A Nation of Minorities

Chris Beneke  

With the present birthrate, the Nordic stock will have become a hopeless minority within fifty years, and will within two hundred have been choked to death, like grain among weeds. Unless some means is found of making the Nordic feel safe in having children we are already doomed.

- Hiram Wesley Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” (1926)

When Evans, the Ku Klux Klan’s Imperial Wizard and Emperor, offered this non-scientific demographic projection in the pages of the respectable North American Review in 1926 he wasn’t far out of the mainstream. Two years earlier, the U.S. Congress had passed an immigration restriction bill that severely narrowed the gates through which immigrants from eastern and southern Europe passed. The impending, relative decline of the Nordics was a leading justification for the measure.

Evans’ apoplexy contrasts with the relative equanimity that greeted the recent news that non-white births now outnumber white births in the U.S.—presaging a non-white majority by midcentury.* While the initial frenzy of reporting dripped with anticipated angst, the nation largely managed to keep its composure.

Interestingly, much of Evans’ vitriol—and much of the contemporary KKK’s general vitriol—was aimed at the Roman Catholic church. Anti-Catholicism didn’t come to an immediate end when the Klan imploded in the late 1920s. But it never again reached such heights.

While religion and ethnicity are very different social categories, and early 21^st domestic and international politics much different than those of pre-Great Society, Cold War America, we can still discern some revealing parallels between the conditions under which white Catholics were successfully integrated into American society and those now surrounding the growing Hispanic population. In other words, we have a historical precedent for the accommodation of a large block of new immigrants in the U.S., despite the hyperbolic fury of the extreme right and the dour pessimism of the extreme left.

Setting aside the fact that nearly one-third of all U.S. Catholics are now Hispanic, there are at least five easily identifiable parallels between 21^st-century Hispanics and 1920s-era Catholics:

1. As early 20^th-century Catholics were a diverse group bound together by an ancestral  faith, so are Hispanics from a variety of backgrounds bound together by an ancestral  language; 
2. Hispanics are approaching one-fifth of the U.S. population—as were Roman Catholics in the first decades of the 20^th, but their birth rates are likely to level off as they did for 20^th-century Catholics; 
3.The Hispanic population now includes a predominant nationality (Mexican American) that will, like Irish American predominance among early 20^th-century Roman Catholics, diminish as illegal immigration slows; 
4. Hispanics are marrying members of other ethnic groups at a rate comparable to 20^th-century Catholic religious exogamy; 
5.Explicit prejudice against Hispanics is increasingly confined to the extreme, economically marginal right—just as it was for early-mid-20^th-century Catholics.

This ad-hoc collection of rough analogies doesn’t guarantee anything about the next few decades of course. The investment firm’s stipulation that past performance is no guarantee of future results also goes for social change. And we should worry about the effects that the return of pre-World War II-levels of economic inequality might have.  Still, the case of early 20^th century Catholics is instructive and  encouraging. 

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* There are problems with the accounting, mainly because those Hispanics who identify as whites were included in the “non-white number.”  On this see Jeff Jacoby’s piece in The Boston Globe and Matthew Yglesias’s piece in SLATE.

Exploring Family History

Randall Stephens

This weekend NPR featured an interesting story about one scholar's quest to learn more about his family.

Eyre Crowe, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, ca. 1861

"Lawrence Jackson went through most of his life not knowing much about his family history," reports Guy Raz.  Continues Raz:

So he began a search, armed with only early boyhood memories, for his late grandfather's old home by the railroad tracks in Blairs, Va. Jackson describes his journey in a new book, My Father's Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War.

Shortly after Jackson began a search for his roots, he found out his great-grandfather was a slave.

"If you said to me that my father's grandfather grew up in slavery and actually spent maybe the first 10 or 15 years of his life as human chattel, I wouldn't have been able to take that idea so seriously" . . . 

This short segment well illustrates how the past still impacts the present.  A course that deals with 19th century US history might make use of stories like this.  In addition programs like Henry Louis Gates' African-American Lives uncover the past in a very personal way.  What better sense could students get of the significance of history?

I'll admit, I've never incorporated a genealogy project into the curriculum.  Yet, stories like these above make me wonder if it would work.

KKK Books and the Direction of History

Randall Stephens

[The following is a cross-post from the Religion in American History blog.]

