Browse

Since the inception of the Atlantic Coast Conference, intense rivalries, legendary coaches, gifted players, and fervent fans have come to define the league's basketball history. This book traces the traditions and the dramatic changes that occurred both on and off the court during the conference's rise to a preeminent position in college basketball between 1953 and 1972. It re-creates the action of nail-biting games and the tensions of bitter recruiting battles without losing sight of the central off-court questions the league wrestled with during these two decades. As basketball became the ACC's foremost attraction, conference administrators sought to field winning teams while improving academic programs and preserving academic integrity. The ACC also adapted gradually to changes in the postwar South, including, most prominently, the struggle for racial justice during the 1960s. The book is an account of coaches' flair (and antics), players' artistry, a major point-shaving scandal, and the gradually more evenly matched struggle for dominance in one of college basketball's strongest conferences.

This book looks at how the lives of everyday Americans changed because of the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, the counterculture and other “revolutionary” Sixties movements. Its chapters focus on the mainstreaming of new values and ideas through television, journalism, music, and clothing.

Most scholarship on the mass migrations of African Americans and southern whites during and after the Great Depression treats those migrations as separate phenomena, strictly divided along racial lines. This interdisciplinary work argues instead that we should understand these Depression-era migrations as interconnected responses to the capitalist collapse and political upheavals of the early twentieth century. During the 1930s and 1940s, it shows, writers and artists of both races created migration stories specifically to bolster the black–white Left alliance. Defying rigid critical categories, the author considers a wide variety of media, including literary classics by John Steinbeck and Ann Petry, “lost” novels by Sanora Babb and William Attaway, hobo novellas, images of migrant women by Dorothea Lange and Elizabeth Catlett, popular songs, and histories and ethnographies of migrant shipyard workers. This rereading and recovering of the period's literary and visual culture expands our understanding of the migration narrative by uniting the political and aesthetic goals of the black and white literary Left and illuminating the striking interrelationship between American populism and civil rights.

After a decade of chasing stories around the globe, intrepid travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest followed the magnetic pull home--only to discover that her native South Texas had been radically transformed in her absence. Ravaged by drug wars and barricaded by an eighteen-foot steel wall, her ancestral land had become the nation’s foremost crossing ground for undocumented workers, many of whom perished along the way. Before Elizondo Griest moved to the New York/Canada borderlands, the frequency of these tragedies seemed like a terrible coincidence. Once she began to meet Mohawks from the Akwesasne Nation, however, she recognized striking parallels to life on the southern border. Having lost their land through devious treaties, their mother tongues at English-only schools, and their traditional occupations through capitalist ventures, Tejanos and Mohawks alike struggle under the legacy of colonialism. Toxic industries surround their neighborhoods while the U.S. Border Patrol militarizes them. Combating these forces are legions of artists and activists devoted to preserving their indigenous cultures. Complex belief systems, meanwhile, conjure miracles. In All the Agents and Saints, Elizondo Griest weaves seven years of stories into a meditation on the existential impact of international borderlines by illuminating the spaces in between.

Prior to 1914, Germany dominated the worldwide production of synthetic organic dyes and pharmaceuticals like aspirin. When World War I disrupted the supply of German chemicals to the United States, American entrepreneurs responded to the shortages and high prices by trying to manufacture chemicals domestically. Learning the complex science and industry, however, posed a serious challenge. This book explains how the United States built a synthetic organic chemicals industry in World War I and the 1920s. It argues that Americans' intense anti-German sentiment during the war helped to forge a concentrated effort among firms, the federal government, and universities to make the United States independent of “foreign chemicals.” Besides mobilization efforts to make high explosives and war gases, federal policies included protective tariffs, gathering and publishing market information, and, most dramatically, confiscation of German-owned chemical subsidiaries and patents. Meanwhile, firms and universities worked hard to develop scientific and manufacturing expertise. Against a backdrop of hostilities and intrigue, the book shows how chemicals were deeply entwined with national and international politics and policy during the war and subsequent isolationism of the turbulent early twentieth century.

The dangerous, decades-long arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War begged a fundamental question: how did these superpowers actually plan to survive a nuclear strike? In Armageddon Insurance, the first historical account of Soviet civil defense and a pioneering reappraisal of its American counterpart, Edward M. Geist compares how the two superpowers tried, and mostly failed, to reinforce their societies to withstand the ultimate catastrophe. Drawing on previously unexamined documents from archives in America, Russia, and Ukraine, Geist places these civil defense programs in their political and cultural contexts, demonstrating how each country's efforts reflected its cultural preoccupations and blind spots and revealing how American and Soviet civil defense related to profound issues of nuclear strategy and national values. This work challenges prevailing historical assumptions and unearths the ways Moscow and Washington developed nuclear weapons policies based not on rational strategic or technical considerations but in power struggles between different institutions pursuing their own narrow self-interests.

