African American Voices Research Articles

Unjust: Publishing Black and African American Children’s Books and School Availability

Traditional book publishing has a pronounced and unjust deficiency of Black and African American voices. White culture, thoughts, and rules are the standard in traditional publishing. Black and African American authors are not typically picked up by white-dominated publishing companies. In traditional publishing, mostly white literary agents are gatekeepers and acquisition editors shut the doors too frequently to non-white authors. Aspiring Black authors then resort to hybrid or vanity press companies that often use unscrupulous practices, charge exorbitant fees, accomplish little or low-quality work, and deny authors’ agency and full rights in the final disposition of a book. Because a majority of traditionally published children’s books featuring Black or African American stories or characters are written by or illustrated by non-Black people, the wide possibilities of adventure, celebrations, discovery, and friendship stories are not published for Black children. Instead, publishers favor stories about slavery, the civil rights movement, famous Black people, and hair tales as well as racially ambiguous characters. Regrettably, Black and African American culturally relevant stories written and illustrated by Black or African Americans are not readily available to children in school and library settings consistent with schools’ community or student demographics. This article shares research findings and viewpoints of Kathy Anderson and Karen Bowlding, two Black children’s book writers and publishing consultants who are also parents. Black and African American students encounter education and cultural injustice because of the practices of traditional publishing companies, educators, and librarians. Parents and guardians can ameliorate these issues with discernment and action. Foremost, publishing company decision-makers must acknowledge their own racial biases that deny representation and authenticity to all children in our US classrooms.

Racism measurement and influences, variations on scientific racism, and a vision

The knowledge base regarding the impact of racism and discrimination on African American health and well-being has grown significantly since the first models of racism and health, but many questions remain. In this commentary, I discuss three challenges requiring attention in future research. The first is measurement. The second is consideration of individual and contextual influences that shape vulnerability to racism. The third challenge is racism in science itself (e.g., racial disparities in funding, absence, and erasure of African American voices in scientific discourse on health disparities). I discuss the benefits of addressing these challenges and offer a vision of what research on racism and African American health and well-being might look like as we move toward the eradication of racism and promotion of health equity.

The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music

The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music

Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation

Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation

Review: Echoes of Exclusion and Resistance: Voices from the Hanford Region, edited by Robert Bauman and Robert Franklin

This is the third volume in the Hanford History Series from WSU Press. Whereas the first two volumes examined the Manhattan Project and its impact on Hanford, White Bluffs, and Richland, this volume expands the scope to include the broader Tri-Cities region and the social changes that have shaped it. The authors make great use of oral histories, and they deserve much credit for amplifying Native American, Japanese American, and African American voices. This also makes the book’s exclusion of Mexican American voices all the more surprising.The book’s overarching thesis, developed by four authors across six chapters, is straightforward: social diversity, racial conflict, wartime displacement, and civil rights activism shaped the Tri-Cities region from the 1880s to the 1970s, and World War II was the turning point. With less consistency, the authors argue that white residents’ treatment of Plateau Indians and successive waves of Chinese, Japanese, and African American newcomers followed the same patterns of discrimination and segregation, the “echoes of exclusion” that fueled resistance.Thomas Marceau’s opening chapter explores the centrality of the region’s natural resources to the Wanapum people and thus the travesty of the tribe’s displacement from the Hanford Site in 1943. Robert Bauman’s chapter backtracks to survey the racist treatment that Chinese immigrants faced during the late nineteenth century before focusing on Japanese immigrants, their survival strategies, and the injustices that internment policy brought to their doorsteps. The next three chapters turn to African Americans. Robert Franklin examines the wartime opportunities that African Americans perceived and the realities of discrimination and segregation they faced. Laura Arata focuses more tightly on African American women and the “optimism, disappointment, and determination that shaped their experiences” (p. 114). Bauman and Franklin then analyze the region’s civil rights movement, including its courageous leaders, committed opponents, and mixed results. Each of these chapters has much to offer, especially for students of Washington state history. The book as a whole presents a compelling mix of material on racial conflict and the perseverance needed to overcome it.The book also reflects some conceptual shortcomings. Lumping Plateau Indians, Chinese immigrants, Japanese Americans, African Americans, and ethnic Mexicans together as “nonwhites” is problematic. It illuminates patterns, but it says more about white residents’ misguided conflation of tribal, national, racial, ethnic, and immigrant identities. More problematic is the decision to relegate the experiences of ethnic Mexicans to five pages of the final chapter. Their recognition that the history of Latinas/os in the region deserves its own book offers some solace. I eagerly await the fourth volume in this series.