Over at the New York Times, Kevin Boyle reviews two books on the Klan. Fellow blogmeister Kelly Baker's Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 is one of them along with Thomas R. Pegram's One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

The authors take different tacks. "While Pegram builds his book up from the experiences of ordinary Klansmen," writes Boyle, Baker "builds out from the Klan’s official declarations of religious devotion drawn from K.K.K. newspapers and magazines." What did the Klan's rise and fall mean? Was it an anomaly of the era or did it represent something darker, more continuous with America's past?

"Yes, the Klan had a very short life," says Boyle. He goes on:

But it has to be understood, [Baker] contends, as of a piece with other moments of fevered religious nationalism, from the anti-Catholic riots of the antebellum era to modern anti-­Islam bigots. Indeed, earlier this year, Herman Cain declared that he wouldn’t be comfortable with a Muslim in his cabinet. It’s tempting to see those moments as Pegram does the Klan: desperate, even pitiful attempts to stop the inevitable broadening of American society. But Baker seems closer to the mark when she says that there’s a dark strain of bigotry and exclusion running through the national experience. Sometimes it seems to weaken.

These books and Boyle's review bring up some weighty issues within American historiography.

How do historians and religious studies scholars generally see these episodes within the context of the arc of American history? Whig historians, of one variety or another, view them as bumps or potholes on the road to freedom and greater equality. Prigs look at them as something more, throwing the whole idea of progress up into the air. (Of course there are all sorts of opinions on the spectrum, shading from one end to the other. Historians need not even be aware of their own views on the subject. See Christopher Shannon's critique of the profession, which we published in Historically Speaking some months ago.)

Take Slavery. How does it fit into the narrative of US history? In 1980 historian John David Smith wrote in the Journal of Negro History that "The importance of slavery in the racial thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been vastly understated by scholars. Yet slavery held an unusual attraction for historians, popular writers, editors, and polemicists in these years." His piece marked a trend in the field. Slavery, historians now wrote, should be taken seriously as integral to the economy and to life in the 19th century. The PBS series Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery spelled out this theme for a wider audience and included talking head historians like Eric Foner, James Horton, and Nell Irvan Painter. Says Foner, "Slavery was an immense political power in the country, as well as an economic power. The three-fifths clause of the Constitution gave the slave South far greater representation in Congress, and a far larger number of electoral votes, than their white population really would have been entitled to. So the South really had an iron grip on the federal government, down to the middle of the 19th century."*

Other historians have been grappling with the issue of religious freedom/intolerance in ways that parallel Baker's approach. How does one chart the story of religious pluralism and religious bigotry? On this matter David Sehat sees a bleak side to America's past. "What if U.S. religious history was not a history of progressive and unfolding freedom?" he asks in his The Myth of American Religious Freedom. "What if, instead, it was a history of religious conflict? And what if that conflict involved extended periods of religious coercion and the continual attempt to maintain religious power and control?"

On the 19th century Protestant establishment an essay by Ronald P. Formisano and Stephen Pickering sheds some light (or, I guess I should say darkness?): “The Christian Nation Debate and Witness Competency,” in the Journal of the Early Republic. Most importantly, they note:

Historians have examined closely the Founders’ intentions regarding the First Amendment’s religious establishment clause as well as the influence of Protestant Christianity in the public life of the early republic. The new national government, and particularly several states, often breached Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state. . . . In courtrooms across the country, well into the nineteenth century, judges allowed witnesses to be questioned regarding their religious beliefs, with some requiring belief in the “future state” doctrine of divine rewards and punishments before permitting them to testify.

Of course, one generation's dark moments are another's beacons of truth. From where we stand in 2011, we judge and think about the past in ways that are profoundly different from the perspective of historians and religious studies scholars half a century ago. (Think Mircea Eliade.)

If we pull back and gauge the whole, what is American history in general or American religious history in particular about? Do either have a direction or a larger point? What if--as Paul Harvey asked in his review of the PBS documentary God in America--"American religious history [is] about coercion and authority? . . . [W]hat if we make coercion, establishment, and repression as central to our narrative as freedom, disestablishment, and expression? What if this is a show in which Americans’ self-understanding as derived from Exodus is more critically examined than celebrated?"

Edward J. Blum on Race and Religion in Recent History

Randall Stephens

On Wednesday the history department at my institution hosted San Diego State University historian Edward J. Blum, who delivered an intriguing lecture on "What Humor Tells Us about Race and Jesus in America."

Blum is the author, with Paul Harvey, of the forthcoming Jesus Christ in Red, White, and Black (UNC Press, 2012), which "examines the central roles played by depictions of Christ in racial battles from the colonial era to the present."* Blum has also authored a variety of other books and articles on race, religion, and American culture.

