Living History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Broad Spectrum ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Life Story ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Living History ◽  
Short Life ◽  
White House ◽  
Recorded Sound ◽  
Excellent Work

Stephen Smith wants you to hear history. He’s made excellent work across a broad spectrum. He produced an aural portrait of the playwright August Wilson; he uncovered war crimes in Kosovo. Some of his best docs, and those he most loves to make, explore twentieth-century history. Stephen traces the short life story of recorded sound, this magic we take for granted. And through his own pieces, like “Song Catcher, Frances Densmore of Red Wing”; “Remembering Jim Crow”; and “White House Tapes: The President Calling,” Stephen shows how radio can blast us into another time, “past the rope-line of textbook history.”

Uncontrollable Blackness

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas J. Flowe
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Lawful Conduct ◽  
The Relationship

Early twentieth-century African American men in northern urban centers like New York faced economic isolation, segregation, a biased criminal justice system, and overt racial attacks by police and citizens. In this book, Douglas J. Flowe interrogates the meaning of crime and violence in the lives of these men, whose lawful conduct itself was often surveilled and criminalized, by focusing on what their actions and behaviors represented to them. He narrates the stories of men who sought profits in underground markets, protected themselves when law enforcement failed to do so, and exerted control over public, commercial, and domestic spaces through force in a city that denied their claims to citizenship and manhood. Flowe furthermore traces how the features of urban Jim Crow and the efforts of civic and progressive leaders to restrict their autonomy ultimately produced the circumstances under which illegality became a form of resistance.Drawing from voluminous prison and arrest records, trial transcripts, personal letters and documents, and investigative reports, Flowe opens up new ways of understanding the black struggle for freedom in the twentieth century. By uncovering the relationship between the fight for civil rights, black constructions of masculinity, and lawlessness, he offers a stirring account of how working-class black men employed extralegal methods to address racial injustice.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Taira Field
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Image Fit ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Back To Africa

“Grandpa went back to Africa with Garvey,” my grandmother recalled. I carried this precious refrain into the archives with me. In Garvey’s place, I found Chief Sam, in the black and Indian borderlands of Oklahoma. While the Great Migration had largely displaced the preceding history of black rural emigration at the nadir, so had Garveyism displaced descendants’ memories of the Chief Sam movement. Meanwhile, scholars portrayed the movement as the product of a single charismatic charlatan and his nameless, faceless followers. Relying almost exclusively on U.S. sources and the memories of those “left behind” in an economically depressed and politically repressed Jim Crow Oklahoma, the only book-length study of the movement, written in the 1950s, argued that the Chief Sam movement illustrated “the desperate hopes of an utterly desperate group of people.” The image fit easily with twentieth-century American tropes of black victimhood and criminality....

scholarly journals Beyond the Psychological Wage: Du Bois on White Dominion

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ella Myers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The Universe

W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet of Du Bois’s account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, “modern” whiteness appears as a proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward “darker peoples” in particular. This “title to the universe” is part of chattel slavery’s uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of “propertized human life” endures as a racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this “title” is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent “colonial aggrandizement” worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely, domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the “wage” but is not reducible to it.

Progress in the formalisation of the Anthropocene GSSP

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Turner ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Living History ◽  
Max Planck ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Depositional Settings ◽  
Quaternary Stratigraphy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Collaborative Exploration

<p>The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) has assembled scientific teams to analyse stratigraphic successions, as potential stratotypes, in order to facilitate a formal submission to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. The aim is to seek ratification of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch starting in the mid-twentieth century. Stratigraphic records, including a range of novel materials, geochemical and biological signals spanning the mid-twentieth century interval of unprecedented human activity and industrialisation, are being gathered by international teams of scientists, working on eleven contrasting depositional settings from around the planet. Interwoven with this scientific process to define a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), from which a specific year for the onset of the Anthropocene will be established, is a decades long collaborative exploration of the Anthropocene between the AWG, Haus der Kulturen Welt (HKW) and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG).  </p><p>While the compilation of stratigraphic data to define a new epoch is as old as the science of geology, the demarcation of one within living history that signifies human activity as a global geological agent is unparalleled. Similarly, there is no precedent of a stratigraphic formalisation process being pivotal to the framing of so much contemporary social, ecological, artistic, historical and political thought. In May 2022 along with the publication of the results and data, an exhibition including a discursive and performative programme will occur at HKW in Berlin as a public forum for the scientific, cultural and socio-political impact of the geochronological research carried out by the international research project on the Anthropocene.</p><p>This presentation provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary and collaborative research project between the AWG, HKW and MPIWG. The talk will introduce the prospective sites and stratigraphy of the proposed successions and an update on progress towards the official ratification of the GSSP, as well as collaborative artistic and cultural work embedded in the process.</p>