The Ethics of Unmeaning: Noise and the Non-inscribable Slave Voice

The Ethics of Unmeaning: Noise and the Non-inscribable Slave Voice Edward Piñuelas In the nexus of literature from within chattel slavery, music has provided scholars of various slave traditions a potent material for reading the influences of enslavement on everyday life in bondage, as well as the remnants of that life in contemporary culture. It was slave music that caused W. E. B. Du Bois to “set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men” (536), and provided Frederick Douglass “[his] first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery” (51). In short, the music of the enslaved and their immediate descendants has provided a window into aspects of the experiences of enslaved people not easily communicated through written testimony, as well as a medium for expressing Black subjectivities in ways denied by the mechanisms of racial slavery. This is especially true in the United States, where the work song and the spiritual have come to form their own genre of literature, offering expressive traditions that exceeded and often resisted those of the master class. These traditions have served as the fundamental building blocks of culture and civil society throughout the United States and have been essential to freedom struggles and political organization since slavery’s abolition. Shana L. Redmond’s recent work on Black music in social and political movements within the Diaspora provides a poignant example of how the spiritual provided postbellum movements with the rhythmic and thematic material to mobilize African American laborers and community organizations (Anthem 146–47). This turn to Black music as a political object began in the antebellum period, when abolitionists pointed to the music and songs of enslaved communities, particularly western religious hymns and spirituals, as evidence of slaveholders’ failing attempts to dehumanize their captives. [End Page 161] Ironically, the very music used by abolitionists to condemn the peculiar institution provided the slaveholding class evidence of its uplifting, indeed humanizing, effects. Many supporters of slavery heard in work songs signs of contentment and in religious songs signs of salvation. As Roger D. Abrahams explains in his historical account of slave music in the antebellum South, “[s]inging and dancing were regarded as signs of happiness, in spite of the fact that many whites could understand that the songs were often about the agonies of separation and alienation” (xix). These interpretations were more than mere misreadings of the often veiled expressions of sadness and resentment among enslaved singers, more than mere selective understandings that sought to confirm biases and assumptions already in place. They resulted from a mode of listening that sought to make meaning of a foreign, though familiar, phenomenon by relating it to assumptions common among members of the master class. In seeking to abstract from the material elements of slave music—the ephemeral, physical, and spatial phenomena of sounding and hearing—slavery’s advocates resorted to discursive practices contingent upon a disembodied, interchangeable, exchangeable enslaved body, a body that does not mark its domain with sound, but communicates only as sign. This reliance on exchangeability and reified value echoes what Saidiya V. Hartman notably identifies as the “fungibility” of the enslaved, the “joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability and interchangeability endemic to the commodity” (21). Faced with a material form of which they were neither the catalyst nor the prescribers, slaveowners and slavery’s supporters often described the music of the enslaved according to narrative frameworks based on this fungibility, not unlike those used for interpreting slave value, productivity, and soundness. These frameworks fundamentally disembodied enslaved voices so as to provide members of the master class a grammar of slave sound. In the process of figuring African American voices through the mechanics of fungibility, these proslavery depictions of Black voices likewise figured an antebellum southern soundscape loaded with numerous cultural and social values meant to buttress the moral argument in favor of the peculiar institution. While opponents of slavery sought to correct the misreadings produced by this body of proslavery literature, I argue here that even in seeking to assign enslaved voices alternative meanings, meanings that [End Page 162] were themselves salvos...

Toni Morrison as an African American Voice: A Marxist Analysis

This article will endeavor to discover the presence of Marxist ideology, in Morrison’s, novels, The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Marxism is a literary theory which focuses on class struggle and materialism. Toni Morrison writes about the culture in which she lives and from which she neither consciously nor emotionally escapes. The Marxist literary ideology focuses on the weak economic position of proletariat class and spotlights bourgeoisie class as a dominant capitalist. This article will explore that how Morrison has used Marxist ideology in her fictional work to highlight the suppression of Afro-American community.

