publishing history of The American Negro, and an analysis of that book's significance to American racial thought. The book is based on fifteen years of research, including research in postamputation trauma and psychoanalytic theory on selfhatred, to assess Thomas's metamorphosis from a constructive race critic to a black Negrophobe. John David Smith argues that his radical shift resulted from key emotional and physical traumas that mirrored Thomas's life history of exposure to white racism and intense physical pain.
The Maid Narratives shares the memories of black domestic workers and the white families they served, uncovering the often intimate relationships between maid and mistress. Based on interviews with over fifty people -- both white and black -- these stories deliver a personal and powerful message about resilience and resistance in the face of oppression in the Jim Crow South. The housekeepers, caretakers, sharecroppers, and cooks who share their experiences in The Maid Narratives ultimately moved away during the Great Migration. Their perspectives as servants who left for better opportunities outside of the South offer an original telling of physical and psychological survival in a racially oppressive caste system: Vinella Byrd, for instance, from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, recalls how a farmer she worked for would not allow her to clean her hands in the family's wash pan. These narratives are complemented by the voices of white women, such as Flora Templeton Stuart, from New Orleans, who remembers her maid fondly but realizes that she knew little about her life. Like Stuart, many of the white narrators remain troubled by the racial norms of the time. Viewed as a whole, the book presents varied, rich, and detailed accounts, often tragic, and sometimes humorous. The Maid Narratives reveals, across racial lines, shared hardships, strong emotional ties, and inspiring strength.
This book explores the relations among blackness, antiblackness, and Black people within the discourse of the blackness of black. This critical discourse developed during the last two decades as scholars explored what Saidiya Hartman describes as the afterlife of slavery. Hartman’s concept, which argues for a troubling continuity between the status of enslaved and emancipated Black people, is the pivot between discursive tributaries and trajectories. Tributaries of the discourse of the blackness of black comprise five foundational concepts: Frantz Fanon’s “phobogenic blackness,” Orlando Patterson’s “social death,” Cedric Robinson’s “racial capitalism and the black radical tradition,” and Hortense Spillers’ “flesh.” The book traces three trajectories within the afterlife of slavery: Frank Wilderson’s “ Afropessimism,” Fred Moten’s “generative blackness,” and Calvin Warren’s “black nihilism.” This ensemble of concepts enable us to understand what is at state in how we understand the relations among blackness, antiblackness, and Black people.
DIVDefinitive study of strange symbolism Blake used to attack political tyranny of his time. "For our sense of Blake in his own times we are indebted to David Erdman more than anyone else."—Times Literary Supplement. Third revised edition. 32 black-and-white illus. /div
Now available in paperback, William C. Banfield’s acclaimed collection of interviews delves into the lives and work of forty-one Black composers. Each of the profiled artists offers a candid self-portrait that explores areas from training and compositional techniques to working in a exclusive canon that has existed for a very long time. At the same time, Banfield draws on sociology, Western concepts of art and taste, and vernacular musical forms like blues and jazz to provide a frame for the artists’ achievements and help to illuminate the ongoing progress and struggles against industry barriers. Expanded illustrations and a new preface by the author provide invaluable added context, making this new edition an essential companion for anyone interested in Black composers or contemporary classical music. Composers featured: Michael Abels, H. Leslie Adams, Lettie Beckon Alston, Thomas J. Anderson, Dwight Andrews, Regina Harris Baiocchi, David Baker, William C. Banfield, Ysaye Maria Barnwell, Billy Childs, Noel DaCosta, Anthony Davis, George Duke, Leslie Dunner, Donal Fox, Adolphus Hailstork, Jester Hairston, Herbie Hancock, Jonathan Holland, Anthony Kelley, Wendell Logan, Bobby McFerrin, Dorothy Rudd Moore, Jeffrey Mumford, Gary Powell Nash, Stephen Newby, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Michael Powell, Patrice Rushen, George Russell, Kevin Scott, Evelyn Simpson-Curenton, Hale Smith, Billy Taylor, Frederick C. Tillis, George Walker, James Kimo Williams, Julius Williams, Tony Williams, Olly Wilson, and Michael Woods
In the mid-nineteenth century a group of Irish revolutionaries, known as the Fenians, set out to destroy Britain’s North American empire. Between 1866 and 1871 they launched a series of armed raids into Canadian territory. In Canadian Spy Story David Wilson takes readers into a dark and dangerous world of betrayal and deception, spies and informers, invasion and assassination, spanning Canada, the United States, Ireland, and Britain. In Canada there were Fenian secret societies in urban areas, including Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, and in some rural townships, all part of a wider North American network. Wilson tells the tale of Irishmen who attempted to liberate their country from British rule, and the Canadian secret police who infiltrated their revolutionary cells and worked their way to the top of the organization. With surprises at every turn, the story includes a sex scandal that nearly brought Canadian spy operations crashing down, as well as reports from Toronto about a plot to assassinate Queen Victoria. Featuring a cast of idealists, patriots, cynics, manipulators, and liars, Canadian Spy Story raises fundamental questions about state security and civil liberty, with important lessons for our own time.
