White American Society Research Articles

A Microcosm of American Exceptionalism: Eigth-Rocks in Ruby as Chosen People in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

American exceptionalism, which has been supposed to have a divine historiography, accentuates and represents various aspects of Americanness that manifest destiny and strong challenges. Its sense of independence and moral superiority stems from the mythos that prioritizes its uniqueness and responsibility as part of its formation process. This ideology, in particular, suggests that the prior history of these people is pointed toward the “New World” in order to build and glamorize their distinctive future. This study offers an overview of the connection between the ideology of American exceptionalism and the 8-rock families, as chosen people, in Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise. Morrison, in Paradise, portrays a black immigration movement that demands a long-term imperial settlement modeled by white American society. Facing the failure of Reconstruction, her characters strive to maintain their freedom and independence through self-imposed, forceful segregation. The assumption that grounds the study, therefore, is that the 8-rock families, the founders of Ruby Town, pattern the ideological formation of American exceptionalism, despite their coal-black skin color and inferior status in cultural paradigms, by adopting a policy of racial segregation. The solidification, as in the American case, implies that self-proclaimed New Founders are responsible for building an independent and superior community that embraces the doctrines of disenfranchisement and racism in America. In addressing this reciprocity and its outcomes, Morrison has confirmed that just like good things, discrimination and ideas of superiority are learned, and Ruby residents have learned to use their skin color as a tool of domination.

Confrontation and reconcilement in contemporary native american theater

Contemporary Native American theater consists of a long list of plays which normally include indigenous and mixed-blood characters who often find themselves living between two worlds, that is, Native culture and white American society. Therefore, it is common to find a significant confrontation and conflict between the two cultures, which is usually solved at the end of the plays with the characters’ reconcilement or synthesis between their Native heritage and the white domineering society. In this way, Native Americans can ensure their Native cultural existence and survival whilst simultaneously adapting to the changes and customs required by white American society.

The History of Racism in America

This research assumes that prejudice and racism is a malady that is inherited in the white American society... It is mirrored throughout many literary works written by American, Latin, African and Asian writers. The study sakes to introduce epitomized reconnaissance and systematize the history of racism and racial discrimination in the United States from the initial years of its constitution to its recent history in light of the texts and events of August Wilson's play " Fences" and applying critical race theory. Racism is the persecution ,oppression, dehumanizing ,underestimating and subjection of human beings on the basis of their social construction , colour ,ethnicity and race .It may be acted in different shapes including abuses ,beliefs ,behaviours and verbal attacks against a group of minority .Racism also involves oppressive and hostile obstacles that prevent people from maintaining their dignity and being equal to other groups of superiority due to the national origin or colour skin of this minority .This studies reveals the first inceptions of racism in the United States since the first slave was brought up to America from Africa .This study introduces first an s introduction on racism in general and in America in particular then and explains the most basic forms of racism in America then it introduces chronologically the stages and development of racism in America as a policy of its successive governments and a strategy of its white racial citizens all over the short history of this Nation then it presents the racism in America in the16th, 17th century ,18th century,19th century, and finally in the 20th century. At the end the study tamps with a brief conclusion of the destructive consequences and effects of racism on the human beings and that race is imposed and invented basically by white people.

COLORISM IN TONI MORRISONS GOD HELP THE CHILD

The present paper has been specifically designed to scrutinize the aspect of colorism in Toni Morrisons well acclaimed novel God Help the Child. African American literature is an academic body of writing produced by African descendants residing in America. The literary canon of African- American literature emerged in late part of 18th century in oral forms like sermon, gospel, music, jazz, blues and spirituals. African American writers have deliberately expressed their painful agony, racial segregation, social injustice and ill treatment which they tolerated in white American society. Toni Morrison was a prolific female novelist of African-American literary writing. Morrisons eleventh novel God Help the Child prominently deals with colorism, racism and child abuse. Conceptually, the term Colorism was coined by Alice Walker to address the superiority of lighter or white skin over the dark. Colorism has its genetic roots in racism because without racism the standardization of color conflict would not be exist. The novel unfolds the story of Bride, also known as Lula Ann who is born with dark black color. She receives ill treatment by her own parents and gets negative rejection because of having black skin. Brides dark color ruins her golden childhood period. Louis Bridewell rejects Bride from accepting as his baby. Similarly, Sweetness breeds Bride with harsh treatment and cruelty. The research study will primarily focus on to address the color conflict faced by child protagonist Lula Ann.

