Download or read book Guten Tag Y all written by Marko Maunula and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nicknamed "Euroville," Spartanburg, South Carolina, is a home away from home for BMW, Michelin, Ciba-Geigy, and numerous other European corporations. Enriching our understanding of what globalization means to millions of small-town, blue-collar Americans, Guten Tag, Y'all looks at Spartanburg as a model of how determined communities can shape and influence globalization to their benefit—and liking. "South Carolinians in general and Spartans in particular do not believe in revolutions or quick fixes of any sort," writes Marko Maunula. Portraying Spartanburg to be a highly organized, hierarchical community, Maunula shows how it retained much of its preexisting culture and many of its institutions as it transformed itself from a mill town to a global business headquarters. As Maunula discusses such topics as global currency flows, cold war politics, federal trade policies, technological advances, and the decline of the American textile industry, he profiles industrialist Roger Milliken, civic booster Richard E. (Dick) Tukey, and others who successfully "sold" their vision for Spartanburg both abroad and on the home front. Maunula also analyzes the complex cultural give-and-take by which multinational corporations are transformed from alien, nationally identifiable foreign business units into localized conglomerates. Guten Tag, Y'all is a multifaceted, engaging case study of international economic survival and success at the local level.
Download or read book Uplifting the Race written by Kevin K. Gaines and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amidst the violent racism prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century, African American cultural elites, struggling to articulate a positive black identity, developed a middle-class ideology of racial uplift. Insisting that they were truly representative of the race's potential, black elites espoused an ethos of self-help and service to the black masses and distinguished themselves from the black majority as agents of civilization; hence the phrase 'uplifting the race.' A central assumption of racial uplift ideology was that African Americans' material and moral progress would diminish white racism. But Kevin Gaines argues that, in its emphasis on class distinctions and patriarchal authority, racial uplift ideology was tied to pejorative notions of racial pathology and thus was limited as a force against white prejudice. Drawing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Hubert H. Harrison, and others, Gaines focuses on the intersections between race and gender in both racial uplift ideology and black nationalist thought, showing that the meaning of uplift was intensely contested even among those who shared its aims. Ultimately, elite conceptions of the ideology retreated from more democratic visions of uplift as social advancement, leaving a legacy that narrows our conceptions of rights, citizenship, and social justice.
Download or read book The Struggle and the Urban South written by David Taft Terry and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the example of Baltimore, Maryland, David Taft Terry explores the historical importance of African American resistance to Jim Crow laws in the South’s largest cities. Terry also adds to our understanding of the underexplored historical period of the civil rights movement, prior to the 1960s. Baltimore, one of the South largest cities, was a crucible of segregationist laws and practices. In response, from the 1890s through the 1950s, African Americans there (like those in the South’s other major cities) shaped an evolving resistance to segregation across three themes. The first theme involved black southerners’ development of a counter-narrative to Jim Crow’s demeaning doctrines about them. Second, through participation in a national antisegregation agenda, urban South blacks nurtured a dynamic tension between their local branches of social justice organizations and national offices, so that southern blacks retained self-determination while expanding local resources for resistance. Third, with the rise of new antisegregation orthodoxies in the immediate post-World War II years, the urban South’s black leaders, citizens, and students and their allies worked ceaselessly to instigate confrontations between southern white transgressors and federal white enforcers. Along the way, African Americans worked to define equality for themselves and to gain the required power to demand it. They forged the protest traditions of an enduring black struggle for equality in the urban South. By 1960 that struggle had inspired a national civil rights movement.
Download or read book Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth Century America written by Dave Tell and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America revolutionizes how we think about confession and its ubiquitous place in American culture. It argues that the sheer act of labeling a text a confession has become one of the most powerful, and most overlooked, forms of intervening in American cultural politics. In the twentieth century alone, the genre of confession has profoundly shaped (and been shaped by) six of America’s most intractable cultural issues: sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy.
