The Browning of the New South

The Browning of the New South
Author: Jennifer A. Jones
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2019-05-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022660103X

Studies of immigration to the United States have traditionally focused on a few key states and urban centers, but recent shifts in nonwhite settlement mean that these studies no longer paint the whole picture. Many Latino newcomers are flocking to places like the Southeast, where typically few such immigrants have settled, resulting in rapidly redrawn communities. In this historic moment, Jennifer Jones brings forth an ethnographic look at changing racial identities in one Southern city: Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This city turns out to be a natural experiment in race relations, having quickly shifted in the past few decades from a neatly black and white community to a triracial one. Jones tells the story of contemporary Winston-Salem through the eyes of its new Latino residents, revealing untold narratives of inclusion, exclusion, and interracial alliances. The Browning of the New South reveals how one community’s racial realignments mirror and anticipate the future of national politics.

The Browning of the New South

The Browning of the New South
Author: Jennifer A. Jones
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2019-05-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022660098X

Studies of immigration to the United States have traditionally focused on a few key states and urban centers, but recent shifts in nonwhite settlement mean that these studies no longer paint the whole picture. Many Latino newcomers are flocking to places like the Southeast, where typically few such immigrants have settled, resulting in rapidly redrawn communities. In this historic moment, Jennifer Jones brings forth an ethnographic look at changing racial identities in one Southern city: Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This city turns out to be a natural experiment in race relations, having quickly shifted in the past few decades from a neatly black and white community to a triracial one. Jones tells the story of contemporary Winston-Salem through the eyes of its new Latino residents, revealing untold narratives of inclusion, exclusion, and interracial alliances. The Browning of the New South reveals how one community’s racial realignments mirror and anticipate the future of national politics.

The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice

The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice
Author: Ronald R. Sundstrom
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2008-10-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0791477622

This book considers the challenge that the so-called browning of America poses for any discussion of the future of race and social justice. In the philosophy of race there has been little reflection about how the rapid increase in the Latino, Asian American, and mixed-race populations affects the historical demands for racial justice by Native Americans and African Americans. Ronald R. Sundstrom examines how recent demographic shifts bear upon central questions in race theory and social and political philosophy, including color blindness, interracial intimacy, and the future of race. Sundstrom cautions that rather than getting caught up in romantic reveries about the browning of America, we should remain vigilant that longstanding claims for racial justice not be washed away.

An Environmental History of the Civil War

An Environmental History of the Civil War
Author: Judkin Browning
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2020-02-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 146965539X

This sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship to the natural world. To be sure, environmental factors such as topography and weather powerfully shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns, and the war could not have been fought without the horses, cattle, and other animals that were essential to both armies. But here Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver weave a far richer story, combining military and environmental history to forge a comprehensive new narrative of the war's significance and impact. As they reveal, the conflict created a new disease environment by fostering the spread of microbes among vulnerable soldiers, civilians, and animals; led to large-scale modifications of the landscape across several states; sparked new thinking about the human relationship to the natural world; and demanded a reckoning with disability and death on an ecological scale. And as the guns fell silent, the change continued; Browning and Silver show how the war influenced the future of weather forecasting, veterinary medicine, the birth of the conservation movement, and the establishment of the first national parks. In considering human efforts to find military and political advantage by reshaping the natural world, Browning and Silver show not only that the environment influenced the Civil War's outcome but also that the war was a watershed event in the history of the environment itself.

Brown Is the New White

Brown Is the New White
Author: Steve Phillips
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2018-03-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1620973251

The New York Times and Washington Post bestseller that sparked a national conversation about America's new progressive, multiracial majority, updated to include data from the 2016 election With a new preface and afterword by the author When it first appeared in the lead-up to the 2016 election, Brown Is the New White helped spark a national discussion of race and electoral politics and the often-misdirected spending priorities of the Democratic party. This "slim yet jam-packed call to action" (Booklist) contained a "detailed, data-driven illustration of the rapidly increasing number of racial minorities in America" (NBC News) and their significance in shaping our political future. Completely revised and updated to address the aftermath of the 2016 election, this first paperback edition of Brown Is the New White doubles down on its original insights. Attacking the "myth of the white swing voter" head-on, Steve Phillips, named one of "America's Top 50 Influencers" by Campaigns & Elections, closely examines 2016 election results against a long backdrop of shifts in the electoral map over the past generation—arguing that, now more than ever, hope for a more progressive political future lies not with increased advertising to middle-of-the-road white voters, but with cultivating America's growing, diverse majority. Emerging as a respected and clear-headed commentator on American politics at a time of pessimism and confusion among Democrats, Phillips offers a stirring answer to anyone who thinks the immediate future holds nothing but Trump and Republican majorities.