In his lecture here on campus, Blum asked students, faculty, and community members to think about how humor in America has changed since the 1970s. What might have been utterly taboo in previous decades--jokes about Jesus, or cracks about religion and race--are now common.

A reporter from the local paper, Dan McCready, showed up and wrote a brief piece on the event. (See the article here along with a short video.) Blum addressed depictions of Jesus and described how Americans have talked about and represented God over the decades and centuries. Those images and ideas about race in general led to innumerable conflicts in the 1960s and 70s, many rehearsed on TV and the big screen. Said Blum to McCready: "What happens in the 1970’s is [that] Americans tire out from the Civil Rights movement, they tired out from all the struggles and we see a backlash to racial problems." Enter Archie Bunker, Dirty Harry, and Rocky Balboa.

Using episodes from South Park and Family Guy, along with popular films, Blum ably guided the audience through the twists and turns of popular culture and showed how we got from point A to point B. Few topics could get students to think about change over time as this did. And I'm always glad to have that key aspect of history discussed by visiting speakers!

Historians in the News Roundup

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Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Civil War Isn't Tragic Cont.," The Atlantic, August 16, 2011



Anyone who's going to deal in Civil War studies really needs to take a moment to grapple with James McPherson's This Mighty Scourge. I doubt that this was McPherson's intent, but the first essay in the book is really what set me on the path of questioning the "Civil War as American Tragedy" narrative on to the "Civil War as American Revolution" line of thinking.



I suspect McPherson might not agree with my reframing--I'm probably being a bit too pat. Nevertheless, his essay demonstrates that the idea of the Civil War as avoidable tragedy didn't materialize out of thin air; it comes not just out of American popular memory, but right out of American historiography.>>>



Charlotte Higgins, "Historians say Michael Gove risks turning history lessons into propaganda classes," Guardian, August 17, 2011



Leading historians are to hit out against Michael Gove's plans for history teaching, saying they risk "going down the route of propaganda".



Gove has said history in schools ought to "celebrate the distinguished role of these islands in the history of the world" and portray Britain as "a beacon of liberty for others to emulate".



But Tom Devine, professor of history at the University of Edinburgh, said: "I am root and branch opposed to Gove's approach. It smells of whiggery; of history as chauvinism. You cannot pick out aspects of the past that may be pleasing to people.">>>



Karen Valby, "Black Women Historians come out against 'The Help,'" Entertainment Weekly, August 11, 2011



The Association of Black Women Historians released a statement today, urging fans of both the best-selling novel and the new movie The Help to reconsider the popular tale of African American maids in 1960s Jackson, Miss., who risk sharing their experiences with a young white journalist. “Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers,” the statement read.>>>



David Barrett, "Historian Starkey in 'racism' row over riot comments," Telegraph, August 14, 2011



Dr Starkey cited Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech from 1968, which criticised Commonwealth immigration, and suggested it had been “absolutely right in one sense”.



He was described as a “racist” and accused of “tribal bigotry” for his provocative comments.



Referring to last week’s riots, Dr Starkey told BBC2’s Newsnight: “But it was not inter-community violence, this is where he (Powell) was completely wrong.>>>



Richard Florida, "The inchoate rage beneath our global cities," Financial Times, August 16, 2011



. . . . Then there is this: our greatest cities are not bland monocultures but the very features that make them dynamic also contribute to their instability. Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian, long ago noted that a combination of density and the poor being close to centres of political power transformed old-style cities into centres of insurrection. It is no accident that the most innovative US cities also have the highest levels of protest and among the lowest levels of social capital and cohesion. Much the same is true of London.>>>

Jeremy Bangs's Experience with Sundown Towns

Randall Stephens

Americans born after the 1950s may not know that there ever were such things as sundown towns. James W. Loewen writes about them in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New Press, 2005). "'Don’t let the sun go down on you in this town.' We equate these words with the Jim Crow South," summarizes the book's website, "but, in a sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, award-winning and bestselling author James W. Loewen demonstrates that strict racial exclusion was the norm in American towns and villages from sea to shining sea for much of the twentieth century."

Jeremy Bangs emailed me the other day about his experience of growing up in Illinois and Kansas and being all-too aware of such villages and hamlets that dotted the midwest. Bangs is the founder of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum in Leiden and the author of Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners (General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 2009). Jeremy's father, Carl Bangs, was a leading authority on the life and theology of Jacobus Arminius. (I read his biography of Arminius when I first launched into grad school. I was hooked on history.) With Jeremy's permission, I include below his reminiscence about sundown towns.

