Wordtrade.com/ American History

African American Women Confront the West: 1600-2000 edited by Quintard Taylor & Shirley Ann Wilson Moore ( University of Oklahoma Press ) African American women in the West have long been stereotyped as socially and historically marginal, existing in isolation from other women in the West and from their counterparts in the East and South. Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore disprove this stereotype, arguing that African American women in the West played active, though sometimes unacknowledged, roles in shaping the political, ideological, and social currents that influenced the United States over the past three centuries. African American Women Confront the West is the first major historical anthology on the topic. It is edited by Quintard Taylor, Professor of American History at the University of Washington , Seattle and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, Professor of History at California State University , Sacramento .

Contributors by period include:

1. The Spanish-Mexican Period: Dedra S. McDonald
2. The Antebellum West: Lynn M. Hudson, Barbara Y. Welke
3. The Post-Civil War Era: Susan Bragg, Peggy Riley, Ronald G. Coleman
4. The Early Twentieth Century: Susan Armitage, Quintard Taylor, Moya Bl. Hansen, Alicia I. Rodriguez/Estrada
5. World War II: Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Claytee D. White
6. The Civil Rights Era: Merline Pitre, Cheryl Brown Henderson, Linda Williams Reese, Jane Rhodes

These contributors explore the life experiences of African American women in the West, the myriad ways in which African American women have influenced the experiences of the diverse peoples of the region, and their legacy in rural and urban communities from Montana to Texas and California to Kansas . The contributors make use of individual and collective biographies, first-person narratives, and interviews that explore what it has meant to be an African American woman, from the era of Spanish colonial rule in eighteenth-century New Mexico into the black power era of the 1960s and 1970s and beyond.

African American Women Confront the West makes an important contribution to a Women’s Studies or African-American Studies class.
Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777-1877 by David Nathaniel Gellman (Editor), David Quigley (Editor) (New York University Press) In 1821, New York 's political leaders met for over two months to rewrite the state's constitution. The new document secured the right to vote for the great mass of white men while denying all but the wealthiest African-American men access to the polls.

Jim Crow New York introduces students and scholars alike to this watershed event in American political life. New York , perhaps the single most influential state in nineteenth-century America , defined democracy in explicitly racial terms at the dawn of an era of unprecedented popular participation. This action crystallized for generations the paradoxes of free black citizenship, not only in the North but throughout the nation: African Americans living in New York would no longer be slaves. But would they be citizens?

 With so many document collections aimed at teaching scholars and students about slavery and race relations in the nineteenth-century South, it is refreshing and enlightening to read a collection that reminds us of the northern side of the story.—Michael Vorenberg, author of Final Freedom

 David N. Gellman, Assistant Professor of History at DePauw University, and David Quigley, Assistant Professor of History at Boston College, provide readers with both scholarly analysis and access to a series of extraordinary documents, including extensive excerpts from the resonant speeches made at New York's 1821 constitutional convention and additional documents which recover a diversity of voices, from lawmakers to African-American community leaders, from newspaper editors to activists. Jim Crow New York is further enhanced by extensive introductory essays and headnotes, maps, illustrations, and a detailed bibliographic essay.

For those of us who are white Southerners carrying around guilt for what we and our forefathers did and didn’t do, it’s valuable to hear “the rest of the story.” This book can also help white Yankees who want to take responsibility and come clean of our militant ignorance about the past.