Challenging social standards

Prior to the evolution of the Black Arts Movement, the concept of “beauty” in the United States relied on specific standards, among which were being white and having blue eyes. However, this narrow definition changed over time as sociopolitical factors affected such concepts. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Black Arts Movement affected and changed the concept of beauty among Black Americans. African Americans stood not against white individuals but against everything that was unjust toward them in white American society. As a result, the literary works created by Black writers had to be built on either a political or an aesthetic framework. This paper examines the standards of beauty in The Bluest Eye and discusses the novel’s ideological tone and its references to the Blues, Black aesthetics and Black feminism. The novel was published in the middle of the Black Arts Movement era, and it satisfies the Black Art Movement’s major concern, which is how the work of art can help African Americans live a better life. Morrison’s novel highlights the concept of beauty at the time and how to change it among Black Americans.

The Native American dream in Sherman Alexie's short story “One Good Man”

The purpose of this article is to discuss the idea of an Indian identity and the Native American Dream in Sherman Alexie’s short story “One Good Man.” In this story, Alexie introduces the idea of the Indian constructed by the White Americans and attempts through his characters to redefine that concept by deconstructing all the different stereotypes created by the White American society. In order to do this, he also introduces the idea of the American Dream that he calls the “Native American Dream” to express the social inequality and hopeless existence of the Indian community always immersed in an ironic and comic discourse. In this sense, Alexie proposes a new definition of the Indian identity looking back to culture, tradition and the space of the reservation. He creates in his fiction a space of contestation and resistance opening a new voice for the Native American identity.

Women Talking Business: Domestic Settings for Economic Discourses in The Squatter and the Don

Women Talking Business:Domestic Settings for Economic Discourses in The Squatter and the Don Mike Lemon (bio) María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don (1885) has proven a polarizing text for twenty-first century readers. Ruiz de Burton calls attention to illegal land seizures, frustrated economic development, and the subsuming of Californio land and culture within an Anglo-American nationalist paradigm. However, she simultaneously condemns mid-nineteenth-century racial hierarchies and relies on those very structures to argue the Alamar family's position within white American society.1 Additionally, the author's use of multiple popular nineteenth-century genres may distance readers. Literary scholars have identified within The Squatter and the Don historical romance, sentimentalism and melodrama, and realism, among many others.2 The novel's multiple genres warrant a complex reading approach; overlapping generic frameworks also suggest Ruiz de Burton's sophisticated rhetorical strategies for presenting the novel's pressing political and economic questions. To this point, however, scholars have neglected how Ruiz de Burton constructs physical and social spaces to facilitate conversations regarding business. While Marissa K. Lopez has written an excellent analysis on railroads in the author's [End Page 359] work, the use of domestic spaces as transgressive sites also deserves sustained attention.3 In analyzing how The Squatter and the Don uses physically constructed space, we can see that where Ruiz de Burton locates economic discourse allows the author to highlight exclusionary tactics that remove women from conversations about American economic affairs. The novel contains two economic narratives that were contemporary concerns. Furthermore, Ruiz de Burton demonstrate the plotlines' interconnected nature by using romantic storylines to entangle her principal families—the Alamares, Darrells, and Mechlins. The first plot functions as a composite account of illegal settlements on Mexican American lands. It details how William Darrell and other Anglo-American squatters seize and despoil the Alamar rancho. As the courts settle the contested land-claims, squatters shoot the family's cattle, depriving them of capital. Ruiz de Burton attempts to resolve this narrative through the marriage of Mercedes Alamar and Clarence Darrell; moreover, Clarence purchases the rancho to provide the Alamares capital.4 The second narrative centers on the proposed Texas Pacific Railroad that would have connected San Diego to the Mexican Gulf. Because they want to deter competition, the Central Pacific Railroad's so-called Big Four—men who fundamentally shaped California's economic future—frustrate the Texas Pacific's completion.5 The railroad's collapse necessitates Clarence, Mercedes, and the extended Alamar family to relocate to San Francisco. Even though male characters largely preclude women from business discussions, I argue that Ruiz de Burton intentionally has the novel's two matriarchs—Mrs. Mary Darrell and Doña Josefa Alamar—use their homes to invite themselves or become invited into these economic narratives. After framing domestic space historically, I track the author's gendered emphasis through three locations: the Darrells' homes, the Alamar daughters' placement in elite Eastern [End Page 360] venues, and Doña Josefa's San Francisco home. Because the story opens with Mrs. Mary Darrell admonishing her husband while they sit in their shared sitting room, the author emphasizes female voices in domestic spaces. During this and other moments within the land-claim plot, Mrs. Darrell actively drives the narrative action, instructing her affluent son Clarence to buy the land rather than pre-empt—that is, to prematurely settle on disputed Mexican land claims.6 Her climatic entrance into the room that the family later calls the "colony"—a domestic space appropriated by her husband—signals her reinsertion within the land-ownership plotline. That her presence discomforts the male audience demonstrates the author's ironic stance on excluding women from business matters. In the middle of the novel, the author curiously emphasizes the need for the female voice through its absence. During the wedding party chapters, Ruiz de Burton relocates two Alamar daughters on an extended visit to the eastern American seaboard. Even though these chapters do not overtly involve either economic plotline, they signal how gardens and trains actively remove the younger women from talking business. Ruiz de Burton closes the main narrative by returning her...