When my father moved ca. 1952-53 from Chicago to Bourbonnais, IL, to teach religion and philosophy at Olivet Nazarene College, he first heard about the existence of such towns, including some in the immediate area. Like others on the faculty who were ordained, he sometimes was invited to preach, and, as director of the college's brass choir (which he started), he sometimes was asked to take students to perform in Sunday morning services in Nazarene churches in Illinois as fundraisers for the college.

He refused to accept invitations in towns that were known as sundown towns. He always explained that he would be happy to accept the church's invitation once the village or town had reversed its policy. He was not alone in this vocal opposition to the racist custom, and I think that he and his colleagues made this an issue that was discussed (and officially opposed) by area councils of churches. Further, we did not drive through such towns, taking the long way around, whatever that might be, when going somewhere farther away. Since most roads there were laid out in square patterns, there was always a way to drive around. I think that at least one town officially changed their policy, after being shamed from the pulpits. As I recall, that must have been Manteno, IL, because I know that it was once a sundown town but in later years we did drive through Manteno. (We moved to Kansas City in 1961.)

In Kansas City, looking for a house to buy, my parents were shocked to find out that certain suburbs excluded blacks as well as Jews. This was possible with so-called covenants in the deeds, by which a buyer obliged himself to refuse to sell to blacks or Jews. The suburbs were among those developed and operated by the J. C. Nichols Company, who also built Kansas City's Plaza. My parents refused to buy in such restricted areas and refused to buy from that company. My father also instigated legal action on this point against the J. C. Nichols Company, which led to some retaliation, although I've forgotten what form that took. I think that eventually this action resulted in the company's being forced to drop the policy and restrictive covenants, even before legal changes made them explicitly illegal. As in Illinois, my father was one among numerous clergymen who tried to bring an end to these restrictions.

Whiteness and WASPishness

Randall Stephens

Race in America has had a complicated history, to say the least. And in the 20th and 21st centuries, historians have grappled with the subject in a variety of ways. Scholars have analyzed the economic and social underpinnings of race and racism. They've scrutinized the power of race as a social construction. They've looked into how race and racism have changed over decades and centuries. They've examined the long-term effects of race-based slavery . . And they've looked into how "whiteness" developed as a counter to blackness and as a marker distinguishing whites from non-whites.

In 2001 Eric Arnesen wrote a piece on "Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination" for International Labor and Working-Class History. Historically Speaking published the essay in modified form in 2002. (I remember that this essay was quite useful for me as I slogged my way through historiography in grad school. And it's still a great read today.)

"The weaknesses of whiteness scholarship," observed Arnesen, "are particularly evident in its treatment of a subject that historians of the United States have chronicled for decades—the hostile encounter between Irish immigrants and African-Americans in the antebellum North."

Arnesen continued:

Attempting nothing short of a paradigmatic revolution, whiteness scholars suggest that the necessarily prior question, is 'how did the Irish become white?' To pose this question is to assert that 19th-century Irish immigrants to the United States were not white upon their arrival—that is, they were not seen as white by the larger American society and did not see themselves as white. Over time, whiteness scholars argue, they became white. Yet early and mid-19th-century commentators on the Irish did not speak of whiteness per se but invoked a more diverse discursive apparatus, weaving considerations of religion (which virtually vanish in the considerations of the whiteness scholars), notions of innate and observed character and behavior, and yes, race too into their anti-Irish commentaries. Therefore whiteness historians must assume the role of interpreter, translating the 19th-century vernacular of race and group inferiority into the late 20th-century idiom of whiteness.>>>

In the November 2010 issue of Historically Speaking, Kevin Schultz casts a similarly critical eye on the neologism WASP. In "The Waspish Hetero-Patriarchy: Locating Power in Recent American History," Schultz traces the term's origins and later ubiquity. Some excerpts from his illuminating essay:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term WASP was coined only in 1962, when the civil rights movement required an oppositional force against which it could protest. Rather than simply choose “white” (which would come later, and subsequently destroy much of our historical memory), the social landscape of the early 1960s demanded a more inclusive term. WASP is what social scientists came up with.

What came before WASP as a descriptive term for the dominant American social and cultural presence? During the first three decades of the 20th century, the term “Anglo- Saxon” took on importance as a national social identity. The term has deep roots; the Anglo-Saxons are famed for a 5th-century invasion of the British Isles. But at the beginning of the 20th century there was a need in America for a term that would differentiate the social elite from all others. Anglo-Saxon
served that need. . . .

Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, historians have shown that it has been politically, socially, and economically useful in our society to be seen as white, to possess an identity affiliated with whiteness.9 But for the first three or four decades of the 20th century, whiteness was not enough. One had to be considered Anglo-Saxon to achieve this status. And, like today’s “whiteness,” the phrase “Anglo-Saxon” lost any specific meaning once it be- came a social necessity. Everyone tried to claim it, and it lost all coherence. Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary of 1913, for instance, defined Anglo- Saxon as “a person of English descent in its broad- est sense.” In 1925 Sinclair Lewis described his hero Martin Arrowsmith as “a Typical Pure-bred Anglo- Saxon American, which means that he was a union of German, French, Scotch, Irish, perhaps a little Spanish, conceivably a little of the strains lumped together as ‘Jewish,’ and a great deal of English, which is itself a combination of primitive Briton, Celt, Phoenician, Roman, German, Dane and Swede.” Clearly the definition of Anglo-Saxon had become diffuse, even if the term’s importance had not.

Nevertheless, the abbreviated construction WASP picked up steam in 1963 as the civil rights movement progressed, appearing in that year in the New York Times and the New Statesman, although in each case the editors required a definition of the term to ensure that readers understood what it meant. Daniel Bell also paused to define WASP in his 1964 review of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot. By the middle of the 1960s, though, WASP no longer needed an accompanying definition. After just a few years in circulation, everyone knew what it meant. Baltzell himself did a good deal to popularize the term in his 1964 book The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America.

And we’ve been stuck with WASP ever since. Interestingly, the term became calcified as a permanent part of the American lexicon even as its sociological and historical accuracy demanded further refinement. Instead of continuing to be sociologically useful, it became a type, often to be castigated and derided. One reason for this might be that the sociological utility of all the markers inherent in the word WASP declined precipitously in the middle 1960s. . . .

And yet despite the rise and fall of the recognized power holders, the term WASP has remained calcified in its mid-century conception. Today, it typifies a stuffy type, someone in the cultural and social elite who disdains things popular and dresses preppy. It’s a much-maligned class identity more than it is a sociological descriptor. Indeed, the distinctions marked out by being a WASP are not necessarily bound by whiteness, Anglo-Saxonism, or Protestantism anymore. They signify an attitude and a manner of living. They have become commodified as “preppy” or what used to be called “Ivy League.” Today, it signifies an elitist snoot, a highbrow more than an actual white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. For example, it’s not hard to imagine someone describing the manner of, say, W.E.B. Du Bois—who wasn’t white, Anglo-Saxon, or technically Protestant—as being WASPish.

Read more of Schultz's interesting critique here.

Black Confederates, the Internet, and the Teaching of History

Heather Cox Richardson

The recent flap over the Virginia grade school textbook that asserted thousands of African Americans fought for the Confederacy brings up a couple of issues of interest to history teachers (aside from the obvious historical issues of race and the Civil War).

First, it raises the question of why on earth any school system would buy a textbook written by someone without training in the subject and published by a non-academic press, but that’s about politics, not history, so I’ll skip that for now.

Another big question here, though, is the use of the internet for research. Anyone who teaches history today knows that students invariably turn to the web as their main source of information. That’s just what textbook author Joy Masoff—who has no training in history and is best known for her book Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty—said she had done to research the material for her textbook.

Just like Masoff, students have no idea whether what they find on the internet is true or false.

A good tool for teaching students about the perils of relying on internet sources is to show them these two photos, which happen to address the issue of black Confederate soldiers (and which almost certainly played a part in Masoff’s mistake).

In 2005, Jerome S. Handler, a senior scholar at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and Michael L. Tuite, Jr., the former director of the University of Virginia Library Digital Media Lab, examined an image of black Confederate soldiers widespread on the web and popular among neo-Confederates. They published their conclusions on the web as “Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph.”

In their paper, they traced how the real photograph of black Union soldiers pictured above was scanned and digitally manipulated into the fake photograph of the “1st Louisiana Native Guard.” It’s a fascinating story.

I make it a point to talk the students through these photographs early in my Civil War history class, both to show them that they can’t believe everything they find on the internet, and to indicate just how aggressively modern politically-motivated organizations have advanced false information about the Civil War. Invariably, the students like the comparison of the photographs and the discussion of why someone would want to manipulate an image in this way.