This full-length biography of Benjamin Mays (1894–1984) chronicles the life of the man Martin Luther King Jr. called his “spiritual and intellectual father.” Dean of the Howard University School of Religion, president of Morehouse College, and mentor to influential black leaders, Mays had a profound impact on the education of the leadership of the black church and of a generation of activists, policymakers, and educators. The author argues that Mays' ability to connect the message of Christianity to the responsibility to challenge injustice prepared the black church for its pivotal role in the civil rights movement. From Mays' humble origins in Epworth, South Carolina, through his doctoral education, his work with institutions such as the National Urban League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the national Young Men's Christian Association movement, and his significant career in academia, the author creates a portrait of the man, the teacher, and the scholar. The book is a portrayal of one man's faith, thought, and mentorship in bringing American apartheid to an end.

Introducing a new model for the transnational history of the United States, this book places Mexican Americans at the center of the Texas creation story. It focuses on Mexican-Texan, or Tejano, society in a period of political transition beginning with the year of Mexican independence. The book explores the factors that helped shape the ethnic identity of the Tejano population, including cross-cultural contacts between Bexarenos, indigenous groups, and Anglo-Americans, as they negotiated the contingencies and pressures on the frontier of competing empires.

Centered on a series of dramatic murders in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Richmond, Virginia, this book uses these gripping stories of crime to explore the evolution of sensationalism in southern culture. In Richmond, as across the nation, the embrace of modernity was accompanied by the prodigious growth of mass culture and its accelerating interest in lurid stories of crime and bloodshed. While others have emphasized the importance of the penny press and yellow journalism on the shifting nature of the media and cultural responses to violence, this book reveals a more gradual and nuanced story of change. In addition, Richmond's racial makeup (one-third to one-half of the population was African American) allows the book to challenge assumptions about how black and white media reported the sensational; the surprising discrepancies offer insight into just how differently these two communities experienced American justice.

In 1947, 4,000 motorcycle hobbyists converged on Hollister, California. As images of dissolute bikers graced the pages of newspapers and magazines, the three-day gathering sparked the growth of a new subculture while also touching off national alarm. In the years that followed, the stereotypical leather-clad biker emerged in the American consciousness as a menace to law-abiding motorists and small towns. Yet a few short decades later, the motorcyclist, once menacing, became mainstream. To understand this shift, this book narrates the evolution of motorcycle culture since World War II.

Mid-twentieth-century women could be “bosses” and “ladies” but this required them to effectively navigate inherent tensions between these two labels, to seize opportunities wherever they found them and sometimes to embrace stereotypical and status quo ideas to support their business success. Boss Lady tells this story, examining the history of three female entrepreneurs who established companies in the 1930s, sold them to major corporations in the 1960s/70s and became some of the first female board members in the country’s largest companies. Tillie Lewis, founder of Flotill Products in Stockton, California, Olive Ann Beech co-founder of Beech Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas, and Margaret Rudkin founder of Pepperidge Farm in Fairfield, Connecticut became the first women on the boards of the Ogden Corporation, Raytheon and Campbell’s Soup. These female leaders began their ascent to the top of the business world before women enjoyed widespread access to higher education, credit discrimination protections or federal incentives for business ownership. And they did so in the manufacturing sector which historically has drawn few female entrepreneurs because of its high barriers to entry. How they charted paths to success by leveraging their networks, capitalizing on relations with government, conforming to conventional labor management strategies, manipulating commonly-held gender ideas to their advantage, and asserting and advocating for themselves is the focus of the book. Restoring this earlier generation of female business leaders to the history of corporate America illustrates what it took for women to be successful in a man’s world in an era of obstacles.

Perhaps the most spectacular reaction to court-ordered busing in the 1970s occurred in Boston, where there was intense and protracted protest. This book explores the sources of white opposition to school desegregation. Racism was a key factor, it argues, but racial prejudice alone cannot explain the movement. Class resentment, ethnic rivalries, and the defense of neighborhood turf all played powerful roles in the protest. In a new epilogue, the author brings the story up to the present day, describing the end of desegregation orders in Boston and other cities. He also examines the nationwide trend toward the resegregation of schools, which he explains is the result of Supreme Court decisions, attacks on affirmative action, white flight, and other factors. The author closes with a brief look at the few school districts that have attempted to base school assignment policies on class or economic status.

Professional football today is an $8 billion sports entertainment industry—and the most popular spectator sport in America, with designs on expansion across the globe. This field-level view of the National Football League (NFL) since 1960 looks closely at the development of the sport and at the image of the NFL and its unique place in American life. New to this edition is an analysis of the offseason labor negotiations and their potential effects on the future of the sport, and an account of how the NFL is dealing with the latest research on concussions and head injuries.