Perception, visibility and invisibility in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

This study analyses three essential motifs which are perception, visibility and invisibility and how their relationships determine and legislate the interracial relationships between whites and blacks in Ralph Ellison’s novel, INVISIBLE MAN. Through insightful analysis, this paper aims to show how from a visible status in existence, the perception that white people have about black people transforms this visibility into an invisible status both in human existence and society and namely in the white American society. And also it aims to clear out how this metamorphosis of black people from visibility to invisibility at first based on white people's perception, is principally based and due to their color of skin, and to another “Blackness” of Black people or African-Americans color of skin. Creating a real problem of existence and identity for black people through the question: “do I exist?”, the refusal of such perception and invisibility constructed by racism, stereotypes, prejudices and the concept of white people superiority will oblige black people to struggle for their visibility, their true existence, their identity and recognition by white people as an equal human being.

The New Diaspora and the Transformation of America in Bharati Mukherjee's <i>Jasmine (1989)</i>

The current research at stake on the notions of new diaspora, immigration, and the study of feminist postcolonialism no longer hold the essential homogenized stereotype of the third world victimized immigrant women but rather consider these women as agents of change and transformation who are capable of subverting traditional gendered roles both in their native lands and America. Therefore, this essay argues that Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (1989) presents a strong immigrant female heroine who resists conscious and unconscious marginalization by mainstream white American society and who also transforms the lives of some of the Americans with whom she interacts while in America rather than a female character who is transformed by America and forced to shuttle between identities. Accordingly, despite the many names that Jasmine’s heroine is known by and that supposedly refer to the different identities she has shuttled between, this essay claims that only one identity of the heroine exists. This identity is presented through a third dimensional level that represents her true, single, and growing identity, through which she has shuttled only on a naming level. The essay first discusses how the heroine presents herself in a third dimensional level in the midst of the different names given to her. Then it investigates the reasons that have led the heroine to accept the different names assigned to her. Finally, it investigates from a feminist perspective, how the heroine is able to partially transform the lives of some of the American men with whom she interacts in America.

The Carlisle School’s Impact on Indian Identity

Before the Gilded Age, little to no effort was put forth to educate the Indians in the United States. The only interaction prior to this time was in battle over land or resource rights. Many Americans even felt Indians were incapable of learning how to be civilized. At least one American, however, did not ascribe to this belief. Richard Henry Pratt, an army officer, had his first experience with Indians in 1867. He believed they were capable of great things, and he wanted to enrich their lives via schooling. However, his aim was to take Native American children from their reservations and attempt to assimilate them into “normal” white American society. Pratt and his industrial school model came to fruition in the late 19th century. The effects of this system were reprehensible, leaving its students with no culture to call their own. This outcome has carried over into tribes’ identities even to the present day.