The Promotion of Social Awakening through the Speech of Lewis Richardson: A Metaphorical Lens that is Echoed Today

This analysis will illustrate how a journey through the lens of metaphorical criticism can openly display the hardships, life, and reality of past African American voices, as their stories echo through the rhetor, Lewis Richardson. An examination of a striking speech that speaks volumes, recited by Lewis Richardson, will unravel the depth in imagery, interpretation, and symbolism from an application of a metaphorical critical lens that tells a story that just keeps getting louder and louder as it grows unheard. “When metaphor is seen as a way of knowing the world, it plays a particular role in argumentation” [8]. This artifact’s use of metaphor builds an argumentative case for freedom, justice, and empathy. The following analysis will shed light on how authentic slave testimony, metaphor, symbolism, personification, and juxtapositions, once coded, can bring us to a reality that may not seem so unfamiliar in comparison to our current climate of racial social instability which has erupted in an uproar of protests, movements such as Black Lives Matter, as well as a full-blown unravelling social awakening.

Black-ish Missiology: A Critique of Mission Studies and Appeal for Inclusion in the United States Context

Abstract Using the idiomatic expression found in the United States, this essay contends that the current field of missiology is black-ish. The expression is used to describe something purports to be Black (African American), but upon close inspection may not be authentic to the culture. This essay seeks to examine the dearth of specifically African American contributions to missiology. Citing issues of internal structuring and epistemology, an argument is made that African American voices and culture are often lost in this maze constituted by a lack of uniformity within mission studies. Additionally, there is an existing catalogue of Black scholarship that deals, directly and indirectly, with mission but is often not given the same latitude of inclusion and review that White scholarship is afforded in the United States.

On Neoclassicism and the Numbing of the Negro Mind

Neoclassical art of the 19th century utilized classical techniques that highlighted the norms of western culture. This umbrella of technique was applied to Americans of both European and African descent. Black neoclassical artists were constantly negotiating between the prescribed rules of the white art world and their unique personal experiences with black culture. As a result, Eurocentric constraints limited the African American voice and resulted in African Americans framing their perspective within a Eurocentric lens. “On Neoclassicism and the Numbing of the Negro Mind” is a commentary on the stifling effect of westernized expectations on black artists. This free-verse poem explores the relationship between white influences and the black artist while acknowledging the contradiction therein. The poem concludes by praising the enduring nature of black artists’ unique perspective.

Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,”

Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,”

Complete and Unabridged

Complete and Unabridged Michelle Lekas (bio) AMERICAN PULP: HOW PAPERBACKS BROUGHT MODERNISM TO MAIN STREET BY PAULA RABINOWITZ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014 And so we come to what is really what we write what we write is really a crime story. —Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America This extended moment of print media digitization and retreading over what counts as cultural education while assigning pedagogical status to figures from Bill Gates to Brad Troemel and beyond welcomes Paula Rabinowitz’s acute materialist history of the American paperback book, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street. In American Pulp, Rabinowitz, a longtime English professor, political activist, and feminist-materialist historical theorist, picks up from memories of her mother’s bedside table heaped with paperback books from which she borrowed and devoured Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago to relieve an early summer’s boredom. She goes on to trace that sort of intimate reading experience into a story that templates reading practice onto a market revolution that annotated American social life from the Great Depression to postwar decentralization. In this journey that interlaces retail, marginalization, and aesthetics with Marshall McLuhan’s conception of “interface,”1 Rabinowitz wisely does not attempt a sweeping chronicle of American cultural change from 1939 to 1960. That project that would echo one of her [End Page 189] more ambitious best-selling paperback authors such as James Michener rather than the pulp subjects she revitalizes. Instead, she employs a strategy more resembling that used by Walter Benjamin in his classic work, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” which she cites throughout her text. She contextualizes pulp as material (inexpensive, grainy, “pulpy” paper) in keeping with her literary studies, such as Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America in particular. American Pulp’s reading thus functions to summon the pulp novel phenomenon as a revolutionary social form rather than as a series of documents demanding analysis. Rabinowitz’s wide lens allows her to frame her discussion in terms of what the paperback revolution helped to capacitate: the popularization of public reading, which allowed for flaneur-esque private subjectivity in public spaces. This demotizing of literacy agitated both the marketplace and the practices of everyday life. Here, books became cheap, but not always easy: they allowed an accessible forum for African American voices to discuss the toll of racism on everyday, not excluding sexual, life; they provided “survival literature” (187) and some relief to proto-lesbian or simply dissatisfied women; offered trenchant commentary on the Cold War and US policy; and pushed the limits of censorship. But possibly above but including all else, they brought people to books that they most likely would not have otherwise even considered reading and to people who lived far from libraries, bookstores, or schools: after all, every town has a drugstore. Rabinowitz’s reconception of the demotic as allowing reading in previously unread spaces and across class boundaries (parsed in her title’s coda, Modernism to Main Street), proves crucial to her rethinking of cultural education as a revolutionary force that exceeds academe. Following this last point, and as is appropriate both to this volume’s title and for a history that culminates with the first graduates who benefited from the GI Bill, American Pulp asserts a place for these “pocket books” as marketing sleaze and high modernist fiction on the same carousels and often packaged in the same lurid cover art (267). This observation, illustrated by sumptuous color cover reproduction plates, lends Rabinowitz’s text some genuine humor, as in her recounting of Robert Jonas’s B-movie-style cover art for the George Garnow’s physics text The Birth and Death of the Sun, John Faulkner’s bawdy cornpone pulps on the sale rack next to his brother William’s novels, [End Page 190] and the saucy covers of Emile Zola’s Nana and Nana’s Mother, all posed to appeal to horny servicemen. The story begins by tracing the popular dime-store novel’s story to two of the its primary market innovators: the English publishing executive Allen Lane, who founded Penguin Press in 1935, and the American Robert De Graff, who launched Pocket Books...