And it does seem to have some effect on the degree to which they trust the internet.

Slavery in New England

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The Sunday Ideas section of the Boston Globe features an interesting essay on slavery in New England. Francie Latour lays bare some of the myths related to regionalism and slavery.

Francie Latour, "New England’s Hidden History," Boston Globe, September 26, 2010.

"When it comes to slavery, the story that New England has long told itself goes like this: Slavery happened in the South, and it ended thanks to the North. Maybe we had a little slavery, early on. But it wasn’t real slavery. We never had many slaves, and the ones we did have were practically family. . . .

As the nation prepares to mark the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War in 2011, with commemorations that reinforce the North/South divide, researchers are offering uncomfortable answers to that question, unearthing more and more of the hidden stories of New England slavery — its brutality, its staying power, and its silent presence in the very places that have become synonymous with freedom." >>>

Dispatches from the Historical Society Conference, Day 3: New Directions in the Study of Race and Slavery

Randall J.Stephens

Historians of the last two generations have been fascinated by the question of what race amounted to, or, how race was made. How was racial inferiority constructed and how did slavery take root in the early modern era? This panel, fitting with the umbrella theme of the conference, looked at some recent trends in the study of race and slavery. The three presenters skillfully spanned the centuries and ranged over several continents. (See the Youtube videos here, which record the first 10 minutes of each presentation.)

Session IVE: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF RACE AND SLAVERY
Room 413-14

Chair: Mark Smith, University of South Carolina

Joyce Malcolm, George Mason University School of Law, “Slavery in 18th-Century Massachusetts and the American Revolution”

Robert Cottrol, George Washington School of Law, “Race-Based Slavery and Race-Based Citizenship: How Brazil and the United States Became Different”

Amy Long Caffee, University of South Carolina, “Hearing Africa: Early Modern Europeans’ Auditory Perceptions of the African Other”

Joyce Malcolm (George Mason University School of Law) spoke about the legacy of slavery in the North during the Revolutionary War. She began by describing the surprising number of slaves in Massachusetts. Military service and its link to freedom varied widely between the North and the South. Malcolm called on historians to closer examine what happened to black soldiers after the war. She also pointed to the need for greater scrutiny of the possibilities and limits of freedom in the emerging nation. (The last New Hampshire slaves, noted Malcolm, died in the years before the Civil War.)

Robert Cottrol (George Washington School of Law) invited historians to think of the issue of slavery and its

legacy beyond the antebellum narrative and beyond the South. He called on historians to look at Latin America, opening up a bigger, hemisphere-wide picture. Slavery in Brazil, for instance, took place for a much longer period and was much more intensely tied to the African trade. Comparisons and contrasts between national legal systems explain some basic differences between North and South America. America's egalitarian ideals were embarrassed by slavery. Slavery's justification in the US revolved around race and black inferiority. Brazil, by contrast, was not a liberal society and was not as contradicted by the institution of slavery. Cottrol also asked several larger questions that are part of a broader project, including: "What is slavery's impact in terms of race relations?" And, he wondered: "How has slavery continued to shape the Western Hemisphere up to the present?"

Early in the European-African encounter white perceptions of Africans were shaping ideas of racial difference. Amy Long Caffee (University of South

Carolina) discussed the auditory notions English traders had of Africans in the early modern period. White traders and travelers reported their views to a larger public back in England. The documents of such venturers, observed Caffee, are "rich with sensory details." These reports speak volumes about what Englishmen thought of as a "barbarous land and people."

Summarizing the panel Mark Smith (University of South Carolina) commented that slavery was not an anomaly in the 19th century. It was the norm. Smith also linked the stereotypes, sensory and otherwise, of the 19th century to similar ones in the 20th century.

During the q and a session, participants considered where the field is headed. Malcolm thinks that more connections will be made between regions and eras. She also believes that the stereotypes of the antebellum period will be challenged more. Cottrol suggested that changes in graduate education--encouraging students to ask larger questions and requiring language work--could shift the field. Smith finally pointed out that emancipation and questions of slavery and freedom will possibly become a greater part of how historians in the area work.

Still Time to Register for the Historical Society Conference in DC

Randall Stephens

Eric Arnesen, George Washington University, has put together a terrific program for the Historical Society Conference next week at GWU's Marvin Center. And, there is still time to register for "Historical Inquiry in the New Century," at a reduced rate, if you have not already done so.