This two-volume set features 400 articles on African-Americans in sports, including biographical entries as well as entries on events, tournaments, leagues, clubs, films, and associations. The entries cover all professional, amateur, and college sports such as baseball, tennis, and golf.
In a narrative built on groundbreaking research, David W. Sparks traces the history of African Baptists in North America, particularly Nova Scotia, in Reclaiming the Oral Tradition of the African Baptist Church. His goal is to recapture and reclaim the oral tradition that once shaped the theology and spiritual practices of the African Baptist Church in its earliest days. Mr. Sparks defines “oral” as “the practices, customs, beliefs, and folkways of a people and community that are passed on by word-of-mouth over several generations.” As opposed to a collection of items in a catechism of religious and doctrinal statements, oral tradition looks more to the heart and the conversion experience. For example, to obtain salvation, “candidates” are to withdraw to a quiet place to seek the Lord in prayer, and wait to hear from God. They’re expected to persist until they see the blood of Jesus, which is central to salvation in the oral tradition. Running throughout the text are various biblical passages, historical sources, and theological themes that give weight, substance, and relevance to a once dynamic tradition. Mr. Sparks makes the argument that the present moral and spiritual state of the African Baptist Church is the direct result of the loss and abandonment of its religious heritage and oral tradition. It calls, therefore, for a return to that tradition: a call to a renewed focus on salvation, revival, restoration, and hope!
This title is the second volume in a four volume series on the cemeteries of Jackson and Sandy Ridge Townships in Union County, North Carolina. It contains information on 144 cemeteries and 27,524 graves.
A New York Times notable book of 2023 | A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography “[An] erudite, enlightening new biography . . . [Waldstreicher’s] interpretations equal Wheatley’s own intentional verse, making it a joy to follow along as he unpacks her words and their arrangement.” —Tiya Miles, The Atlantic “Thoroughly researched, beautifully rendered and cogently argued . . . The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley is [. . .] historical biography at its best.” —Kerri Greenidge, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) A paradigm-shattering biography of Phillis Wheatley, whose extraordinary poetry set African American literature at the heart of the American Revolution. Admired by George Washington, ridiculed by Thomas Jefferson, published in London, and read far and wide, Phillis Wheatley led one of the most extraordinary American lives. Seized in West Africa and forced into slavery as a child, she was sold to a merchant family in Boston, where she became a noted poet at a young age. Mastering the Bible, Greek and Latin translations, and the works of Pope and Milton, she composed elegies for local elites, celebrated political events, praised warriors, and used her verse to variously lampoon, question, and assert the injustice of her enslaved condition. “Can I then but pray / Others may never feel tyrannic sway?” By doing so, she added her voice to a vibrant, multisided conversation about race, slavery, and discontent with British rule; before and after her emancipation, her verses shook up racial etiquette and used familiar forms to create bold new meanings. She demonstrated a complex but crucial fact of the times: that the American Revolution both strengthened and limited Black slavery. In this new biography, the historian David Waldstreicher offers the fullest account to date of Wheatley’s life and works, correcting myths, reconstructing intimate friendships, and deepening our understanding of her verse and the revolutionary era. Throughout The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, he demonstrates the continued vitality and resonance of a woman who wrote, in a founding gesture of American literature, “Thy Power, O Liberty, makes strong the weak / And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak.”
