Afleveringen
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In Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia(New York University Press, 2019), Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History Emerita at New York University, shifts the lens on the well-known narrative of Virginia’s founding to reveal the previously untold and utterly compelling story of the youths who, often unwillingly, entered into cross-cultural relationships—and became essential for the colony’s survival. Their story gives us unprecedented access to both sides of early Virginia. Here for the first time outside scholarly texts is an accurate portrayal of Pocahontas, who, from the age of ten, acted as emissary for her father, who ruled over the local tribes, alongside the never-before-told intertwined stories of Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole, young English boys who were forced to live with powerful Indian leaders to act as intermediaries. As Pocahontas, Thomas, Henry, and Robert collaborated and conspired in carrying messages and trying to smooth out difficulties, they never knew when they might be caught in the firing line of developing hostilities. While their knowledge and role in controlling communication gave them status and a degree of power, their relationships with both sides meant that no one trusted them completely.
Written by an expert in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Atlantic history, Pocahontas and the English Boys unearths gems from the archives—Henry Spelman’s memoir, travel accounts, letters, and official reports and records of meetings of the governor and council in Virginia—and draws on recent archaeology to share the stories of the young people who were key influencers of their day and who are now set to transform our understanding of early Virginia.
Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.
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In his recent book, High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor (The Kent State University Press, 2024), Edwin P. Rutan II rehabilitates the motivations and contributions of late-war Union soldiers and reframes our understanding of how the Union won the Civil War.
For more than a century, historians have disparaged the men who joined the Union army in the later days of the Civil War –– when higher bounty payments and the conditional draft were in effect –– as unpatriotic mercenaries who made poor soldiers and contributed little to the Union victory. However, as Rutan explains, historians have relied on the accounts of 1861 and 1862 veterans who resented these new recruits who had not yet suffered the hardships of war, and they were jealous of the higher bounties those recruits received. The result, he argues, is a long-standing mischaracterization of the service of 750,000 Union soldiers.
High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac offers a much-needed correction to the historical record, providing a more balanced assessment of the “high-bounty” replacements in the Army of the Potomac. Rutan argues, using combat-effectiveness methodology, that they were generally competent soldiers and indispensable in defeating the Army of Northern Virginia. He also examines the issue of financial motivation, concluding that the volunteers of 1862 may have been more driven by economic incentives than once thought, and 1864 recruits were less driven by this than typically described. Thus, Rutan concludes that the Union “high-bounty” men do not deserve the scorn heaped on them by early volunteers and subsequent generations of historians.
Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at [email protected] or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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In 'We Want Better Education!': The 1960s Chicano Student Movement, School Walkouts, and the Quest for Educational Reform in South Texas (Texas A&M UP, 2023), James B. Barrera offers a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the educational, cultural, and political issues of the Chicano Movement in Texas, which remains one of the lesser-known social and political efforts of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. This movement became the political training ground for greater Chicano empowerment for students. By the 1970s, it was these students who helped to organize La Raza Unida Party in Texas. This book explores the conditions faced by students of Mexican origin in public schools throughout the South Texas region, including Westside San Antonio, Edcouch-Elsa, Kingsville, and Crystal City.
Barrera focuses on the relationship of Chicano students and their parents with the school systems and reveals the types of educational deficiencies faced by such students that led to greater political activism. He also shows how school-related issues became an important element of the students' political and cultural struggle to gain a quality education and equal treatment. Protests enabled students and their supporters to gain considerable political leverage in the decision-making process of their schools. Barrera incorporates information collected from archives throughout the state of Texas, including statistical data, government documents, census information, oral history accounts, and legal records. Of particular note are the in-depth interviews he conducted with numerous former students and community activists who participated or witnessed the various "walkouts" or student protests. "We Want Better Education!" is a major contribution to the historiography of social movements, Mexican American studies, and twentieth-century Texas and American history.
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In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670-1825 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony.
The Enslaved and Their Enslavers sets this portrait of early South Carolina against broader political events, economic developments, and social trends that also shaped the development of slavery in the region. For example, the outbreak of the American Revolution and the subsequent war against the British in the 1770s and early 1780s as well as the French and Haitian revolutions all had a profound impact on the institution’s development, both in terms of what enslaved people drew from these events and how their enslavers responded to them.