International Inherence to Africa’s Ebola Crisis

This study is examining the racism in American society, and how the discussion of race has expanded to the issue of immigration. It highlights some of the current trends in public opinion to view Africa as a disease stricken nation and to further distant the country from the crisis’s of disease caused by poverty that affect many African nations. This current trend among White American society includes arguments to the need of protecting the border against current levels of ethnic migration from non-European countries. Thus, advocating and disallowing an increase of modern day African immigrants to study in the United States or be allowed citizenship because of the public racist views. The study goes on to argue that new forms of racism have evolved passed old arguments and become more hidden beyond what is seen as socially unacceptable. For this reason, now White Americans can hold to strong anti-immigration policy and disallowing educational, political and social opportunities towards modern African immigrants and others from different parts of the world. This creates and furthers a system of race that excludes the opportunities allowed within American society towards everyday White Americans, regardless of their past ancestry.

Fretting over Federalism: Reexamining Allegorical Indian Architecture in William Bartram's Travels

William Bartram (1739–1823), early America's preeminent naturalist, was a worrier. He was a pacifist during the most violent years of the American Revolution; he was quiet, even private, in a family and society that valued public oratory and theatricality. William's father, John Bartram (1699–1777), was a friend to the luminaries of the Revolution and a founder of the American Philosophical Society. But John couldn't have been more different from, nor more disappointed in, his son. Of course, their interest in plants and nature was a deep similarity: John had been the leading horticulturalist of the previous generation. But the contrast of their natures, and their views on one vexing social group of the time—American Indians—was striking. John's father had been killed by Native Americans in the elder Bartram's youth, and John harbored an unrelenting grudge throughout his life, thinking of Indians as lazy, cruel savages (Slaughter xvii, 23). In contrast, William, in his time spent on the southern frontier in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, likely admired the nations of Native Americans he found in the southern regions more than any other white colonist in his time.1 William nonetheless believed that Native American cultures would have trouble remaining autonomous entities, and might never truly blend with white American society. If Native Americans would never become part of the American body politic due to whites' “injustice & avarice,” William indirectly advocates that Indians' governmental structures could still be included as part of the deeper American political lineage (Bartram, “Some Hints” 367).

Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier

Creeks and Southerners examines the families created by the hundreds of intermarriages between Creek women and European American men in the southeastern United States during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Called Indian countrymen at the time, these intermarried white men moved into their wives' villages in what is now Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. By doing so, they obtained new homes, familial obligations, occupations, and identities. At the same time, however, they maintained many of their ties to white American society and as a result entered the historical record in large numbers. Creeks and Southerners studies the ways in which many children of these relationships lived both as Creek Indians and white Southerners. By carefully altering their physical appearances, choosing appropriate clothing, learning multiple languages, embracing maternal and paternal kinsmen and kinswomen, and balancing their loyalties, the children of intermarriages found ways to bridge what seemed to be an unbridgeable divide. Many became prominent Creek political leaders and warriors, played central roles in the lucrative deerskin trade, built inns and taverns to cater to the needs of European American travelers, frequently moved between colonial American and Native communities, and served both European American and Creek officials as interpreters, assistants, and travel escorts. The fortunes of these bicultural children reflect the changing nature of Creek-white relations, which became less flexible and increasingly contentious throughout the nineteenth century as both Creeks and Americans accepted a more rigid biological concept of race, forcing their bicultural children to choose between identities.

