Gendering the History of Race and Religion

Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gary Nash; American Indian Studies Center Fortieth Anniversary. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 1 January 2011; 35 (1): 33–37. doi: https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.35.1.gq644g6x64254319 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest Search

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPaul Harvey, Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Pp. 264. $53.00 (cloth); $24.00 (paper).Rachael L. PasierowskaRachael L. PasierowskaRice University Search for more articles by this author Rice UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 104, Number 2Spring 2019LGBT Themes in African American History A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/702429 Views: 59Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Voices of Black Folk: The Sermons of Rev. A. W. Nix, by Terri Brinegar

Need a solid historiographical essay on the social history of British America? On African American or American religious history? On the foreign relations of the United States? Or on ten other specialized topics in American history? Read French? Then Chantiers d'histoire americane is just the volume for you. While the essays in the volume edited by Jean Heffer and Franpois Weil vary in quality, they are completely up-to-date in their scholarship, asking the same questions and citing the same books and articles as similar essays published in the United States. Should we celebrate this mastery of the idiom of American scholarship by these French scholars, nearly all of whom hold academic positions in French universities? Or should we lament the increasing homogeneity of scholarly discourse? In making themselves experts in American history, the authors have inbibed the terms of reference and the intellectual assumptions of their American colleagues. The major difference is their relative detachment from the passions of American historiographic debates, which enables them to assess the strengths and the weaknesses of the contending arguments. Thus, Laurent Cesari offers a fine critique of various approaches to United States diplomatic history (Progressive idealism, balance-ofpower realism, Wisconsin revisionism, and recent postrevisionist and corporatist interpretations) without endorsing any perspective. Like other authors in this volume (for example, those who deal with controversial questions in labor history or in the social history of early America), Cesari assumes an Olympian stance, disparaging monocausal interpretations and celebrating the wisdom of additional research and complex eclectic explanations. Only rarely in this collection do we hear a voice with a distinct and insistent French methodological edge or point of view, as in Pierre Gervais's critical assessment of the empiricist epistemology of much of American social history. What holds for the scholarly essay applies as well to the French survey text on American history. The two volumes written by Pierre Melandri (one in collaboration with Jacques Portes) tell the story of American history much in the manner of an American author writing for an American audience. That is, the French texts assume that the student has a basic familiarity with the historical figures, characters, institutions, and events that dot the narrative. They do not pause to comment in detail on distinctive features of government in the United States, such as the division of power between the state and federal governments; nor, with a few exceptions, do they invoke French examples or analogies. Thus, the discussion by Melandri and Portes of the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment and the subsequent imposition of a modest graduated income tax (to cover the loss of tariff revenues stemming from the Underwood Act) makes no reference to parallel developments in Europe,

This article explores in four sections the logic and impact of the ways in which all archival collections, but African American collections most poignantly, are incomplete; and how a national search engine for African American history confronts and attempts to address the absence of African American stories, voices, documents, and histories. Following the work of scholars such as Verne Harris, Michelle Caswell, and others, the first section analyzes how and why archives are always necessarily incomplete, as well as the particular reasons behind the bias and erasure of and within African American history and the archives that have come to collect and represent it. The second section discusses how Umbra Search African American History (umbrasearch.org) was conceived as a response to the need for a more complete archival record of African American history and culture. Section three presents Umbra Search as a case study—what it is, how it has grown, the role of partners, and the challenges it faces. The final section considers the roles of academic and community collections, technology, and collaboration in creating access to a deeper and more fulsome representation of American history and culture.