Throughout South Carolina’s long history, enslaved people never accepted their enslavement passively and regularly demonstrated their fundamental opposition to the institution by engaging in acts of resistance, which ranged from vandalism to arson to escape, and, on rare occasions, organizing collectively against their oppression. Their attempts to subvert the institution in which they were held captive not only resulted in slaveowners tightening formal and informal mechanisms of control but also generated new forms of thinking about race and slavery among whites that eventually mutated into pro-slavery ideology and the myth of southern exceptionalism.
Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at [email protected].
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Poet Laureate of Kentucky Crystal Wilkinson’s food memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks (Clarkson Potter, 2023), honors her kitchen ghosts, five generations of Black Appalachian women. She contends, “The concept of the kitchen ghost came to me years ago, when I realized that my ancestors are always with me and that the women are most present while I’m chopping or stirring or standing at the stove.” Wilkinson shares nearly forty family recipes like Corn Pudding, Chicken and Dumplings, and Granny Christine’s Jam Cake, with stories and family photos to bring to life the rich heritage of Black Appalachia.
Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.
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Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II, set in 1911 and 1899, are the most-played American history video games since The Oregon Trail. Beloved by millions, they’ve been widely acclaimed for their realism and attention to detail. But how do they fare as re-creations of history?
In Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past (St Martin's Press, 2024), award-winning American history professor Dr. Tore Olsson takes up that question and more. Weaving the games’ plots and characters into an exploration of American violence between 1870 and 1920, Dr. Olsson shows that it was more often disputes over capitalism and race, not just poker games and bank robberies, that fueled the bloodshed of these turbulent years. As such, this era has much to teach us today. From the West to the Deep South to Appalachia, Olsson reveals the gritty and brutal world that inspired the games, but sometimes lacks context and complexity on the digital screen. Colourful, fast-paced, and dramatic, Red Dead’s History sheds light on dark corners of the American past for gamers and history buffs alike.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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In Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865 (U Georgia Press, 2021), Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender and violence to examine family, community, and the tenacious struggles by which free blacks claimed and maintained their freedom under shifting international governance from Spanish colonial rule (1779-95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery’s legal demise in 1865.
Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. This book explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez, Mississippi’s free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence carried down from one generation to another. To demonstrate this, Ribianszky introduces the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows for the identification of a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America's system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding one's status at birth as legally free or unfree, though, each individual's continued freedom was based on compliance with a demanding and often unfair system.
Generations of Freedom tells the stories of people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom. Taken together—by exploring the themes of movement, gendered violence, and threats to their property and, indeed, their very bodies—these accounts argue that free blacks were active in shaping their own freedom and that of generations thereafter. Their successful navigation of the shifting ground of freedom was dependent on their utilization of all available tools at their disposal: securing reliable and influential allies, maintaining their independence, and using the legal system to protect their property—including that most precious, themselves.
For more, see the "Generations of Freedom" website.
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Known worldwide as Lead Belly, Huddie Ledbetter (1889-1949) is an American icon whose influence on modern music was tremendous - as was, according to legend, the temper that landed him in two of the South's most brutal prisons, while his immense talent twice won him pardons.
But, as Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies (Cambridge UP, 2024) shows, these stories were shaped by the white folklorists who 'discovered' Lead Belly and, along with reporters, recording executives, and radio and film producers, introduced him to audiences beyond the South. Through a revelatory examination of arrest, trial, and prison records; sharecropping reports; oral histories; newspaper articles; and more, author Sheila Curran Bernard replaces myth with fact, offering a stunning indictment of systemic racism in the Jim Crow era of the United States and the power of narrative to erase and distort the past.
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In Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Donald L. Miller explains in great detail how Grant ultimately succeeded in taking the city and turning the tide of the war in favor of the Union. Miller begins his tale with events in Cairo and leads the reader through all the important events that lead to success at Vicksburg. He also discusses Grant’s background, personal characteristics, and the influential people surrounding General Grant during this crucial time.
Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Emeritus Professor of History at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Miller’s work includes books on World War II, the war in the Pacific, America’s air war against Germany, studies of Chicago and Jazz Age Manhattan.