The Origins of African American Literature: 1680-1865 by Dickson D. Bruce (University Press of Virginia) From the earliest texts of the colonial period to works contemporary with Emancipation, African American literature has been a dialogue across color lines, and a medium through which black writers have been able to exert considerable authority on both sides of that racial demarcation.
Dickson D. Bruce argues that contrary to prevailing perceptions of African American voices as silenced and excluded from American history, those voices were loud and clear. Within the context of the wider culture, these writers offered powerful, widely read, and widely appreciated commentaries on American ideals and ambitions. The Origins of African American Literature provides strong evidence to demonstrate just how much writers engaged in a surprising number of dialogues with society as a whole.
Along with an extensive discussion of major authors and texts, including Phillis Wheatley's poetry, Frederick Douglass's Narrative, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Martin Delany's Blake, Bruce explores less-prominent works and writers as well, thereby grounding African American writing in its changing historical settings. The Origins of African American Literature is an invaluable revelation of the emergence and sources of the specifically African American literary tradition and the forces that helped shape it

In His Own Voice: The Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar by Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Herbert Woodward Martin, Ronald Primeau (Ohio University Press)

Laurence Dunbar, to be published by Ohio University Press on April 2, 2002, brings together Dunbar's previously unpublished and uncollected short stories, essays, and poems. The collection also establishes Dunbar's reputation as a dramatist who mastered standard English conventions and used dialect in musical comedy for ironic effects.

Dunbar, introduced to the American public by William Dean Howells, who reviewed Dunbar for Harper's magazine in 1896, was the first African American poet to achieve national and international fame. While there have been many valuable editions of his works over time, gaps have developed when manuscripts were lost or access to uncollected works became difficult.

In His Own Voice collects more than seventy‑five works in six genres. Featured are the previously unpublished play Herrick, a comedy of manners, and two one‑act plays, largely ignored for a century, that demonstrate Dunbar's subversion of the minstrel tradition. This generous expansion of the canon also includes a short story never before published, along with six other short stories. Fifteen essays and a number of poems round out the collection.

Poet Herbert Woodward Martin, renowned for his live portrayal of Dunbar, and scholar Ronald Primeau provide a literary and historical context for these stories, essays, poems, and plays, firmly securing the reputation of an important American voice.

"Had Dunbar even lived half as long as Du Bois (born four years earlier than Dunbar, in 1868, but died in 1963), we can only imagine how different would have been the shape of the Harlem Renaissance and indeed the shape of African American literature itself," observes Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in the foreword. "Martin and Primeau's edition of Dunbar's uncollected works allows us to experience an undiscovered Dunbar, a writer of great range, wit, subtlety, and irony

As it was, Dunbar was an important forerunner to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the second Renaissance of black poets in the 1960s. As the son of former slaves "his was a voice of protest against injustice," note the editors. However, Dunbar embarrassed himself with the minstrel‑like lyrics to some musical comedies‑lyrics that later kept critics silent who might have illuminated the ways in which Dunbar subverted racist conventions and mastered the conventions of British comedy.

Dunbar's reputation has rested on his poems, partly because manuscripts of what are suspected to be his best plays have been lost. Caught between free and plantation traditions, Dunbar struggled to deal with an audience that was both black and white; he was trapped between attempts to express his culture and to be mainstream.

"By making these [previously uncollected] works available in one place, this collection will contribute to long‑standing debates, enlarge the Dunbar canon, and provide fresh evidence that he mastered certain genres and literary conventions in order to comment ironically on them," write

Martin and Primeau. "The works in this volume show how he broke ground for many writers to come."

A STREET CALLED HOME

by Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson

Harcourt Brace

$18.00, hardcover, an accordion book with flaps, color pictures, reading level 4-8,

0-15-201465-9

An accordion book with flaps, A STREET CALLED HOME opens on the tumultuous street life of Mount Vernon. Look inside the flaps to see and learn about the businesses that trive on the Street. There is the ragman, the iceman, the brownyskin man and many others. This is a Street view of a Black Ghetto in the 1940s. As it appeared in Columbus, Ohio. A STREET CALLED HOME was a self-sufficient street. It knew how to survive. This ideal vision of the black shantytown. People were alive with business and making a living. People wove in and out with their horses, and carts and trucks, Street cries were full of news and wares for sale. people bartered and bought and sold. People played and danced. Everything you needed to live you could find there on the street.