Download or read book Alabama Getaway written by Allen Tullos and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Alabama Getaway Allen Tullos explores the recent history of one of the nation's most conservative states to reveal its political imaginary—the public shape of power, popular imagery, and individual opportunity. From Alabama's largely ineffectual politicians to its miserly support of education, health care, cultural institutions, and social services, Tullos examines why the state appears to be stuck in repetitive loops of uneven development and debilitating habits of judgment. The state remains tied to fundamentalisms of religion, race, gender, winner-take-all economics, and militarism enforced by punitive and defensive responses to criticism. Tullos traces the spectral legacy of George Wallace, ponders the roots of anti-egalitarian political institutions and tax structures, and challenges Birmingham native Condoleezza Rice's use of the civil rights struggle to justify the war in Iraq. He also gives due coverage to the state's black citizens who with a minority of whites have sustained a movement for social justice and democratic inclusion. As Alabama competes for cultural tourism and global industries like auto manufacturing and biomedical research, Alabama Getaway asks if the coming years will see a transformation of the “Heart of Dixie.”
Download or read book The American South in the Twentieth Century written by Craig S. Pascoe and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the South today, the sight of a Latina in a NASCAR T-shirt behind the register at an Asian grocery would hardly draw a second glance. That scenario, and our likely reaction to it, surely signals something important--but what? Here some of the region’s most respected and readable observers look across the past century to help us take stock of where the South is now and where it may be headed. Reflecting the writers’ deep interests in southern history, politics, literature, religion, and other matters, the essays engage in new ways some timeless concerns about the region: How has the South changed--or not changed? Has the South as a distinct region disappeared, or has it absorbed the many forces of change and still retained its cultural and social distinctiveness? Although the essays touch on an engaging diversity of topics including the USDA’s crop spraying policies, Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full, and collegiate women’s soccer, they ultimately cluster around a common set of themes. These include race, segregation and the fall of Jim Crow, gender, cultural distinctiveness and identity, modernization, education, and urbanization. Mindful of the South’s reputation for insularity, the essays also gauge the impact of federal assistance, relocated industries, immigration, and other outside influences. As one contributor writes, and as all would acknowledge, those who undertake a project like this “should bear in mind that they are tracking a target moving constantly but often erratically.” The rewards of pondering a place as elusive, complex, and contradictory as the American South are on full display here.
Download or read book The Politics of White Rights written by Joseph Bagley and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Politics of White Rights, Joseph Bagley recounts the history of school desegregation litigation in Alabama, focusing on the malleability and durability of white resistance. He argues that the litigious battles of 1954–73 taught Alabama’s segregationists how to fashion a more subtle defense of white privilege, placing them in the vanguard of a new conservatism oriented toward the Sunbelt, not the South. Scholars have recently begun uncovering the ways in which segregationists abandoned violent backlash and overt economic reprisal and learned how to rearticulate their resistance and blind others to their racial motivations. Bagley is most interested in a creedal commitment to maintaining “law and order,” which lay at the heart of this transition. Before it was a buzz phrase meant to conjure up fears of urban black violence, “law and order” represented a politics that allowed self-styled white moderates to begrudgingly accept token desegregation and to begin to stake their own claims to constitutional rights without forcing them to repudiate segregation or white supremacy. Federal courts have, as recently as 2014, agreed that Alabama’s property tax system is crippling black education. Bagley argues that this is because, in the late 1960s, the politics of law and order became a politics of white rights, which supported not only white flight to suburbs and private schools but also nominally color-blind changes in the state’s tax code. These changes were designed to shield white money from the needs of increasingly black public education. Activists and courts have been powerless to do anything about them, because twenty years of desperate litigious combat finally taught Alabama lawmakers how to erect constitutional bulwarks that could withstand a legal assault.
Download or read book Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood written by Rebecca Brückmann and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood offers a comparative sociocultural and spatial history of white supremacist women who were active in segregationist grassroots activism in Little Rock, New Orleans, and Charleston from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Through her examination, Rebecca Brückmann uncovers and evaluates the roles, actions, self-understandings, and media representations of segregationist women in massive resistance in urban and metropolitan settings. Brückmann argues that white women were motivated by an everyday culture of white supremacy, and they created performative spaces for their segregationist agitation in the public sphere to legitimize their actions. While other studies of mass resistance have focused on maternalism, Brückmann shows that women’s invocation of motherhood was varied and primarily served as a tactical tool to continuously expand these women’s spaces. Through this examination she differentiates the circumstances, tactics, and representations used in the creation of performative spaces by working-class, middle-class, and elite women engaged in massive resistance. Brückmann focuses on the transgressive “street politics” of working-class female activists in Little Rock and New Orleans that contrasted with the more traditional political actions of segregationist, middle-class, and elite women in Charleston, who aligned white supremacist agitation with long-standing experience in conservative women’s clubs, including the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Working-class women’s groups chose consciously transgressive strategies, including violence, to elicit shock value and create states of emergency to further legitimize their actions and push for white supremacy.
