Making Black Los Angeles

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marne L. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
American Founding ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

Black Los Angeles started small. The first census of the newly formed Los Angeles County in 1850 recorded only twelve Americans of African descent alongside a population of more than 3,500 Anglo Americans. Over the following seventy years, however, the African American founding families of Los Angeles forged a vibrant community within the increasingly segregated and stratified city. In this book, historian Marne L. Campbell examines the intersections of race, class, and gender to produce a social history of community formation and cultural expression in Los Angeles. Expanding on the traditional narrative of middle-class uplift, Campbell demonstrates that the black working class, largely through the efforts of women, fought to secure their own economic and social freedom by forging communal bonds with black elites and other communities of color. This women-led, black working-class agency and cross-racial community building, Campbell argues, was markedly more successful in Los Angeles than in any other region in the country. Drawing from an extensive database of all African American households between 1850 and 1910, Campbell vividly tells the story of how middle-class African Americans were able to live, work, and establish a community of their own in the growing city of Los Angeles.

Black Mayors and Black Progress

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Adam Davies
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
American City ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Black Mayors ◽  
National Economic

This chapter assesses how African Americans fared under black political leadership during the 1970s. After first exploring the upsurge in the number of black elected officials from the mid-1960s onward, the chapter turns to developments in Los Angeles and Atlanta, cities that in 1973 both elected their first black mayor (Tom Bradley and Maynard Jackson, respectively). An in-depth analysis of Bradley and Jackson's campaigns and first two terms in office focuses on the various factors that shaped their respective political philosophies and mayoralties. Confronted by broader national economic problems, and with limited city resources at their disposal, both Bradley and Jackson deferred to white downtown business interests and pursued pro-growth policies that ultimately reinforced the disadvantages facing their poor and working-class black constituents. For the black middle class and elite in both cities, however, African American city leadership proved to be a wellspring of opportunity.

Social History in Greece: New Perspectives

2008 ◽  
Vol 34-35 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 101-130
Author(s):  
Yannis Yannitsiotis
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Political System ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Recent Period ◽  
Class A ◽  
Economic Phenomenon ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Greek Historiography ◽  
And Gender

This article focuses on the evolution of Greek historiography since the 1970s, with an emphasis on issues of class and gender. It is argued that, in the last decades, Greek historiography has been liberated from traditional nationalistic narratives in favor of new intellectual perspectives dealing with social history and the history of “society.” During the 1970s and 1980s, the concept of class—a fundamental concern of social history in European historiography—did not find much room in Greek historiography. Debates about the socioeconomic and political system in modern Greece focused on the importance of immobile political and economic structures as main barriers to modernization and Europeanization. The 1990s were marked by the renewal of the study of the “social,” articulated around two main methodological and theoretical axes, signaling the shift from structures to agency. The first was the conceptualization of class as both a cultural and economic phenomenon. The second was the introduction of gender. The recent period is characterized by the proliferation of studies that conceptualize the “social” through the notion of culture, evoking the historical construction of human experience and talking about the unstable, malleable, and ever changing content of human identities. Cultural historians examine class, gender, ethnicity, and race in their interrelation and treat these layers of identity as processes in the making and not as coherent and consolidated systems of reference.

The Timothy 0. Webster Papers and the Pearce Civil War Collection: Using Civil War Military Collections for Women's History

Collections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-381
Author(s):  
Julie L. Holcomb
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
Final Part ◽  
American Women ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civil War Era

Working-class and rural white women and free and enslaved African American women left few material traces, making it difficult for scholars to document their experience of the Civil War. This three-part article uses the story of the Timothy O. Webster Papers, which is part of the Pearce Civil War Collection at Navarro College in Corsi-cana, Texas, to examine the possibilities and limitations of recovering women's experience of the war from military collections. The first part examines the practice of collecting Civil War documents, the history of the Pearce Civil War Collection, and the collection and preservation of the Webster letters. In the second part, I begin to reconstruct Harriet's story using letters from the Webster Papers. The final part returns to the archive to consider how archivists might aid scholars in recovering the story of Civil War-era women from military collections.

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