A groundbreaking Black artist and his career in the Jim Crow South This book is the first biography of Graham Jackson (1903-1983), a virtuosic musician whose life story displays the complexities of being a Black professional in the segregated South. David Cason discusses how Jackson navigated a web of racial and social negotiations throughout his long career and highlights his little-known role in events of the twentieth century. Widely known for an iconic photo taken of him playing the accordion in tears at Franklin D. Roosevelt’s funeral, which became a Life magazine cover, Jackson is revealed here to have a much deeper story. He was a performer, composer, and high school music director known for his skills on the piano and organ. Jackson was among the first Black men to enlist in the Navy during World War II, helping recruit many other volunteers and raising over $2 million for the war effort. After the war he became a fixture at Atlanta music venues and in 1971, Governor Jimmy Carter proclaimed Jackson the State Musician of Georgia. Cason examines Jackson’s groundbreaking roles with a critical eye, taking into account how Jackson drew on his connections with white elites including Roosevelt, Coca-Cola magnate Robert Woodruff, and golfer Bobby Jones, and was censured by Black Power figures for playing songs associated with Confederate memory. Based on archival, newspaper, and interview materials, The Life and Music of Graham Jackson brings into view the previously unknown story of an ambitious and talented artist and his controversial approach to the politics and culture of his day. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Loyalists were colonial Americans who supported the British empire and opposed independence during the long revolutionary war. When the American Revolution ended in a peace treaty that was too feeble to protect them against persecution in the newly independent United States, tens of thousands fl ed to a new life in exile. In 1783 many of them sailed northward from the New York City area to the St. John River valley in the future Canadian province of New Brunswick. This volume makes available for the fi rst time the source materials documenting this vast migration. Most records were discovered at the National Archives of the United Kingdom. In this book you can follow thousands of loyal American refugees at one or more critical points in their journey of exile: on registering their names at New York to take part in the exoduson boarding a ship for the voyage northwardon drawing provisions from the army commissariat at St. John Harbour after arrivalas recipients of town lots in the future city of Saint Johnas participants in the political turmoil that overtook the American Loyalists in exile This rich resource will be treasured by both family historians and those interested in New Brunswicks colourful past.
The first steam locomotives used on any British railway, worked in industry. The use of new and second hand former main line locomotives, was once a widespread aspect of the railways of Britain. This volume covers many of the once numerous manufacturers who constructed steam locomotives for industry and contractors from the 19th to the mid 20th centuries. David Mather has spent many years researching and collecting photographs across Britain, of most of the different locomotive types that once worked in industry. This book is designed to be both a record of these various manufacturers and a useful guide to those researching and modelling industrial steam.
In response to Kitchener's famous call for a million volunteers, local communities raised entire battalions for the service on the Western Front. Hull folk are reticent people and the Hull Pals were no exception. This book tells their inspiring story of sacrifice and gallantry under appaling conditions. Hull Pals contains a great number of hitherto unpublished eye-witnessed accounts and photographs.As featured on BBC Radio Humberside and in The Yorkshire Post.
In The House of Blackwood, David Finkelstein exposes for the first time the successes and failures of this onetime publishing powerhouse. The value of the archive Finkelstein studies is its completeness, the depth of the ledger material, and the extraordinary longevity of the firm.
