Quaker Brotherhood

Author(s):  
Allan W. Austin

This is the first extensive study of the American Friends Service Committee's interracial activism in the first half of the twentieth century, filling a major gap in scholarship on the Quakers' race relations work from the AFSC's founding in 1917 to the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the early 1950s. The book tracks the evolution of key AFSC projects, such as the Interracial Section and the American Interracial Peace Committee, that demonstrate the tentativeness of the Friends' activism in the 1920s, as well as efforts in the 1930s to make scholarly ideas and activist work more theologically relevant for Friends. Documenting the AFSC's efforts to help European and Japanese American refugees during World War II, the book shows that by 1950, Quakers in the AFSC had honed a distinctly Friendly approach to interracial relations that combined scholarly understandings of race with their religious views. Highlighting the complicated and sometimes controversial connections between Quakers and race during this era, the book uncovers important aspects of the history of Friends, pacifism, feminism, American religion, immigration, ethnicity, and the early roots of multiculturalism.

Author(s):  
Allan W. Austin

This chapter explores the activities of the Race Relations Committee, which was established in 1943 and remained after World War II. The new committee created several integrated projects (including housing efforts and a work camp) as well as interracial projects such as minority hiring efforts and a university lectureship program. By 1950, Quakers in the AFSC had thus developed an indirect, Friendly approach to interracial relations that while still working to correct individual ignorance now saw the need to reform society as well. Understanding the details of that approach and how Quakers arrived at it provides important insights into Quakers and race in the first half of the twentieth century. It also helps to fill in the historiographical gap concerning the racial activism of Quakers between their nineteenth-century efforts at reform and their participation in the Civil Rights Movement that blossomed in the 1950s and beyond.


Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura

As a leading dissident in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara stands out as an icon of Japanese American resistance. In this biography, Kurihara's life provides a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Hawaiʻi to Japanese parents who immigrated to work on the sugar plantations, Kurihara was transformed by the forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese during World War II. As an inmate at Manzanar in California, Kurihara became one of the leaders of a dissident group within the camp and was implicated in “the Manzanar incident,” a serious civil disturbance that erupted on December 6, 1942. In 1945, after three years and seven months of incarceration, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and boarded a ship for Japan, never to return to the United States. Shedding light on the turmoil within the camps as well as the sensitive and formerly unspoken issue of citizenship renunciation among Japanese Americans, this book explores one man's struggles with the complexities of loyalty and dissent.


Author(s):  
Michihiro Ama ◽  
Michael Masatsugu

Japanese Buddhism was introduced to the United States at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893, but the development of Japanese American Buddhism, also known as Nikkei Buddhism, really began when Japanese migrants brought Buddhism with them to Hawaii and the continental United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It has been influenced by, and has reflected, America’s sociopolitical and religious climate and the US relationship to Japan, to which generations of Japanese Americans, such as Issei (literally, first generation, referring to Japanese immigrants), Nisei (second-generation American-born offspring of the Issei), and Sansei (third generation), responded differently. While adapting to American society, Japanese American Buddhists maintained their cultural practices and ethnoreligious identity. The history of Japanese American Buddhism discussed in this article spans from the late-19th Century to the 1970s and is divided into three major periods: the pre-World War II, World War II, and the postwar eras. Japanese American Buddhism is derived from the various Buddhist organizations in Japan. The Nishi Hongwanji denomination of Jōdo Shinshū, a form of Pure Land Buddhism known as Shin Buddhism in the West, is the oldest and largest form of ethnic Japanese Buddhism in the United States. In Hawaii, Nishi Hongwanji founded the Hompa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii (HHMH) in Honolulu in 1897. On the continental United States, it established the Buddhist Mission of North America (BMNA) in San Francisco in 1898, currently known as the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA). Other Japanese Buddhist organizations also developed in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. They include the Jōdo-shū, another sect of Pure Land Buddhism; Higashi Hongwanji, another major denomination of Jōdoshin-shū; Sōtō-shū, a Zen Buddhist school; Shingon-shū, known as Kōyasan Buddhism; and Nichiren-shū. The characteristics of Japanese American Buddhism changed significantly during World War II, when approximately 120,000 persons of Japanese descent living in the West Coast states were incarcerated because of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The postwar period witnessed a rapid transformation in the status and visibility of Japanese Buddhism in the United States. This transformation was driven by the promotion of ethnonational Buddhism by Nisei and by the growth of interest in Zen Buddhism among the general American public. The positive reception of Japanese Buddhism in the United States reflected and reinforced the transformed relationship between the United States and Japan from wartime enemies to Cold War partners. While they experienced greater receptivity and interest in Buddhism from nonethnics, they could no longer practice or espouse Jōdo Shinshū teachings or adapted practices without clarification. Debates concerning the authenticity of Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism and Japanese American Buddhist practices were interwoven within a longer history of American Orientalism. By the 1960s, Japanese American Buddhist communities were transformed by the addition of a small but vocal nonethnic membership and a new generation of Sansei Buddhists. Demands for English-speaking ministers resulted in the creation, in 1967, of the Institute of Buddhist Studies, the first graduate-level training program in the United States endorsed by Nishi Hongwanji. This article is an overview of Japanese American Buddhism with a focus on the development of the Nishi Hongwanji Shin Buddhist organizations in the United States. English scholarship on the development of other Japanese Buddhist organizations in the United States is still limited. Throughout the history of Japanese American Buddhism, Nikkei Buddhists negotiated with America’s political institutions and Christian churches, as well as with Euro-American Buddhists, over Buddhist and cultural practices to maintain and redefine their ethnoreligious tradition. Buddhist temples provided the space for them to gather and build a community of shared faith and cultural heritage, discuss their place and the role of Buddhism in American society, and express their concerns to America’s general public.


Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors

This chapter examines the strained history of Jackson State University during the aftermath of World War II and leading up to the modern civil rights movement. Located in the heart of Mississippi, Jackson State students carved out space to express their militancy as the war came to a close. However, they quickly felt that space collapse around them as segregationists tightened their grip on the Magnolia State as the burgeoning movement for black liberation challenged the oppressive traditions of the most socially and politically closed state in the country. Administrators such as Jackson State University president Jacob Reddix quickly fell in line with the expectations of his immediate supervisors and squared off against outspoken scholar-activists such as famed poet and novelist Margaret Walker. The standoff resulted in a campus environment fraught with tension yet still producing students and faculty determined to undermine Jim Crow.


Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors

This chapter examines the peculiar history of Tougaloo College from its founding during the Reconstruction Era to the turn of the century. Tougaloo, is best known for being a haven for black militancy during the modern civil rights movement and one of the few safe spaces for Freedom Riders, marchers, and sit-in activists in the most notoriously violent state in the south – Mississippi. Yet its early years illustrate an institution in constant flux, trying to survive economic hardships, and under the thumb of conservative administrators and teachers who exposed Tougaloo students to the expectations of respectability politics. Nevertheless, black students carved out vital spaces for expression and utilized the pages of their student newspaper to display their expanding social and political consciousness and their desire to resist the oppressive and often violent hardships of America’s lowest point in race relations.


Mahjong ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz

The Introduction provides an orientation to the book and its key questions: What did it mean to become “modern” in the early twentieth century? How did American ethnicities take shape in the years leading up to and after World War II? How did middle-class women experience and shape their changing roles in society, before the social revolutions of the late twentieth century? How are these things related? The Introduction also covers an overview of mahjong’s trajectory in the United States. It examines background related to the history of leisure, gender, and consumerism in addition to introducing key sources and methodologies. The introduction sets up the book to tell the story of mahjong’s role in the creation of identifiably ethnic communities, women’s access to respectable leisure, and how Americans used ideas of China to understand themselves.


2020 ◽  
pp. 225-234
Author(s):  
Kurt Edward Kemper

Throughout much of the NCAA’s first half century, the organization maintained an uneasy collection of commercialized schools that pursued highly competitive athletics for publicity and profit; liberal arts colleges that saw college athletics as a component of their educational and leadership missions; and smaller and medium-size state schools that wanted to play athletics for competitive glory but lacked the size, resources, and finances of the big-time powers. Unable to balance those three interests, the NCAA largely ignored the concerns of the latter two while devoting itself to the service of commercialized athletics. This fraught arrangement finally came asunder in the years after World War II when multiple pressures from scandals, racial criticisms, and growing pressure for access to the NCAA Basketball Tournament finally forced concessions. The concessions made in the mid- to late-1950s, however, did not reshape the balance of power in the NCAA, as the organization remained wholly committed to serving the interests of big-time commercialized athletics. In this regard the challenges faced by the NCAA mirrored the larger social and cultural upheaval in the United States following World War II. The civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and opposition to the war in Vietnam all challenged the authority of existing political and economic elites yet did not mark any fundamental shift in power in American life. The question, then, is not really how did the NCAA manage to survive but, rather, how did its critics ever hope to succeed?


2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-80
Author(s):  
Kay Saunders

In 2001 I was invited to give a public lecture at the Centre for the Study of the History of the Twentieth Century, a scholarly research institute within the University of Paris. The invitation was extended by Professor Stephane Dufoix, who writes on the internment of enemy aliens in World War II, one of my academic specialisations. However, I was not asked to speak about this area of expertise. Indeed, it turned out to be a ‘Don't mention the war’ event. Rather, Professor Dufoix and his colleagues were fascinated by Pauline Hanson and were interested in an Australian perspective on the rise of extreme right-wing populism and the Down Under equivalent of the French les laissés-pour-compte (‘those left behind’) or les paumés (‘the losers’).


1991 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 35-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Loewenberg

Karl Renner's political life encompasses the history of Austria's empire and her two twentieth-century republics, making him the foremost leader of Austrian democratic politics. Renner was also the most innovative theoretician on the nationalities question which plagued the Habsburg monarchy and the twentieth-century world. He was chancellor of Austria's first republic, leader of the right-wing Social Democrats, and president of the post-World War II Second Republic. A study of his life and politics offers a perspective on the origins of the moderate, adaptive, political personality and on the tension between ideology and accommodation to the point where it is difficult to determine what core of principle remained.


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