American History

""After decades of hooded klansmen marching . nightriding, burning crosses, bombing churches and lynching African-Americans in self-proclaimed defense of the south, nation and white supremacy against the forces of abolition, desegregation and civil rights, in the 1970s a new movement emerged. One which, far from attempting to defend or protect the south, nation or white supremacy, attempted to 'survive' in the post-civil rights context. What emerged was the survivalist movement and a more general survivalist philosophy, ideology and practice amongst the wider far right, particularly the patriot and white separatist movements. Such movements migrated from the south to the mountainous Pacific Northwest, set up compounds, engaged in paramilitary and preparedness training, stockpiled food supplies and weapons, wrote survival manuals, and waited. 

Such movements were not alone and not limited to the far right, but a popular, if fragmented, movement, ideology and language emerged in everything from recreational sport and corporate team-building to film and TV. While there is a good deal of literature on this, it is fragmented, dealing with a particular manifestation, theoretical approach and ‘explanatory’ analysis, and fails to make links between fringe movements or subcultures and mainstream or popular culture. In this paper, I will examine far right survivalism and put it in the wider context. This has particular relevance as American is now experiencing a revival of both the extreme right and wider mainstream survivalism in the context of an economic crisis, an African-American President and a wider right-wing backlash, which the paper will also examine. 
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""Où que l’on regarde aux États-Unis, la religion n’est jamais bien loin : on la trouve dans la politique, bien entendu ; les faits divers, souvent ; les affiches le long des routes, rappelant à l’automobiliste l’imminence du retour du Christ ou simplement son amour ; la profusion de lieux de culte de toutes les sensibilités imaginables et, de façon plus insolite, jusque dans les rubriques sportives des médias.
Vue de France, cette omniprésence paraît étrange et exotique, difficilement compréhensible. Pour l’éclairer, Lauric Henneton propose d’en revenir aux origines : il cherche les racines de la religiosité américaine dans le protestantisme européen, pour suivre ensuite les différentes branches auxquelles elles ont donné naissance au fil des siècles jusqu’à nos jours.
Il propose donc une approche originale en s’inscrivant dans le courant de l’historiographie dite « atlantique », qui s’efforce de resituer les Treize Colonies puis les États-Unis dans un cadre géographique, culturel, politique et économique large, à l’échelle du bassin atlantique.
De la religion stricte des premiers puritains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre aux megachurches contemporaines, des quakers de Pennsylvanie aux réveils évangéliques qui secouent le pays aux XVIIe et XIXe siècles, ce livre offre pour la première fois un tableau complet des phénomènes religieux aux États-Unis, depuis la fondation des premières colonies jusqu’à nos jours.""

Airport hubs and the networks linking them have an important bearing on the formation of modern identities in world politics. The argument is that an airport connects individual experience – movement through the hub-and-spoke structure – and the world order’s transformation towards progressively more imperial forms. It can be hypothesized that airports teach people the central rituals of acknowledgement that are needed to navigate in the Byzantine structures of the modern hierarchical world order. The aviopolis provides places where appropriate imperial categories are produced – such as Westerner, Third-Worlder and terrorist – where modern virtues are measured and constant vigilance is directed to the political totality of the imagined imperial community. The striking reminders – suspicious strangers, auditory and visual warnings, memories of past terror attacks, metal detectors and security checks – placed throughout the airport frame are meant to drive home the fact that the survival is at stake in the post-September 11th world. The affirmation of political health takes place against the declinist images of weakening imperial hierarchies and the failure to follow their central norms.

"“The Accidental Slaveowner” revisits a long debated story of slavery, religious faith and the quest for liberation. For over a century and a half, white and African American residents of Oxford, Georgia (“the birthplace of Emory University”) have told and retold stories of the enslaved woman known as “Kitty” and her owner, the prominent Methodist Bishop James Osgood Andrew, the first president of Emory’s board of trustees. All agree that Bishop Andrew’s ownership of Miss Kitty and other enslaved persons triggered the 1844 great national schism of the Methodist Episcopal Church, presaging the Civil War, but opinions strongly differ over the details and implications of slavery in the Andrew household. For many local whites, Bishop Andrew was only “accidentally” a slaveholder, having neither bought or sold slaves. Kitty is said to have willingly remained in slavery in 1841, largely out of loyalty to her master and mistress; in return, Bishop Andrew is said to have built her a small house in which she resided in virtual freedom. Local African Americans, in contrast, tend to insist that Miss Kitty was the Bishop’s coerced lover and that she was denied the basic elements of freedom throughout her life.

“The Accidental Slaveowner” explores why this story has proved so fascinating to white and African American tellers and hearers across the generations and what it has signified at different historical moments, from the eve of the Civil War, through the Jim Crow era, during the Civil Rights movement, and in the current moment. Mark Auslander approaches these contested narratives as “myths” in the anthropological sense of the term, not as falsehoods but as deeply meaningful and resonant accounts that illuminate profound enigmas in American history and culture: What does it mean to be free and unfree? How are our understandings of family, community and spirituality still structured by the distant legacies of enslavement? How do we untangle the bonds of domination, loyalty, resentment and resistance that continue to characterize relations of race and power in our body politic? How do we honor the memory of all our forebearers across lines of race and difference?
In the book Mark Auslander takes readers on a journey of scholarship and imagination, moving across the complex landscapes of cemeteries and college campuses as well as through archives and family stories. Reconstructing the complex family lives of masters, slaves and their descendants, he traces and locates the living descendants of Miss Kitty, who have begun a journey of their own as they ponder the joys and the burdens of their lineage. We also learn of emerging efforts at restorative justice and reconciliation across lines of race: in Oxford, Georgia, as in so many sites across the nation, honest collaborative excavation of a difficult history holds the promise for new forms of mutual understanding and social healing."