Rethinking the Center from the Margins K. Scott Wong (bio) Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. By Gary Y. Okihiro. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. 203 pages. $25.00 (cloth). $12.95 (paper). Since the 1968–1969 Third World Strike at Francisco State College and University of California-Berkeley, when Asian American studies emerged as part of the political/educational agenda of Ethnic studies, the field has attained a fair degree of respectability and maturity. 1 A number of universities and colleges now offer courses in Asian American studies, a variety of English department courses often include Asian American literature, and most recently, the University of California, Santa Barbara has established the nation’s first Asian American studies department. In addition, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) has grown into a nationally recognized academic association with an annual meeting, and the AAAS regularly sponsors a panel at the yearly American Studies Association conference. The maturity of the field, in terms of published scholarly work, was exemplified with the publication of Ronald Takaki’s Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1989) and Sucheng Chan’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1991). These two survey texts of Asian American history marked the point at which enough research had already been published to warrant and sustain the writing of two synthetic, yet interpretive, studies of the histories of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and South and Southeast Asian Americans. Utilizing primary and secondary sources, these two scholars summed up a whole generation of Asian American historical studies and thus provided the field with standards by which future synthetic historical work in the field will be measured. With [End Page 415] the publication of Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture, Asian American studies has been advanced again by Gary Okihiro’s adept blending of history, literature, sociology, and cultural studies, all of which come together to provide a provocative and insightful reading of the Asian American experience and how it fits into the larger themes of American history, Ethnic studies, American studies, and contemporary debates on what it means to be an “American.” This book is made up of six chapters, each originally presented as lectures (printed here with slight modification) at Amherst College in the spring of 1992 during Okihiro’s tenure there as the John J. McCloy ‘16 Professor of American Institutions and International Relations (Okihiro is an associate professor of history and director of the Asian American studies program at Cornell University). As he mentions in the preface, these lectures were written and presented during a time of cultural debates. During this period, there was a “fervent and oftentimes heated debate about the idea of a mainstream, about the core of American history and culture, about intellectual ‘ghettoization’ and ethnic ‘balkanization’“ (ix). Thus with debates of this nature in the background, these lectures take up the issues of where and when Asian Americans enter and become part of the larger American cultural and historical landscape. There is also a bittersweet irony that these lectures were commissioned by the John J. McCloy Distinguished Visiting Professorship. During the Second World War, McCloy served as the Assistant Secretary of War (and later as the High Commissioner to Germany and the president of the World Bank) and was a staunch supporter of the wartime internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans. Okihiro, one of the foremost historians of Japanese America, must have relished the opportunity to deliver these lectures under the auspices of McCloy’s legacy. 2 A general theme that reappears throughout these lectures is the contention that the core values and ideals of the nation emanate not from the mainstream but from the margins—from among Asian and African Americans, Latinos and American Indians, women, and gays and lesbians. In their struggles for equality, these groups have helped preserve and advance the principles and ideals of democracy and have thereby made America a freer place for all. (ix) Viewing American history in this way requires a recentering of our perspectives. Herein lies the book’s main contribution to the currrent discourse about race and ethnicity, gender studies, American studies, and [End Page...

This article raises questions about how scholars of African American religions and of Black Queer Studies have historically and historiographically rendered queer and transgender persons as being devoid of a religion of their choosing. It calls for research on LGBTQ+ persons in African American religious history and discusses the necessity of “queering” theories and methods in the study of African American religions. To do this, it traces a genealogy of historians of African American religious history “queering” the study of African American religions in order to analyze the state of the field and chart new directions for future study.

Previous articleNext article No Access“PREMATURELY KNOWING OF EVIL THINGS”: THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN GIRLS AND YOUNG WOMEN IN SLAVERY AND FREEDOMWilma KingWilma KingWilma King is Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of American and African American History at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Search for more articles by this author Wilma King is Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of American and African American History at the University of Missouri, Columbia.PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 99, Number 3Summer 2014 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.99.3.0173 Views: 1297Total views on this site Copyright 2014 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Commentary on progress and reflections of conversations that undergirded the advancement of ethnic minority psychology are presented by the author as a perspective of an Elder. Articles in this special issue are considered in terms of the themes that emerged from their narratives on the history of ethnic psychological associations, Division 45, the Minority Fellowship Program, and governance's response to multicultural issues within the American Psychological Association. Themes in the history of African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians are discussed in terms of the centrality of culture, history, and pride in resilience, treatment in U.S. history, representation in literature, and its implications for training, research and practice, challenges for ethnic psychological associations, and tensions in transition to a multicultural psychology movement.

