June 2000
Volume 87, No. 1

• Articles
• Perspective
• Exhibition Reviews
• Book Reviews

Articles

The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s

Walter Johnson writes about the stories that southern whites told themselves about race and slavery and about how one young enslaved woman employed those stories in a daring scheme to escape. Sold in the slave market in New Orleans, Alexina Morrison ran away and filed suit against her owner, claiming that she was a white person who had been wrongly enslaved. As her case made its way through the courts, it exposed tensions in the accounts of slavery that white southerners used to justify their social order--tensions over the balance between the prerogatives of slavery and those of nonslaveholding white patriarchy, over the place of white labor in a society founded on black slavery, over who was white and who was black and who had the power to say so.

I Am the Other: Puerto Rico in the Eyes of North Americans, 1898

United States history cannot be understood apart from Caribbean colonial history, Gervasio Luis García suggests. In the essay that won the OAH Foreign-Language Article Prize for 1999, García studies the efforts of the United States to invent colonial relations with Cuba and Puerto Rico after the Hispanic/Cuban/American war of 1898. The outcome in Puerto Rico shows that colonies are the product not only of imperial impositions but also of complicities, of negotiations between the metropolis and the subalterns. Shared interests and attitudes--including a paternalistic stance toward most of the island's people-- drew Puerto Rican elites and agents of the United States government together. Postmodernism's insistence on difference and exclusion clouds such similarities between conqueror and conquered.

"Being in the Field of Education and Also Being a Negro . . . Seems . . . Tragic": Black Teachers in the Jim Crow South

Adam Fairclough seeks to illuminate the relationship between education and equality and to reassess the role of African American teachers in the long struggle for black liberation. Arguing that students of the civil rights movement have laid too much emphasis on a "heroic" model of black leadership, he believes that the accommodationism of black teachers during the age of segregation--including that of Booker T. Washington--was neither a capitulation to white supremacy nor a simple survival strategy. In resisting racist ideology and working for equality of opportunity, black educators helped weaken the foundations of the Jim Crow South.

"Each 'Race' Could Have Its Heroes Sung": Ethnicity and the History Wars in the 1920s

Does an ethnically diverse school curriculum promote critical thinking--the skills and attitudes needed for democratic life? Not always, argues Jonathan Zimmerman. In the 1920s, a panoply of ethnic and racial groups inserted their own heroes into American history textbooks. But they also helped purge critical perspectives from those books, warning that any diminution of the grand national narrative would undermine their special contributions to it. Joining hands with the tribunes of one-hundred-percent Americanism, ethnic groups shaped a history curriculum that was culturally plural yet ideologically static. Zimmerman's essay asks us to reexamine both the ethnic politics of the 1920s and the question of diversity in American public schooling.

From Amazons to Glamazons: The Rise and Fall of North Carolina Women's Basketball, 1920-1960

Long before Title IX, from the 1920s through the 1940s, competitive women's basketball flourished in industrial towns, rural areas, and African American communities around the country. By the late 1950s, however, cheerleading had replaced basketball as the major sports-related activity for American women. Focusing on North Carolina, Pamela Grundy explores basketball's place in the competing visions of womanhood of the mid-twentieth century. Cheerleading's post-World War II triumph, she argues, represented, not a sudden cultural shift, but the culmination of a decades- long process as the influence of national popular culture and of middle-class ideals and manners supplanted a range of institutions rooted in local cultures and experiences.

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Perspective

Herbert Aptheker's account of his 1950 discharge from the United States Army Reserve for speaking and writing for Communist organizations, Robin D. G. Kelley's interview with Aptheker, and an afterword by Kelley together document a radical historian's life and work. Aptheker reminisces about race and the historical profession, his life as an activist and scholar, his struggle to teach at Yale University and elsewhere, and his connection with W. E. B. Du Bois. Kelley pays tribute to Aptheker's work in African American history and his importance for African American historians. Marginalized by academe, Aptheker insisted on his participation as a professional historian; he has been at the center of major conflicts dividing historians over the past half century.

An Autobiographical Note, by Herbert Aptheker [Full text available at the History Cooperative]

Interview of Herbert Aptheker, by Robin D. G. Kelley [Full text available at the History Cooperative]

Afterword, by Robin D. G. Kelley [Full text available at the History Cooperative]

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Exhibition Reviews

"William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life," by Karl Kusserow
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]

"Breaking Through: The Creative Engineer," by Richard O'Connor
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]

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Book Reviews

A complete listing of book reviews is available here.

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Letters to the Editor

Announcements

Recent Scholarship

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On the cover: This parent in East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, pictured in 1939, personified blacks' faith in education as a means of liberation. Photograph by Russell Lee. Courtesy State Library of Louisiana. See "'Being in the Field of Education and Also Being a Negro . . . Seems . . . Tragic': Black Teachers in the Jim Crow South" by Adam Fairclough.