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When Rayford W. Logan’s astute history of Howard University appeared in 1969, Logan was in a unique position to analyze one of the nation’s most prominent African American colleges. He had recently completed nearly thirty years at Howard as a history professor, living and teaching through almost a third of the school’s first century. Drawing from his own knowledge and university documents, Logan traced Howard’s chronology from 1866, when it was conceived as a theological seminary for African American ministers, to the increasingly successful, and in Logan’s words, cosmopolitan, institution of the 1960s. Logan detailed university milestones, including Howard’s founding by an act of Congress in 1867 and the election of Dr. Mordecai W. Johnson, the university’s first black president, in 1926, as well as the accomplishments of Howard graduates. More than thirty years after its first publication, Logan’s engaging account is essential for a thorough understanding of Howard, and its place in the legacy of historically black universities.
The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor in the Case of Black Washington, D.C. considers the function of oral history in shaping community dynamics among African American residents of the nation's capitol. The only attempt to document rumor and legends relating to complexion in black communities, The Paper Bag Principle looks at the divide that has existed between the black elite and the black "folk." The Paper Bag Principle focuses on three objectives: to record lore related to the "paper bag principle" (the set of attitudes that granted blacks with light skin higher status in black communities); to investigate the impact that this "principle" has had on the development of black community consciousness; and to link this material to power that results from proximity to whiteness. The Paper Bag Principle is sure to appeal to scholars and historians interested in African American studies, cultural studies, oral history, folklore, and ethnic and urban studies.
In a pathbreaking new assessment of the shaping of black male identity in the early twentieth century, Martin Summers explores how middle-class African American and African Caribbean immigrant men constructed a gendered sense of self through organizational life, work, leisure, and cultural production. Examining both the public and private aspects of gender formation, Summers challenges the current trajectory of masculinity studies by treating black men as historical agents in their own identity formation, rather than as screens on which white men projected their own racial and gender anxieties and desires. Manliness and Its Discontents focuses on four distinct yet overlapping social milieus:...
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