HIST A394 Wenches Witches Welfare Queens

A powerful study of the women's liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders. From the widely revered and legendary political activist and scholar Angela Davis.

In an in-depth community study of women in the civil rights movement, Christina Greene examines how several generations of black and white women, low-income as well as more affluent, shaped the struggle for black freedom in Durham, North Carolina. In the city long known as "the capital of the black middle class," Greene finds that, in fact, low-income African American women were the sustaining force for change. Greene demonstrates that women activists frequently were more organized, more militant, and more numerous than their male counterparts. They brought new approaches and strategies to protest, leadership, and racial politics. Arguing that race was not automatically a unifying force, Greene sheds new light on the class and gender fault lines within Durham's black community. While middle-class black leaders cautiously negotiated with whites in the boardroom, low-income black women were coordinating direct action in hair salons and neighborhood meetings. Greene's analysis challenges scholars and activists to rethink the contours of grassroots activism in the struggle for racial and economic justice in postwar America. She provides fresh insight into the changing nature of southern white liberalism and interracial alliances, the desegregation of schools and public accommodations, and the battle to end employment discrimination and urban poverty.

Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written. In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that ultimately changed the world. The author gives us the never-before-told history of how the civil rights movement began; how it was in part started in protest against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men who used economic intimidation, sexual violence, and terror to derail the freedom movement; and how those forces persisted unpunished throughout the Jim Crow era when white men assaulted black women to enforce rules of racial and economic hierarchy. Black women’s protests against sexual assault and interracial rape fueled civil rights campaigns throughout the South that began during World War II and went through to the Black Power movement. The Montgomery bus boycott was the baptism, not the birth, of that struggle. At the Dark End of the Street describes the decades of degradation black women on the Montgomery city buses endured on their way to cook and clean for their white bosses. It reveals how Rosa Parks, by 1955 one of the most radical activists in Alabama, had had enough. “There had to be a stopping place,” she said, “and this seemed to be the place for me to stop being pushed around.” Parks refused to move from her seat on the bus, was arrested, and, with fierce activist Jo Ann Robinson, organized a one-day bus boycott. The protest, intended to last twenty-four hours, became a yearlong struggle for dignity and justice. It broke the back of the Montgomery city bus lines and bankrupted the company. We see how and why Rosa Parks, instead of becoming a leader of the movement she helped to start, was turned into a symbol of virtuous black womanhood, sainted and celebrated for her quiet dignity, prim demeanor, and middle-class propriety—her radicalism all but erased. And we see as well how thousands of black women whose courage and fortitude helped to transform America were reduced to the footnotes of history. A controversial, moving, and courageous book; narrative history at its best.

The history of African American women has become an important topic in the intellectual life of this country in the last fifteen years; and Darlene Clark Hine has been one of those most responsible for bringing the subject to its current level of importance." --from the Foreword by John Hope Franklin In this absolutely needed collection of essays by one of the leading American historians of our generation, the richly intertwined community-making and self-making that shaped the historical experience of African American women shines out like a beacon." --Susan M. Reverby, Luella LaMer Associate Professor for Women's Studies, Wellesley College

Glenda Gilmore recovers the rich nuances of southern political history by placing black women at its center. She explores the pivotal and interconnected roles played by gender and race in North Carolina politics from the period immediately preceding the disfranchisement of black men in 1900 to the time black and white women gained the vote in 1920. Gender and Jim Crow argues that the ideology of white supremacy embodied in the Jim Crow laws of the turn of the century profoundly reordered society and that within this environment, black women crafted an enduring tradition of political activism. According to Gilmore, a generation of educated African American women emerged in the 1890s to become, in effect, diplomats to the white community after the disfranchisement of their husbands, brothers, and fathers. Using the lives of African American women to tell the larger story, Gilmore chronicles black women's political strategies, their feminism, and their efforts to forge political ties with white women. Her analysis highlights the active role played by women of both races in the political process and in the emergence of southern progressivism. In addition, Gilmore illuminates the manipulation of concepts of gender by white supremacists and shows how this rhetoric changed once women, black and white, gained the vote.

A history of the struggle of black women and their families from the days of slavery to the present.

After the American Civil War, southern black women, such as household labourers and washerwomen, constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance and community organization. This book traces their struggles as they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed.

Bringing together practical methods from both history and composition, Writing History provides a wealth of tips and advice to help students research and write essays for history classes. The book covers all aspects of writing about history, including finding topics and researching them,interpreting source materials, drawing inferences from sources, and constructing arguments. It concludes with three chapters that discuss writing effective sentences, using precise wording, and revising. Using numerous examples from the works of cultural, political, and social historians, WritingHistory serves as an ideal supplement to history courses that require students to conduct research. The second edition includes expanded sections on plagiarism, interviewing, and topic selection, as well as new sections on searching and using the Internet.

Suitable for history students, this primer is a guide to doing research in order to write a research paper, create a website, or do a PowerPoint presentation. It talks about how to do research on the Internet and how to differentiate between reliable and unreliable historical information on the Web.

In the past thirty years, historians have broadened the scope of their discipline to include many previously neglected topics and perspectives. They have chronicled language, madness, gender, and sexuality and have experimented with new forms of presentation. They have turned to the histories of non-Western peoples and to the troubled relations between “the West” and the rest. Allan Megill welcomes these developments, but he also suggests that there is now confusion among historians about what counts as a justified account of the past. In Historical Knowledge, Historical Error, Megill dispels some of the confusion. Here, he discusses issues of narrative, objectivity, and memory. He attacks what he sees as irresponsible uses of evidence while accepting the art of speculation, which incomplete evidence forces upon historians. Along the way, he offers succinct accounts of the epistemological road historians have traveled from Herodotus and Thucydides through Leopold von Ranke and Alexis de Tocqueville, and on to Hayden White, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Lynn Hunt.

It has become commonplace these days to speak of “unpacking” texts. Voice and Vision is a book about packing that prose in the first place. While history is scholarship, it is also art-that is, literature. And while it has no need to emulate fiction, slump into memoir, or become self-referential text, its composition does need to be conscious and informed. Voice and Vision is for those who wish to understand the ways in which literary considerations can enhance nonfiction writing. At issue is not whether writing is scholarly or popular, narrative or analytical, but whether it is good. Fiction has guidebooks galore; journalism has shelves stocked with manuals; certain hybrids such as creative nonfiction and the new journalism have evolved standards, esthetics, and justifications for how to transfer the dominant modes of fiction to topics in nonfiction. But history and other serious or scholarly nonfiction have nothing comparable. Now this curious omission is addressed by Stephen Pyne as he analyzes and teaches the craft that undergirds whole realms of nonfiction and book-based academic disciplines. With eminent good sense concerning the unique problems posed by research-based writing and with a wealth of examples from accomplished writers, Pyne, an experienced and skilled writer himself, explores the many ways to understand what makes good nonfiction, and explains how to achieve it. His counsel and guidance will be invaluable to experts as well as novices in the art of writing serious and scholarly nonfiction.