The conference will feature panels on a variety of topics, ranging from high school history teaching, historians as expert witnesses, and military history to gender, religion in modern Britain, and the Medieval West (you can read some of those papers now on-line). The conference has a number of sessions devoted to labor history and African-American history. The latter includes:

THURSDAY, JUNE 3

1:00-2:30

Session ID: SLAVERY, HISTORY, AND THE FUTURE: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Room 309

Chair: Robert Cottrol, George Washington University School of Law

Karlee-Anne Sapoznik, York University
"‘They Say That It's Culture, but It's Abuse’: Slavery and Servile Marriage in Historical and Contemporary Perspective”

Jeffrey Gunn, York University
"Evolving History in the 21st Century: The Paramount Role of Autobiography and Biography in Linking Historical and Contemporary Issues"

2:45-4:15pm

Session IID: DOES IT TAKE A SMALL WINDOW TO SEE THE BIG PICTURE?
Room 309

Chair: Melvin Patrick Ely, College of William and Mary

Melvin Patrick Ely
"What Reviewers Should Have Criticized about Israel on the Appomattox, But Didn't"

Nancy A. Hillman, College of William and Mary, "Drawn Together, Drawn Apart: Biracial Fellowship and Black Leadership in Virginia Baptist Churches Before and After Nat Turner"

Jennifer R. Loux, Library of Virginia, "How Proslavery Southerners Became Emancipationists: Slavery and Regional Identity in Frederick County, Maryland"

Ted Maris-Wolf, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
"Self-Enslavement in Virginia, 1856-1864: How Two Free Black Men Shaped a Law That Fueled the National Debate Over Slavery"

Comment: Melvin Patrick Ely

FRIDAY, JUNE 4

8:30-10:00am

Session IA: CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE BACKLASH
Room 301

Chair: Sonya Michel, Woodrow Wilson Center

Jerald Podair, Lawrence University, “‘One City, One Standard’: The Struggle for Equality in Rudolph Giuliani's New York”

Brett Gadsden, Emory University, “Refiguring White Backlash: Joseph Biden and the Liberal Retreat from School Desegregation”

Clarence Taylor, Baruch College, “The New York City Teacher's Union and Civil Rights”

Comment: Sonya Michel

10:15-11:45am

Session IIA: RETHINKING EMANCIPATION
Room 301

Chair: Alex Lichtenstein, Florida International University

James Oakes, CUNY Graduate Center
"Rethinking Emancipation"

Comment: Alex Lichtenstein

Comment: Chandra Manning, Georgetown University

2:45-4:15pm

Session IVA: STATE OF THE FIELD: TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY
Room 301

Chair: Adele Alexander, George Washington University

Daniel Letwin, Pennsylvania State University, "Black Political Thought in the Age of the New Negro"

Carol Anderson, Emory University, "Freedom Fighters on the Cold War Plantation: The Histories of African Americans' Anticolonialism"

Mary Ellen Curtin, University of Essex, "Race, Gender, and American Politics since 1965"

4:30-6:00pm

Session VA: "THE LONG CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT": A ROUNDTABLE
Room 301

Chair: Eric Arnesen, George Washington University

Patricia Sullivan, University of South Carolina

J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan

Beth Bates, Wayne State University

Robert Korstad, Duke University

James Leloudis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

SATURDAY, JUNE 5

8:30-10:00am

Session IE: RACE, POLITICS, PROSTITUTION, AND THE COLLAPSE OF RECONSTRUCTION IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH
Room 413-14

Chair: Leslie Rowland, University of Maryland

Emily Landau, University of Maryland, “Public Rights and Public Women: Plessy, Prostitution, and the Effects of Reconstruction’s Demise in New Orleans 1862-1896”

Michael A. Ross, University of Maryland, “Creole Icarus: Jean Baptiste Jourdain and the Rise and Fall of Reconstruction in New Orleans”

Comment: John Rodrigue, Stonehill College

10:15-11:45am

Session IIA: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND RACE IN THE U.S., I
Room 301

Chair: James Miller, George Washington University

Thomas Guglielmo, George Washington University, “Raising a Black and ‘So-Called White’ Military: Race-Making and America's World War II Draft”

Touré Reed, Illinois State University, “The Urban League in the New Deal Era”

Yevette Richards Jordan, George Mason University, “George McCray and the Shifting Dimensions of a Transnational Black Identity in Newly Independent Ghana”

1:00-2:30pm

Session IIIA: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND RACE IN THE U.S., II
Room 301

