You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This first full-length biography of Harrison offers a portrait of a man ahead of his time in synthesizing race and class struggles in the U.S. and a leading influence on better known activists from Marcus Garvey to A. Philip Randolph. Harrison emigrated from St. Croix in 1883 and went on to become a foremost organizer for the Socialist Party in New York, the editor of the Negro World, and founder and leader of the World War I-era New Negro movement. Harrison s enormous political and intellectual appetites were channeled into his work as an orator, writer, political activist, and critic. He was an avid bibliophile, reportedly the first regular black book reviewer, who helped to develop the public library in Harlem into an international center for research on black culture. But Harrison was a freelancer so candid in his criticism of the establishment-black and white-that he had few allies or people interested in protecting his legacy. Historian Perry s detailed research brings to life a transformative figure who has been little recognized for his contributions to progressive race and class politics. Copyright Booklist Reviews 2008.
Prologue -- The trailblazers -- The garment workers -- The mill workers -- The revolutionaries -- The miners -- The harvesters -- The cleaners -- The freedom fighters -- The movers -- The metalworkers -- The disabled workers -- The sex workers -- The prisoners -- Epilogue.
One of America's most prominent historians and a noted feminist bring together the most important political writings and testimonials from African-Americans over three centuries.
A comprehensive, tour-de-force analysis of the birth of slavery, racism, and white supremacy in the American South—and how it shaped our modern world. “A must-read for all social justice activists, teachers, and scholars.” —Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States Long heralded as a classic study of the origin of white privilege from the activist who first coined the term, Theodore W. Allen’s work remains an indispensable resource for making sense of our conflicted present, a reference point for everyone from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Nell Irvin Painter to Reni-Eddo Lodge and Aníbal Quijano. When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in...
When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no "white" people there. Nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. In this seminal two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race, Theodore W. Allen tells the story of how America's ruling classes created the category of the "white race" as a means of social control. Since that early invention, white privileges have enforced the myth of racial superiority, and that fact has been central to maintaining ruling-class domination over ordinary working people of all colors throughout American history. Volume I draws lessons from Irish history, comparing British rule in Ireland with the "white" oppression of Native Americans and African Americans. Allen details how Irish immigrants fleeing persecution learned to spread racial oppression in their adoptive country as part of white America. Since publication in the mid-nineties, The Invention of the White Race has become indispensable in debates on the origins of racial oppression in America. In this updated edition, scholar Jeffrey B. Perry provides a new introduction, a short biography of the author and a study guide.
Diasporic Africa presents the most recent research on the history and experiences of people of African descent outside of the African continent. By incorporating Europe and North Africa as well as North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this reader shifts the discourse on the African diaspora away from its focus solely on the Americas, underscoring the fact that much of the movement of people of African descent took place in Old World contexts. This broader view allows for a more comprehensive approach to the study of the African diaspora. The volume provides an overview of African diaspora studies and features as a major concern a rigorous interrogation of "identity." Other primary themes include contributions to western civilization, from religion, music, and sports to agricultural production and medicine, as well as the way in which our understanding of the African diaspora fits into larger studies of transnational phenomena.
"A monumental study of the birth of racism in the American South which makes truly new and convincing points about one of the most critical problems in US history a highly original and seminal work." David Roediger, University of Missouri
Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze describes the ideas that defined the movement and struggle to be free by Black people in the United States during their Modern Era. Using a historical perspective, this work engages the question of how the historical experience of oppression and the denial of humanity created space for the development of a certain consciousness. The existence and demonstration of agency within the ideas of the African diaspora and the creation of an intentional community with the aim of defining and attaining freedom are dissected in order to understand the Black community as a whole during the modern era. This book was nominated for the 2023 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in nonfiction.
On October 13, 1909, Francisco Ferrer, the notorious Catalan anarchist educator and founder of the Modern School, was executed by firing squad. The Spanish government accused him of masterminding the Tragic Week rebellion, while the transnational movement that emerged in his defense argued that he was simply the founder of the groundbreaking Modern School of Barcelona. Was Ferrer a ferocious revolutionary, an ardently nonviolent pedagogue, or something else entirely? Anarchist Education and the Modern School is the first historical reader to gather together Ferrer’s writings on rationalist education, revolutionary violence, and the general strike (most translated into English for the first...
With the social change brought on by the Great Migration of African Americans into the urban northeast after the Great War came the surge of a biracial sensibility that made America different from other Western nations. How white and black people thought about race and how both groups understood and attempted to define and control the demographic transformation are the subjects of this new book by a rising star in American history. An elegant account of the roiling environment that witnessed the shift from the multiplicity of white races to the arrival of biracialism, this book focuses on four representative spokesmen for the transforming age: Daniel Cohalan, the Irish-American nationalist, Tammany Hall man, and ruthless politician; Madison Grant, the patrician eugenicist and noisy white supremacist; W. E. B. Du Bois, the African-American social scientist and advocate of social justice; and Jean Toomer, the American pluralist and novelist of the interior life. Race, politics, and classification were their intense and troubling preoccupations in a world they did not create, would not accept, and tried to change.