This expansive history of documentary work in the South during the twentieth century examines the motivations and methodologies of several pivotal documentarians, including sociologists Howard Odum and Arthur Raper, photographers Jack Delano and Danny Lyon, and music ethnographer John Cohen. It also explores the contentious history of documentary work in Hale County, Alabama, a place immortalized by writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans in their collaborative book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well by other documentary artists such as William Christenberry, Martha Young, and J.W. Otts. The work of these documentarians salvaged and celebrated folk cultures threatened by modernization or strived to reveal and reform problems linked to the region's racial caste system and exploitative agricultural economy. Images of alluring primitivism and troubling pathology often blurred together, neutralizing the aims of documentary work carried out in the name of reform during the Progressive era, New Deal, and civil rights movement. Black and white southerners in turn often resisted documentarians' attempts to turn their private lives into public symbols. Hale County, Alabama and other places in the region became not only an iconic sites of representation but also battlegrounds where black and white residents challenged the right of documentarians to represent them. The accumulation of influential and, occasionally, controversial documentary images of the South created an enduring, complex, and sometimes self-defeating mythology about the region that persists into the twenty-first century.

This biography of Jewish American writer and humorist Harry Golden (1903–1981) illuminates a remarkable life intertwined with the rise of the civil rights movement, Jewish popular culture, and the sometimes precarious position of Jews in the South and across America during the 1950s. After recounting Golden’s childhood on New York’s Lower East Side, the text points to his stint in prison as a young man, after a widely publicized conviction for investment fraud during the Great Depression, as the root of his empathy for the underdog in any story. During World War II, the cigar-smoking, bourbon-loving raconteur landed in Charlotte, North Carolina, and founded the Carolina Israelite newspaper, which was published into the 1960s. Golden’s writings on race relations and equal rights attracted a huge popular readership. Golden used his celebrity to editorialize for civil rights as the momentous story unfolded. He charmed his way into friendships and lively correspondence with Carl Sandburg, Adlai Stevenson, Robert Kennedy, and Billy Graham, among other notable Americans, and he appeared on the Tonight Show as well as other national television programs.

This book examines the migrations of Vietnamese adoptees and Amerasians since 1965 to answer questions about gendered power relations, obligations to refugees, and constructions of family during an era when U.S. immigration laws elevated the importance of family as a category of entry and anxieties about the consequences of U.S. global interventions intensified. A desire to redeem defeat in Vietnam, faith in conventional forms of kinship, and commitment to capitalism guided American efforts on behalf of Vietnamese children and young adults. However Vietnamese migrants countered these gestures, seeking and sometimes finding reunion with their children and thus pressing their claims as refugees in the United States. As Vietnamese and Americans debated the forms, duties, and privileges of family, they ultimately reworked ideas of responsibility and modes of belonging shattered by war.

Monumental in scope and vividly detailed, Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation’s capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between America’s expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification. But D.C. is more than just a seat of government, and authors Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove also highlight the city’s rich history of local activism as Washingtonians of all races have struggled to make their voices heard in an undemocratic city where residents lack full political rights. Tracing D.C.’s massive transformations--from a sparsely inhabited plantation society into a diverse metropolis, from a center of the slave trade to the nation’s first black-majority city, from “Chocolate City” to “Latte City”--Asch and Musgrove offer an engaging narrative peppered with unforgettable characters, a history of deep racial division but also one of hope, resilience, and interracial cooperation.

Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world’s leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernández documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation’s carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

Claiming Turtle Mountain’s Constitution examines the formation and adoption of the first constitution of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians through the eyes of the tribal members who voted to adopt it. Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this work of legal and social history describes the seminal moment in which the people of Turtle Mountain chose their constitution as a means to accomplish a much larger political goal: beginning a lawsuit against the federal government. By decentering the federal government, the federal actors of the time, and federal legislation such as the Indian Reorganization Act, Claiming Turtle Mountain’s Constitution reorients the tribal citizens who made this important decision at the heart of their own governance and legal, political, and social history. The Plains Ojibwe and Métis who merged together – within the vise of settler colonialism – to become the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians were distressed at the federal government’s disruption of their leadership structure, their treaty, and their reservation and for decades sought a lawsuit against the federal government to rectify these wrongs. The tribal nation adopted a constitution in 1932 that many recognized as deficient and limiting in the hopes that it would lead toward a lawsuit. Tribal citizens have lived with the consequences of this difficult choice ever since. Claiming Turtle Mountain’s Constitution argues that understanding the origins of tribal constitutions from the tribal nation’s perspective is crucial to understanding both historical and contemporary tribal governance and American constitutionalism more broadly.

At a time when race and inequality dominate national debates, the story of West Charlotte High School illuminates the possibilities and challenges of using racial and economic desegregation to foster educational equality. West Charlotte opened in 1938 as a segregated school that embodied the aspirations of the growing African American population of Charlotte, North Carolina. In the 1970s, when Charlotte began court-ordered busing, black and white families made West Charlotte the celebrated flagship of the most integrated major school system in the nation. But as the twentieth century neared its close and a new court order eliminated race-based busing, Charlotte schools resegregated along lines of class as well as race. West Charlotte became the city’s poorest, lowest-performing high school—a striking reminder of the people and places that Charlotte’s rapid growth had left behind. While dedicated teachers continue to educate children, the school’s challenges underscore the painful consequences of resegregation.Drawing on nearly two decades of interviews with students, educators, and alumni, the author uses the history of a community’s beloved school to tell a broader American story of education, community, democracy, and race—all while raising questions about present-day strategies for school reform.