Remembering Alton Parker Hornsby, Jr., 1940–2017

An Examination of African American Women's Lives in Postwar Philadelphia Lisa Krissoff Boehm (bio) Lisa Levenstein . A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xvi + 199 pages. Illustrations, tables, maps, appendix, bibliography, and index. $35.96. This work, a part of the prestigious John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture, edited by Waldo E. Martin and Patricia Sullivan, makes a noteworthy contribution to the growing yet still underserved field of African American women's urban history. Levenstein's work is heartening on a number of levels, and we need more scholars to consider undertaking projects of this type. As I have argued in the Journal of Urban History's special January 2010 edition on teaching ("Adding Gender to American Urban History"), urban historians ought to produce works that cross subfields with greater frequency. Urban historians tend to craft books aimed at a narrow audience and seem hesitant to make theoretical or narrative leaps between genres. This hesitancy denies the field greater readership and historiographical impact. Urban history can be successfully merged with political, economic, environmental, gender, labor, immigration, African American, and other types of history. A Movement Without Marches is simultaneously a book about poverty, African American women, public policy, and postwar Philadelphia. The book openly draws inspiration from the likes of Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996) and Arnold R. Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1840-1960 (1998). Levenstein makes a very important contribution by studying what she terms "the gendered construction of racialized urban poverty" (p. 5). Levenstein writes about African American women in poverty, a topic that has proved onerous for many academics due to the stereotypes that must be confronted. Levenstein rejects the term "underclass," which "not only paints a false portrait of poor women's goals and values, but it also severely misconstrues their work habits. Regardless of their employment status, women who sought and retained assistance from public institutions were workers, first and foremost, because they labored to care for their households and [End Page 556] their families with few financial resources" (p. 24). Levenstein is upfront about addressing the ways in which the women may have exhibited traits commonly attributed to the underclass, admitting that the women "received public assistance, became pregnant unintentionally, suffered from depression, or used drugs and alcohol" (p. 24). Levenstein could point out here that these traits can be applied to a broad number of Americans—middle class as well as working class—especially when one considers how many Americans have relied on unemployment assistance at some time in their lives or made use of child tax credits or other financial relief. The author notes on page twenty-six that any study of African American women in poverty runs the risk of misinterpretation, given the broad range of negative stereotypes attributed to these women. The nature of the book necessitates a thorough exploration of the women's personal lives, and the author must divulge some unflattering stories. Extensive reliance on court records unearths very sensitive tales; however, Levenstein approaches her work with the utmost sensitivity and need not worry about being misinterpreted. In a clearly prepared table, Levenstein notes how the black population of Philadelphia expanded from 219,599 in 1930 to 529,239 by 1960. Much of this notable increase is due to the movement known as the Second Great Migration, which Levenstein does not refer to by name but mentions fleetingly in a few places in the book. The economic, cultural, and political aspects of the city that lured hundreds of thousands of southern migrants to settle there ought to be contrasted with the startling conditions the migrants encountered in their daily lives in Philadelphia. As return migration remained low, the North must have remained preferable in some ways. Migration studies and narratives, although there are relatively few focused strictly on women, have been a staple of postwar urban and African American history and ought to be further incorporated into this work. Reference to the conclusions of sociologist Stewart Tolnay, who refutes...

Challenging Dissemblance in Pauli Murray Historiography, Sketching a History of the Trans New Negro

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 80, NO. 2 | 27 80 No.2 AFRICAN AMERICAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS: HISTORICAL DOCUMENTATION AND PRESERVATION IN CEMETERIES By Sarah Lane Within eyesight of my grandfather’s US Navy plaque was a large field with a few dilapidated headstones. This was the historical “colored section” of Washington Cemetery.TherewerenobrightUSflags.Thisdidnotconvey messages of honor or thankfulness from the community for the service of African American veterans. African American veterans in cemeteries across the nation have lacked deserved recognition. Not only is this disparaging to the African American community and families of veterans, but also, without correction, it passes on division among future generations. In the Civil War, over 200,000 African American soldiers and sailors served in the US Army and Navy.1 They served in 163 units that mainly fell under the moniker United States Colored Troops (USCT). Units of African American soldiers began forming as early as 1862. African American Civil War soldiers were given inferior equipment and low pay, and the highest achievable rank was sergeant major.2 However, African American soldiers and sailors held to their determination to fight the chains of oppression; twenty-one-year-old private Samuel Cabble wrote, “I am a soldier now and i shall use my utmost endeavor to strike at the rebellion and the heart of this system that so long has kept us in chains.”3 Despite their bravery and determination, historically, African American Civil War veterans were not fully recognized, and many of their histories have gone untold. Over 150 years after the Civil War, this discrepancy has begun to be addressed through local and national efforts. I had the privilege of being a part of Paul LaRue’s Research History course at Washington High School in Washington Court House, Ohio. The goal of the course was to bring to light little-known history, with a focus on African American history. Some of the most meaningful work I engaged in was researching and documenting the histories of African American veterans buried in local cemeteries. Prior to my arrival in the course, a 2002–2003 class installed a new row of headstones, called Soldier’s Row, for most of the African American Civil War veterans in Washington Cemetery. This was the unattended area I described earlier; now the headstones for African Americans who served in the Civil War stand upright, with flags and proper honors. There is an Ohio historical marker located there (with text written by students) that includes a quotation by USCT veteran Albert Bird, “We have suffered to save the Country; we ought to be remembered.”4 We engaged in similar work in Beech Grove Cemetery near Cincinnati, Ohio. We did not need to take a trip to Gettysburg; there was untold history in our local community cemeteries. In Beech Grove Cemetery, we were actively conserving the history of African American veterans. I was part of a group who documented as many headstones as possible via photograph, leading to the creation of a digital map of the cemetery. My peers and I hoped to spark even greater change and recognition for these soldiers. Carl Westmoreland, senior historian at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and a representative from the Ohio Department of Veterans Services, visited our class. Imagine the difference that can be made if more teachers took the initiative to engage students in documenting and recognizing the contributions of African American veterans. Nationally, similar history documentation and recognition work is being done, including efforts by the National Park Service (NPS). Overall, African American heritage and history continues to be recognized, documented, and honored throughout NPS sites and programs. In 1991, an African burial ground (used in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries) was discovered in New York City. An African Burial Ground National Monument was erected, and in 1993 it became a National Historical Landmark.5 The National Park Service’s efforts have also focused on the documentation and recognition of African American Civil War veterans. In 1997, the Spirit of Freedom statue, also known as the African American Civil War Memorial, was created. It has a wall of soldiers’names and is located in Washington, DC.6 The NPS provides a Civil...