Jessica Moloughney is a graduate student in history and library science at Queens College in New York
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All too often, the history of early modern Africa is told from the perspective of outsiders. In his book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Toby Green draws upon a range of underutilized sources to describe the evolution of West Africa over a period of four transformative centuries. With these sources Green demonstrates that the region was integrated into the developing transcontinental trade networks far earlier than is often portrayed in more Western-centric accounts, and in ways that influenced the development of local communities long before European ships arrived off of their coast. The arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century, however, shifted the dynamics of this trade in dramatic ways, changing kingdoms and reshaping economic priorities. While West Africa was an equal partner for the first two and a half centuries of this period, Green shows how the growing demand for slaves and the very different nature of slavery in the West during this period combined increasingly disadvantaged the region, while simultaneously changing the internal political dynamics of kingdoms and the societies within them.
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A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor.
In Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans (U Chicago Press, 2024), Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city significantly defined by its foodways. Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla uses menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other material culture to limn the interplay among the production and reception of food, the inscription and reiteration of racial hierarchies, and the constant diminishment and exploitation of working-class people. The consumption of food and people, she shows, was mutually reinforced and deeply intertwined. Yet she also details how enslaved and free people of color in New Orleans used food and drink to carve paths of mobility, stability, autonomy, freedom, profit, and joy. A story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, Insatiable City goes far beyond the task of tracing New Orleans’s culinary history to focus on how food suffuses culture and our understandings and constructions of race and power.
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Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” In We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press, 2024), historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women.
The dismissal of “Black violence” as an illegitimate form of resistance is itself a manifestation of white supremacy, a distraction from the insidious, unrelenting violence of structural racism. Force—from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt—has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people since the days of the American and Haitian Revolutions. But violence is only one tool among many. Carter Jackson examines other, no less vital tactics that have shaped the Black struggle, from the restorative power of finding joy in the face of suffering to the quiet strength of simply walking away.
Clear-eyed, impassioned, and ultimately hopeful, We Refuse offers a fundamental corrective to the historical record, a love letter to Black resilience, and a path toward liberation.
Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at [email protected].
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In recent years, dozens of counties in North Carolina have partnered with federal law enforcement in the criminalization of immigration--what many have dubbed "crimmigration." Southern border enforcement still monopolizes the national immigration debate, but immigration enforcement has become common within the United States as well. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations are a major part of American immigration enforcement, Felicia Arriaga maintains that ICE relies on an already well-established system--the use of local law enforcement and local governments to identify, incarcerate, and deport undocumented immigrants.
In Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America (UNC Press, 2023), Arriaga contends that the long-term partnership between local sheriffs and immigration law enforcement in places like North Carolina has created a form of racialized social control of the Latinx community. Arriaga uses data from five county sheriff's offices and their governing bodies to trace the creation and subsequent normalization of ICE and local law enforcement partnerships. Arriaga argues that the methods used by these partnerships to control immigration are employed throughout the United States, but they have been particularly visible in North Carolina, where the Latinx population increased by 111 percent between 2000 and 2010. Arriaga's evidence also reveals how Latinx communities are resisting and adapting to these systems.
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In Denmark Vesey's Bible: The Thwarted Revolt that Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial (Princeton UP, 2022), Dr. Jeremy Schipper tells the story of a free Black man accused of plotting an anti-slavery insurrection in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. Vesey was found guilty and hanged along with dozens of others accused of collaborating with him.
At the center of the book is an examination of how former slave Denmark Vesey used interpretations of the Bible to justify the revolt while members of the white establishment in South Carolina use that same Bible to support the slaveholders view of themselves as benevolent biblical patriarchs.
The book is a riveting account of a key moment in antebellum American history that underscores deep racial inequities and the assumed supremacy of white Christians during a time of violence, fear, and conflicting understandings of moral superiority and biblical truth.
Recommended reading:
The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History edited by Douglas R. Egerton and Robert L. Paquette
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Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores the significant contributions of African American women radical activists from 1955 to 1995. It examines the 1961 case of African American working-class self-defense advocate Mae Mallory, who traveled from New York to Monroe, North Carolina, to provide support and weapons to the Negroes with Guns Movement. Accused of kidnapping a Ku Klux Klan couple, she spent thirteen months in a Cleveland jail, facing extradition. African American women radical activists Ethel Azalea Johnson of Negroes with Guns, Audrey Proctor Seniors of the banned New Orleans NAACP, the Trotskyist Workers World Party, Ruthie Stone, and Clarence Henry Seniors of Workers World founded the Monroe Defense Committee to support Mallory. Mae’s daughter, Pat, aged sixteen also participated, and they all bonded as family. When the case ended, they joined the Tanzanian, Grenadian, and Nicaraguan World Revolutions. Using her unique vantage point as Audrey Proctor Seniors’s daughter, Paula Marie Seniors blends personal accounts with theoretical frameworks of organic intellectual, community feminism, and several other theoretical frameworks in analyzing African American radical women’s activism in this era.