Download or read book New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South written by Claudrena N. Harold and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study details how the development and maturation of New Negro politics and thought were shaped not only by New York–based intellectuals and revolutionary transformations in Europe, but also by people, ideas, and organizations rooted in the South. Claudrena N. Harold probes into critical events and developments below the Mason-Dixon Line, sharpening our understanding of how many black activists—along with particular segments of the white American Left—arrived at their views on the politics of race, nationhood, and the capitalist political economy. Focusing on Garveyites, A. Philip Randolph’s militant unionists, and black anti-imperialist protest groups, among others, Harold argues that the South was a largely overlooked “incubator of black protest activity” between World War I and the Great Depression. The activity she uncovers had implications beyond the region and adds complexity to a historical moment in which black southerners provided exciting organizational models of grassroots labor activism, assisted in the revitalization of black nationalist politics, engaged in robust intellectual arguments on the future of the South, and challenged the governance of historically black colleges. To uplift the race and by extension transform the world, New Negro southerners risked social isolation, ridicule, and even death. Their stories are reminders that black southerners played a crucial role not only in African Americans’ revolutionary quest for political empowerment, ontological clarity, and existential freedom but also in the global struggle to bring forth a more just and democratic world free from racial subjugation, dehumanizing labor practices, and colonial oppression.
Download or read book The Problem South written by Natalie J. Ring and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most historians, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the hostilities of the Civil War and the dashed hopes of Reconstruction give way to the nationalizing forces of cultural reunion, a process that is said to have downplayed sectional grievances and celebrated racial and industrial harmony. In truth, says Natalie J. Ring, this buoyant mythology competed with an equally powerful and far-reaching set of representations of the backward Problem South—one that shaped and reflected attempts by northern philanthropists, southern liberals, and federal experts to rehabilitate and reform the country's benighted region. Ring rewrites the history of sectional reconciliation and demonstrates how this group used the persuasive language of social science and regionalism to reconcile the paradox of poverty and progress by suggesting that the region was moving through an evolutionary period of “readjustment” toward a more perfect state of civilization. In addition, The Problem South contends that the transformation of the region into a mission field and laboratory for social change took place in a transnational moment of reform. Ambitious efforts to improve the economic welfare of the southern farmer, eradicate such diseases as malaria and hookworm, educate the southern populace, “uplift” poor whites, and solve the brewing “race problem” mirrored the colonial problems vexing the architects of empire around the globe. It was no coincidence, Ring argues, that the regulatory state's efforts to solve the “southern problem” and reformers' increasing reliance on social scientific methodology occurred during the height of U.S. imperial expansion.
Download or read book Who Gets a Childhood written by William S. Bush and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Texas as a case study for understanding change in the American juvenile justice system over the past century, the author tells the story of three cycles of scandal, reform, and retrenchment, each of which played out in ways that tended to extend the privileges of a protected childhood to white middle- and upper-class youth, while denying those protections to blacks, Latinos, and poor whites. On the forefront of both progressive and "get tough" reform campaigns, Texas has led national policy shifts in the treatment of delinquent youth to a surprising degree. Changes in the legal system have included the development of courts devoted exclusively to young offenders, the expanded legal application of psychological expertise, and the rise of the children's rights movement. At the same time, broader cultural ideas about adolescence have also changed. Yet the author demonstrates that as the notion of the teenager gained currency after World War II, white, middle-class teen criminals were increasingly depicted as suffering from curable emotional disorders even as the rate of incarceration rose sharply for black, Latino, and poor teens. He argues that despite the struggles of reformers, child advocates, parents, and youths themselves to make juvenile justice live up to its ideal of offering young people a second chance, the story of twentieth-century juvenile justice in large part boils down to the exclusion of poor and nonwhite youth from modern categories of childhood and adolescence.