Complete and Unabridged

Complete and Unabridged Michelle Lekas (bio) AMERICAN PULP: HOW PAPERBACKS BROUGHT MODERNISM TO MAIN STREET BY PAULA RABINOWITZ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014 And so we come to what is really what we write what we write is really a crime story. —Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America This extended moment of print media digitization and retreading over what counts as cultural education while assigning pedagogical status to figures from Bill Gates to Brad Troemel and beyond welcomes Paula Rabinowitz’s acute materialist history of the American paperback book, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street. In American Pulp, Rabinowitz, a longtime English professor, political activist, and feminist-materialist historical theorist, picks up from memories of her mother’s bedside table heaped with paperback books from which she borrowed and devoured Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago to relieve an early summer’s boredom. She goes on to trace that sort of intimate reading experience into a story that templates reading practice onto a market revolution that annotated American social life from the Great Depression to postwar decentralization. In this journey that interlaces retail, marginalization, and aesthetics with Marshall McLuhan’s conception of “interface,”1 Rabinowitz wisely does not attempt a sweeping chronicle of American cultural change from 1939 to 1960. That project that would echo one of her [End Page 189] more ambitious best-selling paperback authors such as James Michener rather than the pulp subjects she revitalizes. Instead, she employs a strategy more resembling that used by Walter Benjamin in his classic work, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” which she cites throughout her text. She contextualizes pulp as material (inexpensive, grainy, “pulpy” paper) in keeping with her literary studies, such as Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America in particular. American Pulp’s reading thus functions to summon the pulp novel phenomenon as a revolutionary social form rather than as a series of documents demanding analysis. Rabinowitz’s wide lens allows her to frame her discussion in terms of what the paperback revolution helped to capacitate: the popularization of public reading, which allowed for flaneur-esque private subjectivity in public spaces. This demotizing of literacy agitated both the marketplace and the practices of everyday life. Here, books became cheap, but not always easy: they allowed an accessible forum for African American voices to discuss the toll of racism on everyday, not excluding sexual, life; they provided “survival literature” (187) and some relief to proto-lesbian or simply dissatisfied women; offered trenchant commentary on the Cold War and US policy; and pushed the limits of censorship. But possibly above but including all else, they brought people to books that they most likely would not have otherwise even considered reading and to people who lived far from libraries, bookstores, or schools: after all, every town has a drugstore. Rabinowitz’s reconception of the demotic as allowing reading in previously unread spaces and across class boundaries (parsed in her title’s coda, Modernism to Main Street), proves crucial to her rethinking of cultural education as a revolutionary force that exceeds academe. Following this last point, and as is appropriate both to this volume’s title and for a history that culminates with the first graduates who benefited from the GI Bill, American Pulp asserts a place for these “pocket books” as marketing sleaze and high modernist fiction on the same carousels and often packaged in the same lurid cover art (267). This observation, illustrated by sumptuous color cover reproduction plates, lends Rabinowitz’s text some genuine humor, as in her recounting of Robert Jonas’s B-movie-style cover art for the George Garnow’s physics text The Birth and Death of the Sun, John Faulkner’s bawdy cornpone pulps on the sale rack next to his brother William’s novels, [End Page 190] and the saucy covers of Emile Zola’s Nana and Nana’s Mother, all posed to appeal to horny servicemen. The story begins by tracing the popular dime-store novel’s story to two of the its primary market innovators: the English publishing executive Allen Lane, who founded Penguin Press in 1935, and the American Robert De Graff, who launched Pocket Books...