Essential biographical and character narratives are combined with an analysis of the social and political movements of the era and their historical significance. Seniors examines the link between Mallory, Johnson, and Proctor Seniors’s radical activism and their connections to national and international leftist human rights movements and organizations. She asks the underlying question: Why did these women choose radical activism and align themselves with revolutionary governments, linking Black human rights to world revolutions?
Seniors’s historical and personal account of the era aims to recover Black women radical activists’ place in history. Her innovative research and compelling storytelling broaden our knowledge of these activists and their political movements.
Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at [email protected].
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Linked by declarations of emancipation within the same five-year period, two countries shared human rights issues on two distinct continents. In When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate (McFarland, 2022), readers will find a case-study comparison of the emancipation of Russian serfs on the Yazykovo Selo estate and American slaves at the Palmyra Plantation. Although state policies and reactions may not follow the same paths in each area, there were striking thematic parallels. These findings add to our understanding of what happens throughout an emancipation process in which the state grants freedom, and therefore speaks to the universality of the human experience.
Despite the political and economic differences between the two countries, as well as their geographic and cultural distances, this book re-conceptualizes emancipation and its aftermath in each country: from a history that treats each as a separate, self-contained story to one with a unified, global framework.
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Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead.
In Death at the Edges of Empire: Fallen Soldiers, Cultural Memory, and the Making of an American Nation, 1863-1921 (U Nebraska Press, 2020) Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memories of war expressed through American cultural traditions emerging within broader transatlantic and transpacific networks. Examining the pragmatic collaborations between middle-class Americans and government officials negotiating the contradictory terrain of empire and nation, Death at the Edges of Empire shows how Americans imposed modern order on the inevitability of death as well as how they used the war dead to reimagine political identities and opportunities into imperial ambitions.
Alex Beckstrand is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Connecticut and an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves.
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In this special episode, we talk to two authors about the role of financial institutions in enslavement. Sharon Ann Murphy, associate professor of history, argues in Banking on Slavery Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (University of Chicago Press, 2023) that Southern banks’ willingness to use enslaved people as loan collateral led to the exponential growth of Southern enslavement during the 1820-30s. In filmmaker, producer, and author David Montero’s book, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations (Hatchette Book Group, 2024), he follows Wall Street bankers and large Northern banks were critical to the financing of slavery and, in turn, who massed incredible wealth from enslavement.
Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator and assistant professor. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.
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Justin Gardiner is the author of two nonfiction books and a collection of poetry. His most recent title is the book-length lyric essay Small Altars, published by Tupelo Press in 2024. Besides his role as Nonfiction Editor for Southern Humanities Review, Justin is also an Associate Professor at Auburn University.
Founded in 1967, SHR considers subject matter both within and beyond the South. The magazine has had Justin Gardiner as its nonfiction editor for the past half decade. Four essays are discussed in the episode, with most of all of them showing evidence of the associative qualities that Gardiner, as a poet, enjoys in whatever genre. In this case, we started with Lisa Greenwell’s essay “Your Soul Doesn’t Need You.” While ostensibly an essay about a carjacking she experienced, it goes wider to consider alike how well both more cognitively based therapy and poetry that speaks to one’s soul can aid recovery. In Leslie Stainton’s “Here with You,” an understanding of how the artist Joseph Cornell’s boxes reflect his life with a brother who suffered from cerebral palsy parallels the circumstances of the author’s own, younger sister. Delicacy is the order of the day. In Ceridwen Hall’s essay, “Submarine Reconnaissance: Bodies, Permutations, Voyages,” Hall delves into whether submarines are “female” (as her mom believes) or a “he” when in combat, along with many fascinating aspects of serving aboard a submarine and the “aquatic” nature of our memories and the way we must constantly “refit” our thinking. The other, remaining essay, Jennifer Taylor-Skinner’s “I Don’t Want Somebody in My House,” highlights the grand piano that serves as her companion, in contrast to how an esoteric French composer (Erik Satie) had two baby grand pianos stacked atop each other in his southern France villa. Again, expect the unexpected.
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.
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Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (U California Press, 2024) explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.
Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake--for creators and audiences alike--in revisiting the long history of American popular music.
Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University ([email protected]).
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