Download or read book A Common Thread written by Beth Anne English and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With important ramifications for studies relating to industrialization and the impact of globalization, A Common Thread examines the relocation of the New England textile industry to the piedmont South between 1880 and 1959. Through the example of the Massachusetts-based Dwight Manufacturing Company, the book provides an informative historic reference point to current debates about the continuous relocation of capital to low-wage, largely unregulated labor markets worldwide. In 1896, to confront the effects of increasing state regulations, labor militancy, and competition from southern mills, the Dwight Company became one of the first New England cotton textile companies to open a subsidiary mill in the South. Dwight closed its Massachusetts operations completely in 1927, but its southern subsidiary lasted three more decades. In 1959, the branch factory Dwight had opened in Alabama became one of the first textile mills in the South to close in the face of post-World War II foreign competition. Beth English explains why and how New England cotton manufacturing companies pursued relocation to the South as a key strategy for economic survival, why and how southern states attracted northern textile capital, and how textile mill owners, labor unions, the state, manufacturers' associations, and reform groups shaped the ongoing movement of cotton-mill money, machinery, and jobs. A Common Thread is a case study that helps provide clues and predictors about the processes of attracting and moving industrial capital to developing economies throughout the world.
Download or read book Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South written by Steven P. Miller and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-08-23 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While spreading the gospel around the world through his signature crusades, internationally renowned evangelist Billy Graham maintained a visible and controversial presence in his native South, a region that underwent substantial political and economic change in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this period Graham was alternately a desegregating crusader in Alabama, Sunbelt booster in Atlanta, regional apologist in the national press, and southern strategist in the Nixon administration. Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South considers the critical but underappreciated role of the noted evangelist in the creation of the modern American South. The region experienced two significant related shifts away from its status as what observers and critics called the "Solid South": the end of legalized Jim Crow and the end of Democratic Party dominance. Author Steven P. Miller treats Graham as a serious actor and a powerful symbol in this transition—an evangelist first and foremost, but also a profoundly political figure. In his roles as the nation's most visible evangelist, adviser to political leaders, and a regional spokesperson, Graham influenced many of the developments that drove celebrants and detractors alike to place the South at the vanguard of political, religious, and cultural trends. He forged a path on which white southern moderates could retreat from Jim Crow, while his evangelical critique of white supremacy portended the emergence of "color blind" rhetoric within mainstream conservatism. Through his involvement in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, as well as his deep social ties in the South, the evangelist influenced the decades-long process of political realignment. Graham's public life sheds new light on recent southern history in all of its ambiguities, and his social and political ethics complicate conventional understandings of evangelical Christianity in postwar America. Miller's book seeks to reintroduce a familiar figure to the narrative of southern history and, in the process, examine the political and social transitions constitutive of the modern South.
Download or read book Everybody was Black Down There written by Robert H. Woodrum and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1930 almost 13,000 African Americans worked in the coal mines around Birmingham, Alabama. They made up 53 percent of the mining workforce and some 60 percent of their union's local membership. At the close of the twentieth century, only about 15 percent of Birmingham's miners were black, and the entire mining workforce had been sharply reduced. Robert H. Woodrum offers a challenging interpretation of why this dramatic decline occurred and why it happened during an era of strong union presence in the Alabama coalfields. Drawing on union, company, and government records as well as interviews with coal miners, Woodrum examines the complex connections between racial ideology and technological and economic change. Extending the chronological scope of previous studies of race, work, and unionization in the Birmingham coalfields, Woodrum covers the New Deal, World War II, the postwar era, the 1970s expansion of coalfield employment, and contemporary trends toward globalization. The United Mine Workers of America's efforts to bridge the color line in places like Birmingham should not be underestimated, says Woodrum. Facing pressure from the wider world of segregationist Alabama, however, union leadership ultimately backed off the UMWA's historic commitment to the rights of its black members. Woodrum discusses the role of state UMWA president William Mitch in this process and describes Birmingham's unique economic circumstances as an essentially Rust Belt city within the burgeoning Sun Belt South. This is a nuanced exploration of how, despite their central role in bringing the UMWA back to Alabama in the early 1930s, black miners remained vulnerable to the economic and technological changes that transformed the coal industry after World War II.