The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages by Matthew X. Vernon

Reviewed by: The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages by Matthew X. Vernon Nahir I. Otaño Gracia Matthew X. Vernon. The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. xiii, 266. $89.00 cloth; $69.99 e-book. Those of us who take a critical stance toward medieval studies as a field and the ways that it perpetuates white supremacy and expels people of color from its ranks are often asked, especially by scholars from other areas, why we are trying to save medieval studies. Why not move on to other fields of study that are more inclusive? Although the answers vary among medievalists, my answer has always been that medieval literature and culture do not belong to white academia, nor do they belong to white supremacists. Perhaps this is why I found Matthew X. Vernon's The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages to be one of the most important books on medievalism and the Middle Ages to date. Vernon's insightful archival work, the strength of his arguments, and the nuance he brings to discussions of the Middle Ages are but a few of the reasons his book is a must-read in medieval studies, nineteenth- and twentieth-century medievalisms, and African-American studies. Vernon carefully integrates materials from both African-American and medieval studies, demonstrating that nineteenth- and twentieth-century African-Americans used the Middle Ages to reject their erasure from America's founding origin myths, in which the nation was often [End Page 427] presented as Anglo-Saxon in history and identity. The Black Middle Ages is divided into six chapters, and many of these chapters begin by deconstructing the ways that white writers and academics use the Middle Ages to equate the concept of the nation with a concept of whiteness. The chapters' substantive analysis, however, centers on the African-American writers and academics who create counter-narratives to this imagined white nationhood (shaped from a constructed white mythical past) by including African-Americans in national narratives of progress. It is difficult to do justice to the richness of the materials that Vernon brings to each chapter, and the plethora of African-American voices that he brings into the conversation. I can only say that if you can stop reading this review and simply read his The Black Middle Ages, then you should do so right now. The opening introductory chapter, "Reading out of Time— Genealogy, African-American Literature, and the Middle Ages," outlines the ways that political and literary figures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—including Thomas Jefferson, John H. Van Eyrie, and Walt Whitman—drew on and helped create a fantasy of the English Middle Ages as racially pure (and white). These white intellectuals imagined the Middle Ages as a framework through which to construct a narrative of national progress, a narrative that simultaneously erased the voices of those who threatened its logic. At every turn, however, African-Americans challenged these medieval myths by exposing them as false, creating a counter-narrative of the Middle Ages that laid bare the fantasy of whiteness in arguments about citizenship and American belonging (18). W. E. B. Du Bois offers a case in point, with his Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920) clearly demonstrating how the United States and Europe used the Middle Ages to create ideologies that justified colonization and imagined a community of whiteness extending far back into the past (20). Chapter 2, "Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in African-American Scholarship and Curricula," shows how African-American intellectuals used the Middle Ages to renegotiate terms of belonging by rejecting the notion of the Anglo-Saxon period as an era of racial purity, instead describing a multicultural medieval England that supported the possibility of racial mixing as a means to reach political power. Vernon shows that African-American and abolitionist writers such as Frederick Douglass; Lydia Maria Child, author of the short story "The Black Saxons" (The Liberator, 1841); and William Day, who wrote the poem "The [End Page 428] Black Saxons: A Tale of America" (1850), had a...

Make the Door Open: Groundbreaking African American Teachers of Singing

ABSTRACTThis article identifies some of the first African American professors of singing to integrate the faculties of notable music programs in the United States. The study examined archival sources on African American musicians, university records, and interviews conducted. Edna C. Williams, Thelma Waide Brown, Sylvia Olden Lee, Willis Patterson, Camilla Williams, Thomas Carey, and William Warfield were found to have made significant contributions as groundbreaking teachers, and their work is discussed. Significantly, a strong correlation exists between the timing of their appointments and the civil rights movement on college campuses at the University of Cincinnati, Indiana University, University of Michigan, and Oklahoma University. This suggests that political action played an influential role in encouraging music departments to include African American voice teachers on their faculties. The study suggests that their previous exclusion and subsequent admission to the academy after social action reinterprets higher music education as a racialized space. It simultaneously reappraises the historical significance of their careers as groundbreaking African American teachers of singing.

