sutton039

Randall Stephens Today is the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington "For Jobs and Freedom." So, to continue with the theme of Monday's post --concerning history/historians, activism, and civil rights--I excerpt below part of Sheldon Hackney's 2009 essay in Historically Speaking , "C. Vann Woodward, Dissenter." Here Hackney discusses C. Vann Woodward's political outlook, civil rights work, and the parameters of dissent in the 1960s. Hackney is the Boies Professor of U.S. History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the former president of the University of Pennsylvania (1981-1993) and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1993-1997). He is the author of a variety of books and articles, including Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton University Press, 1969) and Magnolias without Moonlight: The American South from Regional Confederacy to National Integration (Transaction Publishers, 2005): One of t...

Randall Stephens From Life magazine, September 6, 1963. Across the US and around the globe people are marking the 50th anniversary of the "Jobs and Freedom" march on Washington, D.C.   Roughly 200,000 men and women, young and old, black and white gathered to demand justice and equality on Wednesday, August 28, 1963.  Among the throng who came together around the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial were a collection of historians. (How interesting to think how this event so shaped the writing of those in attendance and many more who witnessed it from afar or learned of it years later.)  Some were soon-to-be historians or historians-in-training from the University of Maryland, Howard University, Johns Hopkins University, UVA, George Washington, and others. Among the many in attendance were Clayborne Carson, Dorothy Drinkard-Hawkshawe , and Robert Zieger .  From Life magazine, September 6, 1963. Zieger, who passed away this year, was Distinguished Professor of Hi...

Randall Stephens In not too long Project Muse will post the June issue of Historically Speaking .  In the meantime, copies are being shipped across the country and overseas to subscribers.  The latest issue contains a lively range of essays.  This month we have the last of Joe Amato's three essays on revitalizing local history. Here he sketches a sensory history of 20th-century rural America. He then explores some causes and effects of the countryside’s marginalization in modern American society. On a related note, Don Yerxa interviews Canadian cultural historian Constance Classen about sense history.  Classen has written extensively on the senses, exploring the lived experiences of embodiment from the Middle Ages to modernity and helping us appreciate the tactile foundations of Western culture.   Also in this issue are pieces on history and political thought, Mormon historical studies, Stalin and Nazi Germany, Civil War naval history, Britain and the Treat...

Randall Stephens Matthew Frye Jacobson, interviewed in the video posted here, is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University .  He is the outgoing president of the American Studies Association .  He's also the author of What Have They Built You to Do? The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America (with Gaspar Gonzalex, University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Harvard University Press, 2005); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (Hill and Wang, 2000); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press, 1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (University of California Press, 1995). Jacobson was one of the keynote speakers at the Nordic Association for American Studies conference I attended this...

Heather Cox Richardson On May 6, 1882, President Chester Arthur signed into law theChinese Exclusion Act . This hotly contested law was the first in American history to prevent voluntary immigration to the United States. It was also the formal rejection of one of the founding principles of the Republican Party: that the immigration of workers to the U.S. was fundamental to the country’s strength. An 1882 cartoon: "THE ONLY ONE BARRED OUT. Enlightened American Statesman.--"We must draw the line somewhere, you know." Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Chinese immigration to America began with the Gold Rush . Its flood tide in 1849 coincided with the economic catastrophe left in China by the Opium Wars, and young Chinese men came to “Gold Mountain” to earn money to feed their families back home. Chinese miners did well financially in California, but quickly came under fire from native-born Americans, who first passed a “Foreign Miners’ Tax” targeting Chinese ...

Chris Beneke In a famous photograph of baseball star Jackie Robinson and Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey, the African American legend prepares to sign his 1948 contract. As he does so, the viewer of this staged scene can make out a small photo hung above Rickey’s head at top right. From that modest rectangular frame, a young, beardless Abraham Lincoln gazes upon the scene.* Three years earlier, Robinson met Rickey under that same gaze and the two men discussed, among many other things, their shared Christian devotion. During this tense  and seemingly interminable meeting that would lead to the end of baseball’s longstanding prohibition on black players, Rickey had Robinson read a line from Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ : “But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Robinson agreed to turn the other cheek and in April 1947, he joined the Dodgers as the first African American major leaguer in more than half a century...