Reviewed by: African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture Jennifer Sieck Anne L. Bower (ed.), African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. 200 pp. Editor Anne L. Bower invites six scholars to bring a dish in the form of a chapter to African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture. Together they host a multi-course meal for readers hungry to learn about African American history and culture through the lens of food. The diversity of the dinner guests reflects the divergent disciplines to which African American culinary studies lends itself; experts around the table range from archaeologists to sociologists. The result is a recipe for a flavorful feast (and, notably, one attentive to presentation) that provides a solid foundation for exploring African American foodways. Bower, a retired English professor and author of Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories, introduces the collection of essays by examining the role of food in the motion picture Soul Food, observing that the Sunday dinner table acts as a barometer for the status of the African American family in the film. Bowers extends the metaphor to show how African American food offers a mirror to history and culture. By studying the history (part one of the book) and representations (part two) of African American food, she contends that scholars gain new insights not only into history and culture, but also into issues of race, gender, [End Page 1193] economics and politics. Though not a cookbook, Bowers includes a recipe for "Chicken and Collard Green Crêpes with Béchamel Sauce" at the conclusion of her introduction, enjoining readers, too, to participate in African American foodways (11). The value of studying food to yield greater meaning than, as the ad slogan puts it, "it's what's for dinner," echoes throughout the book. The author of chapter four, Doris Witt, likens food to music as a site for cultural expression, but critiques the limited recognition food receives related to its role in shaping history. Recapitulated in almost every chapter is the way that food is yet another example of African Americans' use of material culture to retain individual and group identities in the face of oppression. Though the book testifies to a distinctiveness in African American food, it also emphasizes the fusion of cultures blended by African Americans—African, Native American, and European—and the resulting influence that permeates American cuisine today. Finally, women and men play important roles in African American foodways past and present; however, a number of essays pay special attention to women's access to power in relation to food. In chapter one, Robert L. Hall notes that African foodways predate Alfred Crosby's notion of the Columbian Exchange by "hundreds, if not thousands of years" (17). He provides extensive documentation of crop exchanges to inform his inquiry into the relationship between food and the transatlantic slave trade. By asking what Africans ate and brought with them to the Americas, he attempts to determine how "African all Americans are" (18). Hall, a professor of African American studies and history, argues that enslaved Africans integrated their cultures into white southern culture because of their knowledge of growing crops such as rice and their role in preparing food on the plantation. They also maintained what Charles W. Joyner describes as "African culinary grammars" in their own food preparations which were separate from whites (31). Food and identity remained symbolically linked during slavery, a connection that continues today. Hall's concluding contention is reminiscent of Albert Raboteau's groundbreaking work in Slave Religion: foodways provide another instance in which African Americans creatively preserve African culture within the context of the slavery. William C. Whit riffs on similar themes in chapter two from his perspective as a sociologist, touching on how enslaved cooks influenced the evolution of white southern food culture and, more broadly, how "subordinated [End Page 1194] people used their own knowledge systems of the environment they settled to reshape the terms of their domination" (49). In these ways and others, Whit sees "soul food," a term coined in the 1960s to describe African American cuisine, "as constitutive of, and an exemplary performance of...