To ÕJoy My Freedom

To ÕJoy My Freedom
Author: Tera W. Hunter
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 1998-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0674893085

As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta--the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south--in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post-Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception--and at the heart--of the new south.

The Southern Past

The Southern Past
Author: William Fitzhugh Brundage
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2009-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674028982

Since the Civil War whites and blacks have struggled over the meanings and uses of the Southern past. Indeed, today's controversies over flying the Confederate flag, renaming schools and streets, and commemorating the Civil War and the civil rights movement are only the latest examples of this ongoing divisive contest over issues of regional identity and heritage. The Southern Past argues that these battles are ultimately about who has the power to determine what we remember of the past, and whether that remembrance will honor all Southerners or only select groups. For more than a century after the Civil War, elite white Southerners systematically refined a version of the past that sanctioned their racial privilege and power. In the process, they filled public spaces with museums and monuments that made their version of the past sacrosanct. Yet, even as segregation and racial discrimination worsened, blacks contested the white version of Southern history and demanded inclusion. Streets became sites for elaborate commemorations of emancipation and schools became centers for the study of black history. This counter-memory surged forth, and became a potent inspiration for the civil rights movement and the black struggle to share a common Southern past rather than a divided one. W. Fitzhugh Brundage's searing exploration of how those who have the political power to represent the past simultaneously shape the present and determine the future is a valuable lesson as we confront our national past to meet the challenge of current realities.

Legal Passing

Legal Passing
Author: Angela S. García
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520296753

Legal Passing offers a nuanced look at how the lives of undocumented Mexicans in the US are constantly shaped by federal, state, and local immigration laws. Angela S. García compares restrictive and accommodating immigration measures in various cities and states to show that place-based inclusion and exclusion unfold in seemingly contradictory ways. Instead of fleeing restrictive localities, undocumented Mexicans react by presenting themselves as “legal,” masking the stigma of illegality to avoid local police and federal immigration enforcement. Restrictive laws coerce assimilation, because as legal passing becomes habitual and embodied, immigrants distance themselves from their ethnic and cultural identities. In accommodating destinations, undocumented Mexicans experience a localized sense of stability and membership that is simultaneously undercut by the threat of federal immigration enforcement and complex street-level tensions with local police. Combining social theory on immigration and race as well as place and law, Legal Passing uncovers the everyday failures and long-term human consequences of contemporary immigration laws in the US.

Becoming Free in the Cotton South

Becoming Free in the Cotton South
Author: Susan Eva O'Donovan
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2010-04-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674041607

Becoming Free in the Cotton South challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the ending of the story, as most histories do, Susan Eva O’Donovan explores the perilous transition between these two conditions, offering a unique vision of both the enormous changes and the profound continuities in black life before and after the Civil War.This boldly argued work focuses on a small place—the southwest corner of Georgia—in order to explicate a big question: how did black men and black women’s experiences in slavery shape their lives in freedom? The reality of slavery’s demise is harsh: in this land where cotton was king, the promise of Reconstruction passed quickly, even as radicalism crested and swept the rest of the South. Ultimately, the lives former slaves made for themselves were conditioned and often constrained by what they had endured in bondage. O’Donovan’s significant scholarship does not diminish the heroic efforts of black Americans to make their world anew; rather, it offers troubling but necessary insight into the astounding challenges they faced.Becoming Free in the Cotton South is a moving and intimate narrative, drawing upon a multiplicity of sources and individual stories to provide new understanding of the forces that shaped both slavery and freedom, and of the generation of African Americans who tackled the passage that lay between.