Chair: David Chappell, University of Oklahoma

Kevin Gerard Boyle, Ohio State University, “Redemption: Civil Rights, History, and the Promise of America”

Joseph Kip Kosek, George Washington University, “‘Who Is Their God?’: Religion and the Civil Rights Movement”

Sophia Z. Lee, Yale University, “Without the Intervention of Lawyers’: Race, Labor, and Conservative Politics in 1950s America”

Comment: David Chappell

2:45-4:15pm

Session IVB: RACE AND LABOR IN THE CONTEMPORARY SOUTH
Room 307

Chair: Robert H. Zieger, University of Florida

Jane Berger, Cornell University, "'A Lot Closer To What It Ought To Be': Black Women and Public-Sector Employment in Baltimore, 1950-1975"

Rob Chase, Case Western Reserve University, "Slaves of the State Revolt: Southern Prison Labor and a Prison-Made Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1980"

Michael Dennis, Acadia University, "The Virginia Organizing Project and the Movement for Economic Democracy"

Comment: Robert H. Zieger

Session IVD: TRADITIONS, REVISIONS, AND PUBLIC THEOLOGIES IN AFRICAN AMERICA
Room 309

Chair: Richard S. Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology

David Waldstreicher, Temple University, "Phillis Wheatley, Religion, and the American Revolutionaries"

Jacqueline Robinson, St. Joseph's University, “A Halfway Covenant for Harlem: The Public Theology of William Lloyd Imes”

Comment: Richard S. Newman

Session IVE: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF RACE AND SLAVERY
Room 413-14

Chair: Mark Smith, University of South Carolina

Joyce Malcolm, George Mason University School of Law, “Slavery in 18th-Century Massachusetts and the American Revolution”

Robert Cottrol, George Washington School of Law, “Race-Based Slavery and Race-Based Citizenship: How Brazil and the United States Became Different”

Amy Long Caffee, University of South Carolina, “Hearing Africa: Early Modern Europeans’ Auditory Perceptions of the African Other”

4:30-6:00pm

Session VA: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND RACE IN THE U.S., III
Room 301

Chair: Steven Reich, James Madison University

James Ralph, Middlebury College, “‘It is an Eternal Struggle’: The Pursuit of Civil Rights in the Land of Lincoln”

James D. Wolfinger, DePaul University, “‘The American Ideals of Justice and Equality’: The African-American Fight for Equal Rights in Levittown”

Kenneth Mack, Harvard Law School, “Race, Representation, and the Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer”

An Interview with Hank Klibanoff on Civil Rights, the Press, and Recent History

Randall Stephens

Back in October, the renowned journalist and historian Hank Klibanoff came to my school to give a lecture and to speak with students about his work. Klibanoff is a masterful raconteur and his knowledge of what was once called the "race beat" by journalists is remarkable. He sparked my students' interest in reporting, race, and modern American history.

Klibanoff served as managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution until 2008 and was the Deputy Managing Editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he worked for 20 years. He was also a reporter for the Boston Globe. His book, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, co-authored with Gene Roberts, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for History.

Klibanoff summarizes his recent work as follows:

Today in the American South, scores of civil rights murders remain unsolved, uninvestigated, unprosecuted, untold. Those two legacies of violence and silence still haunt the region and continue to damage race relations in the United States.

Many histories have been written about the struggle for civil rights; many documentaries have been made about the movement and the resistance that rose up against it. But the history of the South and of the United States still has huge, important holes where myths and mysteries reside, threatening to undermine the nation’s goal of putting racial conflict behind.

The Cold Case Truth and Justice Project is an unprecedented collaboration bringing together the power of investigative reporting, narrative writing, documentary filmmaking and multimedia development to reveal the long-neglected truth behind unsolved civil rights murders, and to facilitate reconciliation and healing.

Our reporters have produced extraordinary information in high-profile cases that prosecutors have used to build criminal cases against killers and conspirators who had walked free for more than 40 years. To date, every civil rights murder case that has been reopened and successfully prosecuted was the direct result of an investigation initiated by a journalist.

That will continue. But the greater goal and ultimate hope of the project is that the stories we tell, even about cases that can no longer be prosecuted, will bring reconciliation for individuals, for communities and for the nation.

While Klibanoff was up in Quincy, MA, I sat down with him to ask a few questions about his research and writing. I also spoke with him about the challenges of writing recent history. And, I asked about his ongoing work on civil rights, race, and cold cases. The 30-minute interview can be listened to in full below.