In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West 1528-1990

In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West 1528-1990
Author: Quintard Taylor
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 450
Release: 1999-05-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393318893

The American West is mistakenly known as a region with few African Americans and virtually no black history. This work challenges that view in a chronicle that begins in 1528 and carries through to the present-day black success in politics and the surging interest in multiculturalism.

The Forging of a Black Community

The Forging of a Black Community
Author: Quintard Taylor
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2022-06-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295750650

Seattle's first black resident was a sailor named Manuel Lopes who arrived in 1858 and became the small community's first barber. He left in the early 1870s to seek economic prosperity elsewhere, but as Seattle transformed from a stopover town to a full-fledged city, African Americans began to stay and build a community. By the early twentieth century, black life in Seattle coalesced in the Central District, a four-square-mile section east of downtown. Black Seattle, however, was never a monolith. Through world wars, economic booms and busts, and the civil rights movement, black residents and leaders negotiated intragroup conflicts and had varied approaches to challenging racial inequity. Despite these differences, they nurtured a distinct African American culture and black urban community ethos. With a new foreword and afterword, this second edition of The Forging of a Black Community is essential to understanding the history and present of the largest black community in the Pacific Northwest.

Freedom's Racial Frontier

Freedom's Racial Frontier
Author: Herbert G. Ruffin
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 508
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0806161248

Between 1940 and 2010, the black population of the American West grew from 710,400 to 7 million. With that explosive growth has come a burgeoning interest in the history of the African American West—an interest reflected in the remarkable range and depth of the works collected in Freedom’s Racial Frontier. Editors Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack have gathered established and emerging scholars in the field to create an anthology that links past, current, and future generations of African American West scholarship. The volume’s sixteen chapters address the African American experience within the framework of the West as a multicultural frontier. The result is a fresh perspective on western-U.S. history, centered on the significance of African American life, culture, and social justice in almost every trans-Mississippi state. Examining and interpreting the twentieth century while mindful of events and developments since 2000, the contributors focus on community formation, cultural diversity, civil rights and black empowerment, and artistic creativity and identity. Reflecting the dynamic evolution of new approaches and new sites of knowledge in the field of western history, the authors consider its interconnections with fields such as cultural studies, literature, and sociology. Some essays deal with familiar places, while others look at understudied sites such as Albuquerque, Oahu, and Las Vegas, Nevada. By examining black suburbanization, the Information Age, and gentrification in the urban West, several authors conceive of a Third Great Migration of African Americans to and within the West. The West revealed in Freedom’s Racial Frontier is a place where black Americans have fought—and continue to fight—to make their idea of freedom live up to their expectations of equality; a place where freedom is still a frontier for most persons of African heritage.

The American West: A New Interpretive History

The American West: A New Interpretive History
Author: Robert V. Hine
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 520
Release: 2017-08-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300231784

A fully revised and updated new edition of the classic history of western America The newly revised second edition of this concise, engaging, and unorthodox history of America’s West has been updated to incorporate new research, including recent scholarship on Native American lives and cultures. An ideal text for course work, it presents the West as both frontier and region, examining the clashing of different cultures and ethnic groups that occurred in the western territories from the first Columbian contacts between Native Americans and Europeans up to the end of the twentieth century.

African Americans on the Great Plains

African Americans on the Great Plains
Author: Bruce A. Glasrud
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0803226896

Until recently, histories of the American West gave little evidence of the presence--let alone importance--of African Americans in the unfolding of the western frontier. There might have been a mention of Estevan, slavery, or the Dred Scott decision, but the rich and varied experience of African Americans on the Great Plains went largely unnoted. This book, the first of its kind, supplies that critical missing chapter in American history.

Portraits of Women in the American West

Portraits of Women in the American West
Author: Dee Garceau-Hagen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136076182

Men are usually the heroes of Western stories, but women also played a crucial role in developing the American frontier, and their stories have rarely been told. This anthology of biographical essays on women promises new insight into gender in the 19C American West. The women featured include Asian Americans, African-Americans and Native American women, as well as their white counterparts. The original essays offer observations about gender and sexual violence, the subordinate status of women of color, their perseverance and influence in changing that status, a look at the gendered religious legacy that shaped Western Catholicism, and women in the urban and rural, industrial and agricultural West.

Imagining the African American West

Imagining the African American West
Author: Blake Allmendinger
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0803210671

The literature of the African American West is the last racial discourse of the region that remains unexplored. Blake Allmendinger addresses this void in literary and cultural studies with Imagining the African American West?the first comprehensive study of African American literature on the early frontier and in the modern urban American West. ø Allmendinger charts the terrain of African American literature in the West through his exploration of novels, histories, autobiographies, science fiction, mysteries, formula westerns, melodramas, experimental theater, and political essays, as well as rap music and film. He examines the histories of James P. Beckwourth and Oscar Micheaux; slavery, the Civil War, and the significance of the American frontier to blacks; and the Harlem Renaissance, the literature of urban unrest, rap music, black noir, and African American writers, including Toni Morrison and Walter Mosley. His study utilizes not only the works of well-known African American writers but also some obscure and neglected works, out-of-print books, and unpublished manuscripts in library archives. ø Much of the scholarly neglect of the ?Black West? can be blamed on how the American West has been imagined, constructed, and framed in scholarship to date. In his study, Allmendinger provides the appropriate theoretical, cultural, and historical contexts for understanding the literature and suggests new directions for the future of black western literature.

Encyclopedia of African American Society

Encyclopedia of African American Society
Author: Gerald D. Jaynes
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 1113
Release: 2005-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0761927646

An encyclopedic reference of African American history and culture.

Race Work

Race Work
Author: Matthew C. Whitaker
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2007-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780803260276

Nearly sixty years ago, Lincoln and Eleanor Ragsdale descended upon the isolated, somewhat desolate, and entirely segregated city of Phoenix, Arizona, in search of freedom and opportunity?a move that would ultimately transform an entire city and, arguably, the nation. Race Work tells the story of this remarkable pair, two of the most influential black activists of the post?World War II American West, and through their story, supplies a missing chapter in the history of the civil rights movement, American race relations, African Americans, and the American West. ø Matthew C. Whitaker explores the Ragsdales? family history and how their familial traditions of entrepreneurship, professionalism, activism, and ?race work? helped form their activist identity and placed them in a position to help desegregate Phoenix. His work, the first sustained account of white supremacy and black resistance in Phoenix, also uses the lives of the Ragsdales to examine themes of domination, resistance, interracial coalition building, race, gender, and place against the backdrop of the civil rights and post?civil rights eras. An absorbing biography that provides insight into African Americans? quest for freedom, Race Work reveals the lives of the Ragsdales as powerful symbols of black leadership who illuminate the problems and progress in African American history, American Western history, and American history during the post?World War II era.