Josephus Daniels was a progressive, a warm-hearted family man, a man who genuinely cared about the country’s less-fortunate and down-trodden, at least as he defined them. Yet at the same time, he was a white supremacist, who used the coercive powers of the state to keep blacks in a socially and economically inferior state for generations.
It was not just careers that came to an end in Woodrow Wilson’s Washington. African Americans also lost a claim to their legitimacy as American citizens and participants in the national state. Marked as corrupt and untrustworthy, black Americans have struggled ever since to clear their names as honest and trust-worthy citizens, a struggle that continues into our own time.
King’s letter scribbled on the edges of a newspaper is a democratic critique and draws attention to public aspect of faith traditions. In a democracy, faiths must always be self-critical and publicly criticized.
I had a new image of the Times Op-Ed department as a kind of graduate seminar on steroids, not just fact-checking and copy-editing but asking the rigorous questions.
We are honored and delighted to share the news of some of our most recent award-winning books. Hope you’ll join us in congratulating these fine authors. And you may want to consider using some of these books in your classroom or kitchen. Click the cover images or book titles to go to the book page …
Continue reading ‘Award-winning books from UNC Press (updated)’ »
The image of the armed woman as white, suburban-looking, and thoroughly domesticated is but one aspect of women’s gun culture, and women’s relationship to guns, in the United States.
Jesus has had a long, exciting, funny, and painful life in America. From the slave ships of the Atlantic Ocean to the Hollywood sets along the Golden Coast, from the visions out of Indian country to the artwork of children, from the firing of bullets to the construction of billboards, Jesus has been born, crucified, and resurrected in America’s racial sagas. Those of the twenty-first century laugh because there is so much to cry over.
Where did he find his inspiration? Frequently in what we would call gaffes. Those little slips that so reveal the true character of any politician helped to inspire Nast’s pencil to new heights.
Now available: Alan M. Wald’s American Literary Left Trilogy, Omnibus E-Book: Includes American Night, Trinity of Passion, and Exiles from a Future Time
To justify their more rigorous white supremacy that stood against racial segregation and for immigrant restriction and conservative politics, the Klan in the 1910s and ’20s turned to the white Jesus.
What does it mean to be literate? Fiona Deans Halloran explores the literacy of Thomas Nast’s political cartoons.
It’s a Twitter event! This Wednesday, December 12, from 9-10 pm EST join @LoriRotskoff, @uncpressblog, and @MamaDramaNY for a Twitter celebration and discussion of the 40th anniversary of Free to Be…You and Me, the popular nonsexist children’s album/book/TV special that has helped shape the childhoods and parenting practices of generations.
The most fascinating thing about the letter is that before the Civil War, just about everyone knew that it was a fraud. Whenever Americans discussed it, such as the President of Yale University Ezra Stiles, they admitted that it was a fake and that the Bible said nothing of what Jesus looked like. But then between the Civil War and the Great Depression, white Americans transformed it into a believed truth.
Today marks the 70th anniversary of Casablanca’s world premier on November 26, 1942. In the following post, M. Todd Bennett, author of One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II, reveals what fans may not know about the movie, widely considered among the best ever made.
Lori Rotskoff and Laura L. Lovett, editors of When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made discuss the legacy of Free to Be…You and Me after 40 years.
