Author: Steven Andrew ReichPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Book Description
The Making of a Southern Sawmill World
Author: Steven Andrew ReichPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Book Description
The Southern Key
Author: Michael GoldfieldPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190079320
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433
Book Description
"The South is today, as it always has been, the key to understanding American society, its politics, its constitutional anomalies and government structure, its culture, its social relations, its music and literature, its media focus, its blind spots, and virtually everything else. The Golden Key argues that much of what is important in American politics and society today was largely shaped by the successes and failures of the labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s, and most notably the failures of southern labor organizing during this period. It also argues that these failures, despite some important successes in organizing interracial unions, left the South (and consequentially much of the rest of the United States as well) racially backward and open to right-wing demagoguery. These failures have led to a nationwide decline in unionization, growing economic inequality, and overall failures to confront white supremacy head on. In an in-depth look at unexamined archival material and detailed data, The Golden key challenges established historiography, both telling a tale of race, radicalism, and betrayal and arguing that the outcome was not at all predetermined"--
The Other Great Migration
Author: Bernadette PruittPublisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603449485
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482
Book Description
The twentieth century has seen two great waves of African American migration from rural areas into the city, changing not only the country’s demographics but also black culture. In her thorough study of migration to Houston, Bernadette Pruitt portrays the move from rural to urban homes in Jim Crow Houston as a form of black activism and resistance to racism. Between 1900 and 1950 nearly fifty thousand blacks left their rural communities and small towns in Texas and Louisiana for Houston. Jim Crow proscription, disfranchisement, acts of violence and brutality, and rural poverty pushed them from their homes; the lure of social advancement and prosperity based on urban-industrial development drew them. Houston’s close proximity to basic minerals, innovations in transportation, increased trade, augmented economic revenue, and industrial development prompted white families, commercial businesses, and industries near the Houston Ship Channel to recruit blacks and other immigrants to the city as domestic laborers and wage earners. Using census data, manuscript collections, government records, and oral history interviews, Pruitt details who the migrants were, why they embarked on their journeys to Houston, the migration networks on which they relied, the jobs they held, the neighborhoods into which they settled, the culture and institutions they transplanted into the city, and the communities and people they transformed in Houston.
American Congo
Author: Nan Elizabeth WoodruffPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674045335
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
This is the story of how rural Black people struggled against the oppressive sharecropping system of the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. Here, white planters forged a world of terror and poverty for Black workers, one that resembled the horrific deprivations of the African Congo under Belgium’s King Leopold II. Delta planters did not cut off the heads and hands of their African American workers but, aided by local law enforcement, they engaged in peonage, murder, theft, and disfranchisement. As individuals and through collective struggle, in conjunction with national organizations like the NAACP and local groups like the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, Black men and women fought back, demanding a just return for their crops and laying claim to a democratic vision of citizenship. Their efforts were amplified by the two world wars and the depression, which expanded the mobility and economic opportunities of Black people and provoked federal involvement in the region. Nan Woodruff shows how the freedom fighters of the 1960s would draw on this half-century tradition of protest, thus expanding our standard notions of the civil rights movement and illuminating a neglected but significant slice of the American Black experience.
The Texas Left
Author: David O'Donald CullenPublisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603441891
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
The Texas Left. Some would say the phrase is an oxymoron. For most of the twentieth century, the popular perception of Texas politics has been that of dominant conservatism, punctuated by images of cowboys, oil barons, and party bosses intent on preserving a decidedly capitalist status quo. In fact, poor farmers and laborers who were disenfranchised, segregated, and, depending on their ethnicity and gender, confronted with varying levels of hostility and discrimination, have long composed the "other" political heritage of Texas. In The Texas Left, fourteen scholars examine this heritage. Though largely ignored by historians of previous decades who focused instead on telling the stories of the Alamo, the Civil War, the cattle drives, and the oilfield wildcatters, this parallel narrative of those who sought to resist repression reveals themes important to the unfolding history of Texas and the Southwest. Volume editors David O'Donald Cullen and Kyle G. Wilkison have assembled a collection of pioneering studies that provide the broad outlines for future research on liberal and radical social and political causes in the state and region. Among the topics explored in this book are early efforts of women, blacks, Tejanos, labor organizers, and political activists to claim rights of citizenship, livelihood, and recognition, from the Reconstruction era until recent times.
The Tribe of Black Ulysses
Author: William Powell JonesPublisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252029790
Category : African American men
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
The lumber industry employed more African American men than any southern economic sector outside agriculture, yet those workers have been almost completely ignored by scholars. Drawing on a substantial number of oral history interviews as well as on manuscript sources, local newspapers, and government documents, The Tribe of Black Ulysses explores black men and women's changing relationship to industrial work in three sawmill communities (Elizabethtown, South Carolina, Chapman, Alabama, and Bogalusa, Louisiana). By restoring black lumber workers to the history of southern industrialization, William P. Jones reveals that industrial employment was not incompatible - as previous historians have assumed - with the racial segregation and political disfranchisement that defined African American life in the Jim Crow South. At the same time, he complicates an older tradition of southern sociology that viewed industrialization as socially disruptive and morally corrupting to African American social and cultural traditions rooted in agriculture. William P. Jones is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Barrett, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Nelson Lichtenstein.
Like a Family
Author: Jacquelyn Dowd HallPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807882941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 541
Book Description
Since its original publication in 1987, Like a Family has become a classic in the study of American labor history. Basing their research on a series of extraordinary interviews, letters, and articles from the trade press, the authors uncover the voices and experiences of workers in the Southern cotton mill industry during the 1920s and 1930s. Now with a new afterword, this edition stands as an invaluable contribution to American social history. "The genius of Like a Family lies in its effortless integration of the history of the family--particularly women--into the history of the cotton-mill world.--Ira Berlin, New York Times Book Review "Like a Family is history, folklore, and storytelling all rolled into one. It is a living, revelatory chronicle of life rarely observed by the academe. A powerhouse.--Studs Terkel "Here is labor history in intensely human terms. Neither great impersonal forces nor deadening statistics are allowed to get in the way of people. If students of the New South want both the dimensions and the feel of life and labor in the textile industry, this book will be immensely satisfying.--Choice
Texas Labor History
Author: Bruce A. GlasrudPublisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603449450
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458
Book Description
A helpful new source for scholars and teachers who wish to fill in some of the missing pieces. Tackling a number of such presumptions—that a viable labor movement never existed in the Lone Star State; that black, brown, and white laborers, both male and female, were unable to achieve even short-term solidarity; that labor unions in Texas were ineffective because of laborers’ inability to confront employers—the editors and contributors to this volume lay the foundation for establishing the importance of labor to a fuller understanding of Texas history.
American Lumberman
Author: The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
Author: James G. Thomas Jr.Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807837431
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
Science and medicine have been critical to southern history and the formation of southern culture. For three centuries, scientists in the South have documented the lush natural world around them and set a lasting tradition of inquiry. The medical history of the region, however, has been at times tragic. Disease, death, and generations of poor health have been the legacy of slavery, the plantation economy, rural life, and poorly planned cities. The essays in this volume explore this legacy as well as recent developments in technology, research, and medicine in the South. Subjects include natural history, slave health, medicine in the Civil War, public health, eugenics, HIV/AIDS, environmental health, and the rise of research institutions and hospitals, to name but a few. With 38 thematic essays, 44 topical entries, and a comprehensive overview essay, this volume offers an authoritative reference to science and medicine in the American South.