Search results for ""author john david smith""

A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865 (originally published in 1888) by pioneer African American historian George Washington Williams remains a classic text in African American literature and Civil War history. In this powerful narrative, Williams, who served in the U.S. Colored Troops, tells the battle experiences of the almost 200,000 black men who fought for the Union cause. Determined to document the contributions of his fellow black soldiers and to underscore the valor and manhood of his race, Williams gathered his material from the official records of U.S. and foreign governments and from the orderly books and personal recollections of officers commanding Negro troops during the American Civil War. The new edition of this important text includes an introductory essay by the award-winning historian John David Smith. In his essay, Smith narrates and evaluates the book’s contents, analyzes its reception by contemporary critics, and evaluates Williams’s work within the context of its day and its place in current historiography.

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Jackie Robinson’s story is not only a compelling drama of heroism, but also as a template of the African American freedom struggle. A towering athletic talent, Robinson’s greater impact was on preparing the way for the civil rights reform wave following WWII. But Robinson’s story has always been far more complex than the public perception has allowed. Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey famously told the young Robinson that he was “looking for a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back.” J. Christopher Schutz reveals the real Robinson, as a more defiant, combative spirit than simply the “turn the other cheek” compliant “credit to his race.” The triumph of Robinson’s inclusion in the white Major Leagues (which presaged blacks’ later inclusion in the broader society) also included the slow demise of black-owned commercial enterprise in the Negro Leagues (which likewise presaged the unrecoverable loss of other important black institutions after civil rights gains). Examining this key figure at the crossroads of baseball and civil rights histories, Schutz provides a cohesive exploration of the man and the times that made him great.

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William Hannibal Thomas (1843–1935) served with distinction in the U.S. Colored Troops in the Civil War (in which he lost an arm) and was a preacher, teacher, lawyer, state legislator, and journalist following Appomattox. In many publications up through the 1890s, Thomas espoused a critical though optimistic black nationalist ideology. After his mid-twenties, however, Thomas began exhibiting a self-destructive personality, one that kept him in constant trouble with authorities and always on the run. His book The American Negro (1901) was his final self-destructive act.Attacking African Americans in gross and insulting language in this utterly pessimistic book, Thomas blamed them for the contemporary "Negro problem" and argued that the race required radical redemption based on improved "character," not changed "color." Vague in his recommendations, Thomas implied that blacks should model themselves after certain mulattoes, most notably William Hannibal Thomas.Black Judas is a biography of Thomas, a publishing history of The American Negro, and an analysis of that book’s significance to American racial thought. The book is based on fifteen years of research, including research in postamputation trauma and psychoanalytic theory on selfhatred, to assess Thomas’s metamorphosis from a constructive race critic to a black Negrophobe. John David Smith argues that his radical shift resulted from key emotional and physical traumas that mirrored Thomas’s life history of exposure to white racism and intense physical pain.

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From women’s suffrage to Civil Rights for African Americans, to the environment, and the gay and lesbian liberation movement, the American Left has achieved notable successes in the 20th and 21st centuries. Sometimes celebrated and sometimes reviled, the Left has taken on many forms and reinvented itself many times over the past century. In All-American Rebellion, historian Robert Cottrell traces the rise and fall, ebb and flow of left-wing American movements. Following an overview of early 20th century movements, Cottrell focuses on the 1960s to today, offering readers a concise introduction and helping them to understand the political and ideological roots of the Left today. Cottrell includes chapters on the most recent versions of the American left, discussing community organizing, gay liberation, the women’s movement, the Campaign for Economic Democracy, the nuclear freeze movement, opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America, the anti-WTO campaign, Code Pink, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and more. The demand for and support of democracy and the quest for empowerment in various guises unifies these different lefts to one another and to the general unfolding of American history. Cottrell argues that democratic engagement has proven inconsistent and at times outright contradictory. The Left has been most successful when it fully embraces a democratic vision.

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Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877–1934) established a reputation as one of the early twentieth century's foremost authorities on the history of African American slavery and the Old South. An empiricist, Phillips approached his subjects analytically and dispassionately, and his scholarship shaped historical investigation of the South for decades. Phillips was an empiricist and based his writing on an array of primary sources, including a growing collection of photographs he accumulated during his research. These images of plantation crops and machinery, agricultural scenes, distinctive architecture, white southerners, and former slaves and their descendants collectively record much about the life and labour in the rural South three decades before the Farm Security Administration undertook its own documentary projects during the New Deal.In Seeing the New South, photography historian Patricia Bellis Bixel and Phillips scholar and historian John David Smith delve into the visual record Phillips left behind, publishing many of these photographs for the first time, and integrating his photographic archive with his research and teachings on the history of the South. For example, his Life and Labor in the Old South, published in 1929, was well illustrated with useful photographs. The bulk of Phillips's papers resides in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. The collection includes sixty lantern slides and many photographic prints that Phillips employed in his work. Bixel and Smith uncovered another five hundred images that greatly expanded Phillips's visual archive. Taken between 1904 and 1930, these images provide glimpses of a Southern landscape rarely seen and even more rarely photographed, offering a striking visual account of early-twentieth-century life in the rural South.Phillips deliberately sought out images of buildings and agricultural scenes emblematic of the South, representative portraits of white and black southerners, and distinctive depictions of farm and town life. Some photographs reinforce Phillips's arguments about the general backwardness of an impoverished rural South and about the limitations of the region's agricultural and industrial economies. But his images also documented active independent black and white communities with diverse economic practices and subcultures. This first-ever collection of Phillips's photographs provides dramatic documentation of economic and social life during an era seldom captured on film, yielding striking visual portraits of human dignity in black and white.