A Consummation Devoutly to Be Wished For

Anne Sarah Rubin. A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 352 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Here is a book likely to be set upon by the slings and arrows of modern historiography. "[C]ontrary to what we have thought," Anne Sarah Rubin writes in introducing A Shattered Nation, "the construction or creation of Confederate nationalism was not a difficult problem. The speed with which white Southerners, many of them staunch Unionists through the election of 1860, shed their American identity and picked up a sense of themselves as Confederates was startling" (p. 1). With that Rubin enters a debate studded with redoubts and entrenchments. A modern survey of the field might begin with Emory M. Thomas: "For four brief years Southerners took charge of their own destiny. In doing so they tested their institutions and sacred cows, found them wanting, and redefined them." Not so, comes the retort from Drew Gilpin Faust: Southern women tired of the war and eventually "undermined both objective and ideological foundations for the Confederate war effort; they directly subverted the South's military and economic effectiveness as well as civilian morale." Exactly right, say the authors of Why the Confederacy Lost the Civil War: "In basic terms, the Confederates lacked a feeling of oneness, that almost mystical sense of nationalism. They lacked a consensus on why they fought or what they stood for. The Confederate nation was created on paper, not in the hearts and minds of its would-be citizens." Wrong, says Gary W. Gallagher: "The Confederate populace waged a determined struggle for independence. No other segment of white American society has persisted in any endeavor so destructive of human and physical resources."1 Such has been the way with Confederate nationalism. The argument has long since lost subtlety and nuance: to the blunting of professional categorization; to the infighting between social historians and military ones; to—if we are to be honest—ideological positioning on the memory, legacy, and importance of the Confederate experience. None are more aware of the latter than those who have been speaking daggers. "Any historian who argues that the [End Page 366] Confederate people demonstrated robust devotion to their slave-based republic, possessed feelings of national community, and sacrificed more than any other segment of white society in United States history," Gallagher has written, "runs the risk of being labeled a neo-Confederate."2 A Shattered Nation is first and foremost an exploration of Confederate identity, not primarily an argument for the wartime strength of Confederate nationalism. Unfortunately, given the nature of the current debate, more than a few readers will invert or confuse those priorities for their own—without, one hopes, accusing Rubin of a neo-Confederate sensibility. There is none of that here, even as Rubin attempts to go beyond the traditional argument to explore the contours of what it meant to be Confederate: what forces shaped identity, challenged it, and were redefined in the crucible of the war and its aftermath. Rubin is not the first modern historian to take Confederate identity on its own terms—years ago Thomas attempted to develop a useable Confederate past—but she is the first one to offer a deepening of what heretofore have been exploratory or piecemeal explanations of it. Indeed A Shattered Nation is in some ways a synthesis of concepts and arguments and forces that to this point have been loosely or even tangentially applied to Confederate nationalism. David Potter and other theorists of nationalism and identity—Alon Confino, Richard Handler, and Benedict Anderson among others—provide her framework; through diligent and often imaginative research in primary sources, Rubin herself broadens our awareness of the various ways that identity was disseminated. Songs, newspapers, sermons, pamphlets, and schoolbooks created a public culture that was reflected and reinforced in more intimate, personal sources such as diaries and letters. "Confederates sustained their nationalism in...

The Claiming of Christ: Native American Postcolonial Discourses

On a night of the full moon in November 1987, at the beginning of the Spirit Dancing Season, an important historical event took place. At an ancient Indian burial ground, located in Seattle, Washington, Jewell Praying Wolf James, a Lummi Indian, read from a document produced by several local churches in the community. It was a public declaration, today known as the Apology. The document apologized to Indian people for the signatory churches' long standing participation in the destruction of traditional Indian ceremonies and for not coming to the aid of Native Americans when they were victimized by unfair federal policies and practices. The churches pleaded for forgiveness. The Apology was reaffirmed a year later in a ceremony of Natives and non-Natives, Christians and non-Christians. Since its creation the Apology has been translated into other languages, read at tribal gatherings, distributed to Native Brazilians in the Amazon jungle and to the Kwanyama Aboriginal Council in Australia, and supported by a national ecumenical church body. The Bishops' Apology emerged from the Church Council of Greater Seattle. The Council is a broad-based ecumenical organization of Catholics and Protestants, representing twenty denominations and more than 300 congregations. It has sponsored more than thirty task forces, including the Native American Task Force. An ally of Native peoples in the Pacific Northwest since the fish-ins in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Council's Task Force is a group of church-related Indians and non-Indians who work to affirm Native people's historical and contemporary contributions to American society; defend Indian treaty rights and advocate for Native American issues; support Native Americans' efforts to protect traditional religious practices; sensitize non-Natives regarding Native American issues; foster mutual respect between Indians and non-Indians; and stimulate and encourage worthwhile projects of mutual benefit to both Native and non-Native communities (Church Council). The Council's carefully drafted Bishop's Apology is one of its many accomplishments. Since the Apology the Council has sustained its membership and continues to work successfully on Native issues. My interest in Native Americans and Christianity came from this newly created relationship between churches and Native people. I was intrigued by the fact the Christian churches which nearly destroyed Native cultures began to support and acknowledge the importance of Native lives and cultures. After the Apology, I began to wonder about the extent of the amicable experiences between Native people and Christianity. Hence, this study became a personal journey for me and an examination of the meeting places of Christianity and Native life, and an evaluation of points of strength rather than of weakness. In Native Christian writings, and through the lens of postcoloniality, Christianity is presented as a means to survival and as a vehicle of adaptation, reflecting considered choices which do not necessarily imply rejection of Native spirituality or Indianness. Prior to contact Native people had their own cultural and religious systems sustained their physical and spiritual well-being for centuries. However, with the arrival of European colonizers came the suppression and prohibition of traditional Native religious practices. In an attempt to civilize the Indians the colonizers sought to undermine traditional ways of worship. Europeans challenged the authority of religious leaders and banned Native worship, penalizing and/or jailing those who continued their traditional ways (Axtell 227-29). Religious organizations agreed that instruction in Christianity was fundamental in the education of Indian youth. To fit Indians for citizenship in a Christian Nation, it was imperative religious training precede or parallel the industrial and literary learning was intended to prepare pupils of the tribes for full participation in white American Society (Churches 161). …