Download or read book Liberalism Black Power and the Making of American Politics 1965 1980 written by Devin Fergus and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pioneering exploration of the interplay between liberalism and black nationalism, Devin Fergus returns to the tumultuous era of Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Helms and challenges us to see familiar political developments through a new lens. What if the liberal coalition, instead of being torn apart by the demands of Black Power, actually engaged in a productive relationship with radical upstarts, absorbing black separatists into the political mainstream and keeping them from a more violent path? What if the New Right arose not only in response to Great Society Democrats but, as significantly, in reaction to Republican moderates who sought compromise with black nationalists through conduits like the Blacks for Nixon movement? Focusing especially on North Carolina, a progressive southern state and a national center of Black Power activism, Fergus reveals how liberal engagement helped to bring a radical civic ideology back from the brink of political violence and social nihilism. He covers Malcolm X Liberation University and Soul City, two largely forgotten, federally funded black nationalist experiments; the political scene in Winston-Salem, where Black Panthers were elected to office in surprising numbers; and the liberal-nationalist coalition that formed in 1974 to defend Joan Little, a black prisoner who killed a guard she accused of raping her. Throughout, Fergus charts new territory in the study of America's recent past, taking up largely unexplored topics such as the expanding political role of institutions like the ACLU and the Ford Foundation and the emergence of sexual violence as a political issue. He also urges American historians to think globally by drawing comparisons between black nationalism in the United States and other separatist movements around the world. By 1980, Fergus writes, black radicals and their offspring were "more likely to petition Congress than blow it up." That liberals engaged black radicalism at all, however, was enough for New Right insurgents to paint liberalism as an effete, anti-American ideology--a sentiment that has had lasting appeal to significant numbers of voters.
Download or read book Shaped by the State written by Brent Cebul and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American political history has been built around narratives of crisis, in which what “counts” are the moments when seemingly stable political orders collapse and new ones rise from the ashes. But while crisis-centered frameworks can make sense of certain dimensions of political culture, partisan change, and governance, they also often steal attention from the production of categories like race, gender, and citizenship status that transcend the usual break points in American history. Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams have brought together first-rate scholars from a wide range of subfields who are making structures of state power—not moments of crisis or partisan realignment—integral to their analyses. All of the contributors see political history as defined less by elite subjects than by tensions between state and economy, state and society, and state and subject—tensions that reveal continuities as much as disjunctures. This broader definition incorporates investigations of the crosscurrents of power, race, and identity; the recent turns toward the history of capitalism and transnational history; and an evolving understanding of American political development that cuts across eras of seeming liberal, conservative, or neoliberal ascendance. The result is a rich revelation of what political history is today.
Download or read book Jim Crow Terminals written by Anke Ortlepp and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical accounts of racial discrimination in transportation have focused until now on trains, buses, and streetcars and their respective depots, terminals, stops, and other public accommodations. It is essential to add airplanes and airports to this narrative, says Anke Ortlepp. Air travel stands at the center of the twentieth century’s transportation revolution, and airports embodied the rapidly mobilizing, increasingly prosperous, and cosmopolitan character of the postwar United States. When segregationists inscribed local definitions of whiteness and blackness onto sites of interstate and even international transit, they not only brought the incongruities of racial separation into sharp relief but also obligated the federal government to intervene. Ortlepp looks at African American passengers; civil rights organizations; the federal government and judiciary; and airport planners, architects, and managers as actors in shaping aviation’s legal, cultural, and built environments. She relates the struggles of black travelers—to enjoy the same freedoms on the airport grounds that they enjoyed in the aircraft cabin—in the context of larger shifts in the postwar social, economic, and political order. Jim Crow terminals, Ortlepp shows us, were both spatial expressions of sweeping change and sites of confrontation over the renegotiation of racial identities. Hence, this new study situates itself in the scholarly debate over the multifaceted entanglements of “race” and “space.”