This scholarship is important: experiences in newspaper historical research of African-American voices on radio

This scholarship is important: experiences in newspaper historical research of African-American voices on radio

A Socio-Historical Overview of Black Youth Development in the United States for Leisure Studies

African American voices are absent from many histories of the youth development movement in the United States. This article explores contexts for African American youth development in three historical phases: 1790–1840, 1860–1877, and 1890–1920. Each phase includes a description of the family, neighborhood, education, religion, and leisure as interconnected developmental contexts. Each historical period was characterized by a dynamic of oppression and resistance through which African Americans carved out youth development opportunities for and with their children. Coming to terms with this legacy of oppression underscores the imperative to challenge injustice in the present. Further disruption of leisure history with nuanced perspectives from people of color may provide a more complete portrait of where we, as a field, have been and options for where we might go in the future.

Reading Tocqueville behind the Veil: African American Receptions ofDemocracy in America, 1835–1900

Tocqueville’s views on race and race relations as espoused in Democracy in America have received considerable scholarly attention over the past several decades. This article examines the reception of these ideas within the black counterpublic. The analysis focuses on commentary about Democracy in America in black-controlled periodicals between 1835 and 1900. The main finding is that African American intellectuals developed their own distinct interpretations of the text. This finding is significant because extant reception histories have ignored African American voices. The article also shows that African American commentators were far more critical of Tocqueville’s ideas about race and race relations before the Civil War. By the close of the nineteenth century, African American intellectuals began to elevate Democracy in America to the status of a canonical text on race relations and republicanism. Both of these findings cut against the dominant historiography of the reception of Democracy in America.

Occupied Vicksburg by Bradley R. Clampitt

Reviewed by: Occupied Vicksburg by Bradley R. Clampitt Thomas W. Robinson Occupied Vicksburg. Bradley R. Clampitt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8071-6338-2. 304 pp., cloth, $48.00. Many people know the age-old Civil War trivia that, after the fall of the city on July 4, 1863, the residents of Vicksburg did not formally celebrate Independence Day again until the early twentieth century. Much like many other stories related to the war, there is still debate as to how true the tale is. Regardless, when many people think of Vicksburg, they conjure up images of the city on the bluff falling, in tandem with Gettysburg, turning the tide of the war, and the tales of unrepentant Rebels refusing to completely accept the Confederate loss. Bradley Clampitt's book breaks new ground in seeking to understand what happened once the city was under Union control. In this fascinating work, Clampitt shows how Union occupation from the city's capture until the war's end laid the groundwork for the hostility toward "Yankees" but also how the city and surrounding area became an incubator for testing out policies regarding treatment of former slaves, former combatants, and southern civilians. Clampitt begins by discussing the Confederate surrender, but most of the ground he covers is well trodden and there is not much new here, other than the author pointing out where Union and Confederate leaders may have been self-serving in later accounts. The book really begins to tread new ground in chapter 2, in which Clampitt focuses on the first week of occupation. The officers and men of both sides intermingled, and Ulysses S. Grant spent the week feeding the Confederate army and Vicksburg's civilians while also grappling with what to do with the POWs and the influx of slaves arriving inside Union lines. Grant emerges as a man who [End Page 395] attempted to blend compassion with pragmatism in dealing with all parties. Once Grant moved on, four other Union commanders took turns setting local occupation policy, blending hard war with conciliation, and Clampitt deftly compares the strategy of each. The most intriguing portion of the book is the final two chapters, which cover Union policy toward African Americans and Confederate resistance to Union occupation. Not surprisingly, what to do with the large numbers of freedpeople occupied the thoughts of both the army and the federal government. Concurrently, Clampitt points out that the army and government were also struggling with what role the newly formed African American troops should take. In works on this era, the two issues are often dealt with separately, and yet I think Clampitt is wise to discuss them in tandem, because it is obvious that with both the former slaves and the black troops, neither the commanders in Vicksburg nor the leaders in Washington, DC, knew what to do with either group. Clampitt mines Union letters and diaries to show that the white soldiers in Vicksburg were equally unsure of what to make of their African American comrades and the refugees. The author does an admirable job of blending the stories of both the high and on-the-ground views. Sadly, though, and perhaps due to a dearth of sources, there are not that many African American voices to discuss their response to Union policies or attitudes. Confederate resistance to the Union occupation came in two forms. First, within Vicksburg, the white citizens detested the constant presence of Union troops and they did not accept emancipation or African American soldiers. White civilians reacted with disdain and incredulity when forced to comply with the orders of black soldiers. Unsurprisingly, though, Clampitt finds that in order to survive Union occupation, even the most ardent Confederates were not often openly defiant, afraid of the threat of punishment. The second form of resistance was open and flagrant as southern guerillas constantly harassed freedmen and whites who attempted to work abandoned plantations outside the city. Clampitt finds that these guerillas were the main cause of the general failure of the US Treasury Department's scheme to lease plantations. Unfortunately, Clampitt is not able to devote many pages to discuss the guerilla actions, and that...