All groups tell stories, but some groups have the power to impose their stories on others, to label others, stigmatize others, paint others as undesirables—and to have these stories presented as scientific fact, God’s will, or wholesome entertainment. Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors examines the origins and significance of several longstanding antiblack stories and the caricatures and stereotypes that support them. Here readers will find representations of the lazy, childlike Sambo, the watermelon-obsessed pickaninny, the buffoonish minstrel, the subhuman savage, the loyal and contented mammy and Tom, and the menacing, razor-toting coon and brute. Malcolm X and James Baldwin both refused to eat watermelon in front of white people. They were aware of the jokes and other stories about African Americans stealing watermelons, fighting over watermelons, even being transformed into watermelons. Did racial stories influence the actions of white fraternities and sororities who dressed in blackface and mocked black culture, or employees who hung nooses in their workplaces? What stories did the people who refer to Serena Williams and other dark-skinned athletes as apes or baboons hear? Is it possible that a white South Carolina police officer who shot a fleeing black man had never heard stories about scary black men with straight razors or other weapons? Antiblack stories still matter. Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors uses images from the Jim Crow Museum, the nation’s largest publicly accessible collection of racist objects. These images are evidence of the social injustice that Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as “a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be exposed to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.” Each chapter concludes with a story from the author’s journey, challenging the integrity of racial narratives.
David Burke uncovers the clandestine activities of Patrick Crinnion, a Garda intelligence officer who secretly served MI6 during the early years of the Troubles. As the Garda Síochána launched a manhunt for the Chief-of-Staff of the IRA, Crinnion found himself playing a crucial role in the effort to track him down. Before his disappearance, Crinnion's actions exposed a web of secrets including those of another British spy in the Irish police, damaging intelligence leaks, gunrunning by Irish politicians, and a cover-up related to the murder of a Garda. Burke reveals MI6's shady dealings, from attempts to smear Irish politicians to plans for using criminals as assassins and the secret surveillance of a key IRA member. Crinnion fled into exile. The Puppet Masters not only reveals what became of him but also provides an insightful look into a turbulent period marked by covert operations, betrayal, and the power struggle that shaped modern Irish history.
This book lists nearly 3,000 original choral works written by 76 composers active in the United States from roughly 1920 until the present. Styles range from the lush Romanticism of Charles Wakefield Cadman to the stark, dissonant harmonies of Morton Feldman.
A groundbreaking history of worldwide English in all its dialects, differences, and linguistic delights: “Informative . . . distinctive . . . a spirited celebration.” —The Guardian In this “well-informed and appealing” work (Publishers Weekly), David Crystal puts aside the usual focus on “standard” English, and instead provides a startlingly original view of where the richness, creativity, and diversity of the language truly lies—in the accents and dialects of nonstandard English users all over the world. Whatever their regional, social, or ethnic background, each group has a story worth telling, whether it is in Scotland or Somerset, South Africa or Singapore. He reminds us that for several hundred wonderful years, there was no such thing as “incorrect” English—and traces the evolution of the language from a few thousand Anglo-Saxons to the 1.5 billion people who speak it today. Moving from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens and the present day, Crystal puts regional speech and writing at center stage, giving a sense of the social realities behind the development of English. This significant shift in perspective enables us to understand for the first time the importance of everyday, previously marginalized, voices in our language—and provides an argument too for the way English should be taught in the future. “A work of impeccable scholarship [that] could easily serve as a standard textbook for students of linguistics, but Mr. Crystal, reaching out to a more general audience, recognizes that even the most avid reader might flinch at the sections on Old Norse grammatical influence. Cleverly, he has sprinkled the book with little digressions, set apart in boxes, that address historical mysteries, strange loanwords, interesting etymologies and the like.” —The New York Times “Learned and often provocative . . . demonstrates repeatedly that common conceptions about language are often historically inaccurate—split infinitives bothered no one until recently (likewise sentence-ending prepositions).” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Simply the best introductory history of the English language family that we have. The plan of the book is ingenious, the writing lively, the exposition clear, and the scholarly standard uncompromisingly high.” —J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
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