An Examination of a Culturally Sensitive University Career Center: Outreach, Services, and Evaluation

The demographic composition in the United States has changed considerably in the past few decades. The size of racial/ethnic minority populations is expected to continue to grow substantially into the next millennium due to high immigration rates and birth rates within these groups. In particular, the growth rate among Hispanics and Asian Americans is expected to be considerable. At the same time, the projected increase of European Americans is small in comparison to other groups. By the year 2050, the demographic composition is expected to shift from a predominantly White American society to one in which the total number of racial/ethnic minorities actually out number European Americans (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1992). This marks a significant change in the look of our society: one that points to diversification and difference. These changing demographics are being mirrored on university and college campuses, as the number of racial and ethnic minority student enrollment has been on the rise. Since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's, there has been a greater awareness of the experiences of people of color in our society. In addition, the Civil Rights movement led to the proliferation of other movements from oppressed groups in our society, namely, women and sexual orientation minorities. Overall, these have led to an increased awareness of contextual factors which affect certain individuals in our society. On university campuses, this has been reflected in part by the formation of special interest groups (i.e., Gay,

An Examination of a Culturally Sensitive University Career Center: Outreach, Services, and Evaluation.

The demographic composition in the United States has changed considerably in the past few decades. The size of racial/ethnic minority populations is expected to continue to grow substantially into the next millennium due to high immigration rates and birth rates within these groups. In particular, the growth rate among Hispanics and Asian Americans is expected to be considerable. At the same time, the projected increase of European Americans is small in comparison to other groups. By the year 2050, the demographic composition is expected to shift from a predominantly White American society to one in which the total number of racial/ethnic minorities actually out number European Americans (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1992). This marks a significant change in the look of our society: one that points to diversification and difference. These changing demographics are being mirrored on university and college campuses, as the number of racial and ethnic minority student enrollment has been on the rise. Since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's, there has been a greater awareness of the experiences of people of color in our society. In addition, the Civil Rights movement led to the proliferation of other movements from oppressed groups in our society, namely, women and sexual orientation minorities. Overall, these have led to an increased awareness of contextual factors which affect certain individuals in our society. On university campuses, this has been reflected in part by the formation of special interest groups (i.e., Gay,

American Exceptionalism? U.S. Working-Class Formation in an International Context: Commonwealth Fund Conference, 1995

ing labor historians and others for two days of extremely lively discussion. Several of the papers took on contentious issues that provoked spirited debate; it is a perhaps a measure of how irritating and yet influential the concept of exceptionalism still is that many of the points raised remained unresolved at the end of the conference. Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh kicked off the proceedings with their paper Notes on The Tempest and the Origins of Atlantic Capital ism, in which they explored the ways that working-class identity and consciousness were articulated both within the play and in the larger At lantic world. Their detailed and teasing analysis of Shakespeare's text underscored the potential value of shifting the conventional frame of working-class history back a century or two. Peter Thompson, using the same time scale for his paper on the moral economy of the Atlantic world, in echoing E. P. Thompson's famous phrase looked at some exam ples of sailors who had faced maritime famine?most notably those instances in which sailors had been compelled to eat their crewmates for survival. David Roediger and James Barrett (Inbetween Peoples: Race, Na tionality and the New Immigrant Working-Class) argued that in order to imbue the study of race and racism with significance, a meaningful chrono logical context is necessary. Theirs was a lengthy and wide-reaching look at the implications and effects on immigrants of their racial identity and cul tural assimilation into white American society. Following hot on their heels, James Grossman took this a step further in his paper 'Social Bur den' or Amiable Peasantry': Constructing a Place for Black Southerners and made it clear that the in question here concerned geography far less than the construction (by white American society) of a social loca tion or a place within society, which would depend on African Americans' acceptance of that place and the concomitant status it would bestow upon them. In her paper Present at the Creation: Working-Class Catholics in the United Leslie Woodcock Tentler sought to correct the so-called failure of labor historians to attend to religion, particularly as positive force in working-class life. Pointing out that while Protestants have always constituted a substantial majority in the United States, the working class