Overcoming Challenges

2018 ◽  
pp. 97-108
Author(s):  
Jenny M. Luke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Medical Association ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
National Medical ◽  
The Hill ◽  
Jim Crow South

As one explanation for the longevity and centrality of lay midwifery in southern childbirth culture, chapter 11 focuses on the lack of medical support and hospital facilities available to African Americans in the Jim Crow South. It reaches back to the early twentieth century and examines the challenges faced by black medical schools and hospitals, and the establishment of the National Medical Association. The problems associated with segregated facilities and the consequences of the Hill-Burton Act failed to ease the pressures on the black medical profession. The Slossfield Community Center in Birmingham Alabama is used as a case study to emphasize the both the obstacles faced by black hospitals and physicians, and the benefits of a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to wellness.

Cultural Motifs Persist

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-31
Author(s):  
Jenny M. Luke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
General Overview ◽  
Lay Midwifery ◽  
National Perspective ◽  
Jim Crow South

After a general overview of childbirth’s shift to hospital in the early decades of the twentieth century from a national perspective, the chapter narrows its focus to the Jim Crow South. The cultural motifs established during slavery are highlighted as features of African American lay midwifery. A religious calling, an intergenerational female connectedness, and authority to practice were inherent characteristics of the midwife’s role.

Jim Crow Organized Crime

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Cooley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Drug Trafficking ◽  
Illicit Drugs ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Underground Economy ◽  
Street Gangs ◽  
Historical Evolution ◽  
Games Of Chance

This chapter examines the historical evolution of Chicago’s African American underground economy. During the first decades of the twentieth-century games of chance associated with cards and dice were the primary source of gambling revenue in black Chicago. By the early 1930s, this facet of the underground economy had been surpassed by policy, also referred to as “the numbers game.” An important linkage between these two periods was that gambling proprietors funneled some of their profits back into the larger community. Later in the twentieth century, gang-controlled drug trafficking became the primary manifestation of black Chicago’s underground economy. Unlike the earlier period’s relatively violence-free focus on games of chance, the selling of illicit drugs by street gangs turned black Chicago into a battleground.

The Whites Got the Best

2018 ◽  
pp. 81-120
Author(s):  
John M. Coggeshall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Community Identity ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Economic Opportunities ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World

This chapter presents the story of Liberia during the early twentieth century, through the Depression and the world wars. As the nation’s economy changes, African Americans continue to abandon the region for better economic opportunities as they are also forced out by restrictive Jim Crow segregation and racialized attacks. Both Soapstone Baptist Church and Soapstone School continue, critical anchors for community identity. Some residents return to care for aging relatives. The story of Liberia is presented through the memories of elderly residents and some local historical sources, including obituaries.

Adrienne Herndon's Homeplaces: Shakespeare and Black Resistance in Atlanta, c.1906

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-58
Author(s):  
PATRICIA A. CAHILL
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The Political ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Racial Trauma ◽  
Black Resistance ◽  
Jim Crow South

This essay examines the political significance of the career of Atlanta-based Shakespearean Adrienne McNeil Herndon in the early twentieth century. It contextualizes Herndon's writing in the activist journal Voice of the Negro and elucidates the radicalism of Herndon's Shakespeare work at Atlanta University and beyond. More broadly, the essay shows how Herndon's performances and pedagogy – especially her focus on elocution work, bodily expressivity, domestic spaces, and visual culture – repeatedly challenged the white supremacist culture of the Jim Crow South, offering black Americans a way to resist racial terrorism and endure racial trauma.

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