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry

Reviewed by: The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry Gregory D. Smithers (bio) The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. By Daina Ramey Berry. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017. Pp. 261. $27.95 cloth) Daina Ramey Berry's impressive new book, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, focuses on how enslaved people "recalled and responded [End Page 521] to their monetary value throughout the course of their lives" (p. 2). Berry's elegantly written book is part intellectual history, part social history, and part of the "new economic history" (p. 3). She expertly weaves these methodological approaches together in six well-conceived chapters that follow the life cycle of enslaved people in the United States from the early republic to the outbreak of the Civil War. Berry's work is part of a large and still growing historical literature that focuses our attention on issues of gender, sexuality, and reproduction in American slavery. She joins a conversation that includes recent works by Stephanie M. H. Camp, Jennifer Morgan, Walter Johnson, Thavolia Glymph, Edward Baptist, Sasha Turner, and Katherine Paugh. These historians have deepened our understanding of the coerciveness associated with American and Caribbean slavery, with particular attention to the violence associated with slave breeding practices and the violent separation of enslaved family members. Berry's voice in this conversation is forceful, clear, and compelling. This is a powerful book. She begins before life even starts, observing that an enslaved woman's value was routinely tied to her perceived ability to reproduce future generations of enslaved laborers. For slave owners, human reproduction was a source of wealth and a reminder to enslaved people of how the master class perceived their value in monetary terms. A key driver of economic prosperity in the slave South was, therefore, the reproductive capacities of enslaved women, a point that is not new to Berry's analysis but which is nonetheless well made in this book. In the context of this cruel system, even the unborn had monetary value, as plantation owners and slave traders factored potential values into their projected profits. As she takes us through the life cycle of the enslaved, Berry reveals how the assessed value of enslaved men and women rose as they matured through childhood, into adolescence, and reached their peak values during adult years. Over the course of these years, enslaved people became acutely aware of their enslaved status, something that children became painfully conscious of when they or a parent was sold away. For young women, the terror of enslavement [End Page 522] rose precipitously during puberty. As young girls experience menstruation and became young women, rape and forced breeding shadowed them, a violent reminder of how slavery commodified black bodies and their perceived reproductive capabilities for the financial gain of the master class. The commodification of black bodies did not only involve rape and coercive forms of reproduction; an enslaved person's value, while declining during their elderly years, continued to have financial value after death. The "postmortem commodification" of black bodies has gained growing scholarly attention in recent years (pp. 93, 99). Berry's analysis of grave robbing practices and the "domestic cadaver trade" is, therefore, a reminder of how medical schools profited and accumulated knowledge from the bodies of recently deceased enslaved people (p. 154). The Price for Their Pound of Flesh makes an important contribution to our historical understanding of the commodification of black bodies. Berry's analysis deserves a wide audience. Readers will find her approach to this topic engaging, and her weaving of African American voices into her narrative enlightening. However, some will be left wanting deeper dives into the economics of enslavement, while others will lament a missed opportunity to discuss the historical significance of "breeding" and the language associated with it ("bucks" and "wenches") with the level of detail this topic deserves. Indeed, basing such analysis on a single email exchange with another historian will strike some readers as a failure to adequately ground this aspect of...