You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Between 1940 and 1945, thousands of African Americans migrated from the South to the East Bay Area of northern California in search of the social and economic mobility that was associated with the region's expanding defense industry and its reputation for greater racial tolerance. Drawing on fifty oral interviews with migrants as well as on archival and other written records, Abiding Courage examines the experiences of the African American women who migrated west and built communities there. Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo vividly shows how women made the transition from southern domestic and field work to jobs in an industrial, wartime economy. At the same time, they were struggling to keep their families together, establishing new households, and creating community-sustaining networks and institutions. While white women shouldered the double burden of wage labor and housework, black women faced even greater challenges: finding houses and schools, locating churches and medical services, and contending with racism. By focusing on women, Lemke-Santangelo provides new perspectives on where and how social change takes place and how community is established and maintained.
The first book to focus specifically on the women of the counterculture movement reveals how hippie women launched a subtle rebellion by by rejecting their mothers' suburban domesticity in favor of their grandmothers' agrarian ideals, which assigned greater value to women's contributions.
With a strong social emphasis and succinct narrative, COMPETING VISIONS: A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA, 2E chronicles the stories of people who have had an impact on the state's history while presenting California as a hub of competing economic, social, and political visions. It highlights the state's cultural diversity and explicitly compares it to other Western states, the nation, and the world--illustrating the national and international significance of California's history. Its chronological organization and thematic approach enables readers to keep track of events and fully understand their significance. Telling the full story, the text concludes by discussing such current events as immigration and demographic changes, the Occupy Movement, energy challenges, and more.
From the 18th century, African Americans, like many others, have migrated to California to seek fortunes or, often, the more modest goals of being able to find work, own a home, and raise a family relatively free of discrimination. Not only their search but also its outcome is covered in Seeking El Dorado. Whether they settled in major cities or smaller towns, African Americans created institutions and organizations—churches, social clubs, literary societies, fraternal orders, civil rights organizations—that embodied the legacy of their past and the values they shared. Blacks came in search of the same jobs as other Americans, but the search often proved frustrating. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, African American leadership in the state consistently focused on achieving racial justice. The essays in this book speak of triumph and hardship, success, discrimination, and disappointment. Seeking El Dorado is a major contribution to black history and the history of the American West and will be of interest to both scholars and general readers.
Gregory reaches into the migrants' lives to reveal both their economic trials and their impact on California's culture and society. He traces the development of an 'Okie subculture' which is now an essential element of California's cultural landscape.
This short overview of the United States hippie social movement examines hippie beliefs and practices.
"Exploring the health benefits that the hula hoop can foster in both the physical and mental sense, "Hoopdance Revolution" is a choice and highly recommended addition to health and self-help collections, recommended." Midwest Bookwatch If you are looking for healthy fun, regardless of your age, size, or level of fitness, this hands-on guidebook is for you. "Hoopdance Revolution" puts a new spin on that favorite childhood pastime, hula hooping. Find out how it evolved into a fitness program, what makes hoopdance so popular today, and why it is steadily gaining followers worldwide. As the counterculture of hoopdance took hold in recent decades, it gradually merged with other forms of dance, ae...
Drawing on folktales, oral histories, religious rituals and music, this book explores the pervasive influence of African traditions on American life. Pierson aims to reinterpret American history in a way that disrupts conventional assumptions and turns racial stereotypes inside out.
During World War II, factories across America retooled for wartime production, and unprecedented labor opportunities opened up for women and minorities. In We, Too, Are Americans, Megan Taylor Shockley examines the experiences of the African American women who worked in two capitols of industry--Detroit, Michigan, and Richmond, Virginia--during the war and the decade that followed it, making a compelling case for viewing World War II as the crucible of the civil rights movement. As demands on them intensified, the women working to provide American troops with clothing, medical supplies, and other services became increasingly aware of their key role in the war effort. A considerable number of the African Americans among them began to use their indispensability to leverage demands for equal employment, welfare and citizenship benefits, fair treatment, good working conditions, and other considerations previously denied them. Shockley shows that as these women strove to redefine citizenship, backing up their claims to equality with lawsuits, sit-ins, and other forms of activism, they were forging tools that civil rights activists would continue to use in the years to come.
In this book sociologist Robert D. Bullard explores the major social, economic, and political factors that helped make Houston the "golden buckle" of the Sunbelt. He then chronicles the rise of Houston's black neighborhoods. Using case studies conducted in Houston's Third Ward, the city's most diverse black neighborhood, he discusses housing patterns, discrimination, law enforcement, and leadership, relating these to the larger issues of institutional racism, poverty, and politics. Book jacket.