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As a Unionist but also proslavery state during the American Civil War, Kentucky occupied a contentious space both politically and geographically. In many ways, its pragmatic attitude toward compromise left it in a cultural no-man's-land. The constant negotiation between the state's nationalistic and Southern identities left many Kentuckians alienated and conflicted. Lincoln referred to Kentucky as the crown jewel of the Union slave states due to its sizable population, agricultural resources, and geographic position, and these advantages, coupled with the state's difficult relationship to both the Union and slavery, ultimately impacted the outcome of the war. Despite Kentucky's central role, relatively little has been written about the aftermath of the Civil War in the state and how the conflict shaped the commonwealth we know today. New Perspectives on Civil War–Era Kentucky offers readers ten essays that paint a rich and complex image of Kentucky during the Civil War. First appearing in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, these essays cover topics ranging from women in wartime to Black legislators in the postwar period. From diverse perspectives, both inside and outside the state, the contributors shine a light on the complicated identities of Kentucky and its citizens in a defining moment of American history.

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Americans have long been identified as a people of law and lawyers with an addiction to lawsuits. This national characteristic became so prevalent in late twentieth-century America that some legal authorities dubbed the pattern a “litigation crisis.” In Litigation Nation: A History of Litigation in America, Peter C. Hoffer charts the history of civil litigation from the seventeenth century to the present, using key cases that illustrate the central theme in civil litigation during different periods of U.S. history and enable readers to explore and understand key questions in American life and culture. Hoffer’s concise and accessible treatment to this history will appeal to general audiences as it examines both historical and contemporary questions, debates, and litigation concerning gender, discrimination, harassment, and workplace culture.

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In 1863, as the Civil War raged, the escaped slave, abolitionist, and novelist William Wells Brown identified two groups most harmful to his race. “The first and most relentless,” he explained, “are those who have done them the greatest injury, by being instrumental in their enslavement and consequent degradation. They delight to descant upon the ‘natural inferiority’ of the blacks, and claim that we were destined only for a servile condition, entitled neither to liberty nor the legitimate pursuit of happiness.” “The second class,” Brown concluded, “are those who are ignorant of the characteristics of the race, and are the mere echoes of the first.” Four years later, Brown wrote the first military history of African Americans, The Negro in the American Rebellion. This text assailed those whose hatred and ignorance inclined them to keep blacks oppressed after Appomattox. This critical edition of The Negro in the American Rebellion, one of Brown’s least-analyzed texts, is the first to appear in more than three decades. In his introduction, historian John David Smith identifies the text’s Anglo-American abolitionist roots, sets it in the context of Brown’s other writings, appraises it as military history, analyzes its interpretation of black masculinity and honor, and focuses closely on Brown’s assessment of contemporary racial tensions. Largely ignored by scholars, The Negro in the American Rebellion, Smith argues, is a powerful transitional text, one that confronted squarely the neo-slavery of the Reconstruction era. “Whites,” Brown wrote, “appear determined to reduce the blacks to a state of serfdom if they cannot have them as slaves.” His important text was a call to arms in the ongoing race struggle. Smith’s analysis, framed within recent scholarship on slavery, emancipation, and African American participation in the U.S. army, is long overdue.

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W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most prolific African American authors, scholars, and leaders of the twentieth century, but none of his previous biographies have so practically and comprehensively introduced the man and his impact on American history as noted historian Shawn Alexander's W. E. B. Du Bois: An American Intellectual and Activist. Alexander tells Du Bois’ story in a clear and concise manner, exploring his racial strategy, civil rights activity, journalistic career, and his role as an international spokesman. The book also captures Du Bois’s life as a historian, sociologist, artist, propagandist, and peace activist, while providing space for the voices of his chief critics: Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Walter White, the Young Turks of the NAACP—not to mention the federal government’s characterization of his ever-radicalizing beliefs, particularly after World War II. Alexander’s analysis traces the development of Du Bois' thought over time, beginning with his formative years in New England and ending with his death in Ghana. Paying significantly more attention to the many pivotal and previously unexamined intellectual moments in his life, this biography illustrates the experiences that helped bend and mold the indispensable thinker that W.E.B. Du Bois became: the kind whose crowning achievement is his continued relevance in contemporary culture, from classrooms to curbsides.

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Frances Peter was one of the eleven children of Dr. Robert Peter, a surgeon for the Union army. The Peter family lived on Gratz Park near downtown Lexington, where nineteen-year-old Frances began recording her impressions of the Civil War. Because of illness, she did not often venture outside her home but was able to gather a remarkable amount of information from friends, neighbors, and newspapers.Peter's candid diary chronicles Kentucky's invasion by Confederates under Gen. Braxton Bragg in 1862, Lexington's month-long occupation by Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith, and changes in attitude among the slave population following the Emancipation Proclamation. As troops from both North and South took turns holding the city, she repeatedly emphasized the rightness of the Union cause and minced no words in expressing her disdain for the hated "secesh."Her writings articulate many concerns common to Kentucky Unionists. Though she was an ardent supporter of the war against the Confederacy, Peter also worried that Lincoln's use of authority exceeded his constitutional rights. Her own attitudes towards blacks were ambiguous, as was the case with many people in that time. Peter's descriptions of daily events in an occupied city provide valuable insights and a unique feminine perspective on an underappreciated aspect of the war.Until her death by epileptic seizure in August 1864, Peter conscientiously recorded the position and deportment of both Union and Confederate soldiers, incidents at the military hospitals, and stories from the countryside. Her account of a torn and divided region is a window to the war through the gaze of a young woman of intelligence and substance.

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