"Classical Jazz" and the Black Arts Movement

period between 1960 and 1970 represents an era of important and extraordinary cultural change in United States. Longstanding issues of relationship of ethnic vernacular to mainstream, and that of American mainstream to European high art, came into focus in these years in a particularly contentious yet artistically fruitful manner. If one recalls artists such as John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Eric Dolphy, it is clear that jazz musicians were never before so technically proficient on their instruments or in their mastery of European traditions. On other hand, these artists consciously intended to foreground non-European musical influences as well as Afrocentric and folkloristic elements of jazz. At same time, poets and theorists of Black Arts Movement (including Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and Askia Muhammad Toure) were making a very popular case for an aesthetic conceived as openly oppositional to both European and white American culture. roots of Black Arts Movement are easily traced to Harlem Renaissance of 1920s. That earlier movement first attempt by American artists to produce work consciously grounded in their folk heritage and to utilize that work for social advancement of race. For Larry Neal, Harlem Renaissance was essentially a failure. It did not address itself to mythology and lifestyles of black community (78). This statement seems puzzling today, but its meaning crystal clear in 1968 and pointed to a political philosophy underlying aesthetic discriminations. Whereas leaders of Harlem Renaissance hoped to prove cultural worthiness of Americans byy demonstrating their aptitude for cultivation, development, and progress in terms understood by white American society, leaders of Black Arts Movement hoped to celebrate a kind of proletarian and vaguely African culture. Like Zora Neale Hurston's appreciation of folk, Black Arts Movement sought to identify a certain intrinsic beauty and vitality in American authenticity. This view particularly affected way that Black Arts Movement writers dealt with jazz. In an important essay titled Jazz and White Critic (1963), Amiri Baraka declared: In jazz criticism, no reliance on European tradition or theory will help at all. Negro music, like Negro himself, is strictly an American phenomenon, and we have got to set up standards of judgment and aesthetic excellence that depend on our native knowledge and understanding of underlying philosophies and local cultural references that produced blues and jazz in order to produce valid critical writing or commentary about it. (186) By 1966, Baraka had framed message much more concisely: The music you hear (?) is an invention of Black lives (Black Music 176). What at stake, of course, a cultural hierarchy explicit in American society. As a visiting student once expressed it, They love your music - but they don't love you. Black Arts Movement asked, basically, what's love got to do with it? In area of music, prevailing cultural hierarchy assigns value to European symphonic tradition at expense of indigenous American musical conventions. Compared to jazz, classical music has been assigned a higher cultural value which - of course - has very little to do with music per se. In 1948 Sidney Finkelstein noted that the man who listens to jazz, whether New Orleans or bebop, is hearing as unstandardized a set of musical scales and combinations of scales as is he who listens to Copeland or Ives. Finkelstein logically concluded that the artificial distinction between 'classical' and 'popular' has been forced upon our times by circumstance that production of both ... has become a matter for financial investment instead of art (9). There is, however, a definite political rationale involved that touches on aesthetic questions. …

Land, Power, and Reputation: The Cultural Dimension of Politics in the Ohio Country

H HISTORIANS of the Northwest Territory have long recognized that the interaction of settlers from throughout the eastern United States was central to the formation of the territory's social character. Indeed, white American society in the territory-which in the I790s was limited largely to the river valleys of the Ohio Countryconsisted of migrants from regions as culturally distinct as New England and Virginia. Observers from Crevecoeur to Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick have argued that the demands of frontier life quickly dissolved these distinctions into a more or less homogeneous society. An examination of the cultural dimension of territorial politics suggests, however, that the settlement of the Ohio Country intensified rather than weakened cultural differences.1 Contemporary travelers noted a sequence of quite discrete settlements along the Ohio and up its tributaries. From east to west, moving