History.  What is ‘history’?  Is it simply a ‘record of past events’ as my Collins Concise Dictionary suggests?  What about past events which aren’t recorded?  Are they still part of history?  And whose record counts?  Does mine?  Does yours?  Which one is the most accurate, and more importantly, whose account is right?  As I embark on research for my novel, Legacy, strands of which are historically based, I have begun to ask the questions which all writers of historical fiction must ask. 

"Throughout the postwar period, Harlem’s public schools became increasingly troubled. Racial segregation intensified and dropout rates rose. Classrooms were more overcrowded than ever before, while facilities crumbled. Parents, students and community activists fought long battles against inferior black schools in Harlem, especially after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Though these people tried nearly every means at their disposal, they were unable to stop public education in Central Harlem from declining in the years following the war. They faced a complex set of issues, including housing, employment, districting policies and government intransigence. Harlem residents and activists credited these interconnected exigencies with bringing about the explosive July 1964 uprisings in the community.

In the postwar period, Central Harlem was the most crowded, run-down, segregated and economically depressed black neighborhood in Manhattan, and conditions only worsened with time. As the city’s black population and residential segregation increased throughout the postwar period, educational segregation spread and with it, inferior black schools. School board officials and local politicians professed deep concern for the city’s educational segregation, with the board of education citing the Brown decision as an affirmation of what the city’s educational system already held to be true. After years of fruitless picketing and conferences with city officials, parents in Central Harlem began withdrawing their children from inferior segregated schools in 1958, instead preferring to educate them through tutoring.

In attempts to call attention to the many problems black New York City public school students faced, two one-day student boycotts in February and March of 1964 kept 45 percent and 25 percent of the city’s public school children out of school on those respective days. With the cry of “Boycott Jim Crow Schools,” the Harlem Parents Committee enjoined every mother and father of a school-age child to refuse to send their children to inferior schools. The committee also led a struggle for an educational concept that discarded Euro- and Anglocentric models of history in favor of one that taught black and Puerto Rican history in a proportional way. Examining these demands helps us to see the emergence of Black Power in the city as a logical outgrowth of frustration, as opposed to a nihilistic, irrational force. Despite school integration proponents’ best efforts, including multiple boycotts, sit-ins, conferences, pickets, legal intervention and more, schools were more segregated by the mid-1960s and children of color were worse off than they were in 1954, the year of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision that invalidated separate but equal educational facilities.

This paper shows the ways in which Harlem’s public schools became increasingly segregated in the twenty years following the Second World War, leading up to the explosive July 1964 rebellions in Central Harlem and Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section. Residential segregation was a crucial factor in producing and maintaining Harlem’s segregated schools. Unlike today, parents in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s had no choice but to send their children to local schools. The city had a strict policy of neighborhood schools, which meant students learned where they lived, unless they went to private schools, which were not an option for most black students. Segregated neighborhoods produced segregated schools, and by the mid-1960s, there were more segregated schools than ever before. While this was a time of progress for the national civil rights movement, New York’s civil rights movement was unable to prevent social, political and economic conditions from worsening in Manhattan’s largest black neighborhood. Many of the students’ parents had recently escaped the physical and emotional violence of the Jim Crow South to seek better opportunities in New York, with its reputation for racial liberalism and economic opportunity. Instead, they found the quiet misery and slow violence of the city, with its combination of residential and educational segregation, which combined to produce poor employment prospects.

Using the Harlem Neighborhoods Association archives at the Schomburg Center, I am able to trace the ceaseless activities of Central Harlem activists and residents to combat segregated housing and schools. I will also use newspapers, NAACP branch files and social science research, such as that from Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU).

This paper makes substantial historiographical contributions to the histories of education, civil rights, and New York City. While some scholars, such as Adina Back and Clarence Taylor have written on parents’ and activists’ efforts to desegregate New York City’s schools, all have looked at the city in its entirety. In doing so, though these scholars have given us vital information on citywide school desegregation, they have not given Harlem the attention it deserves. Harlem has a long history as a site of black political organizing dating back into the 19th century, making it the urban center of the black diaspora. Also, none of these scholars places appropriate emphasis on the vital connections between housing, education and employment, linkages which activists and parents made evident at the time. While we may not think of financial institutions as having a role in creating educational segregation, it was in fact banks and mortgage brokers who decided who would be allowed to live where in New York City through granting or not granting loans, the results of which in turn fed students into the city’s neighborhood schools.

Harlem’s segregated schools are as timely a topic as they have ever been. Though nearly fifty years have passed since the end of the time period I cover, predominantly black public schools in New York City are still staffed by a much larger number of short-term teachers than are predominantly white schools, with teachers in majority black schools also earning significantly less money. Black students in the city’s public schools face a disproportionate discipline rate when compared to white students for committing the same offenses, helping to feed the school to prison pipeline. My research helps us to understand how the problems of the past continue into today, what remedies have already been attempted and how we might address segregated schools in the future."

Liberalism sanctions both democracy and capitalism, but incorporating the two into a coherent intellectual system presents difficulties. The anti-foundational pragmatism of Richard Rorty offers a way to describe and defend a meaningful democratic capitalism while avoiding the problems that come from the more traditional liberal justification. Additionally, Rorty’s rejection of the search for extra-human grounding of social and political arrangements suggests that democracy is entitled to a philosophical support that capitalism is not. A viable democratic capitalism therefore justifies its use of markets on the consent of the governed, rather than appeals to liberal notions of individualism, liberty, and property.