On the Shelf at CCBC Libraries
Confederate Exceptionalism by
Along with Confederate flags, the men and women who recently gathered before the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts carried signs proclaiming "Heritage Not Hate." Theirs, they said, was an "open and visible protest against those who attacked us, ours flags, our ancestors, or our Heritage." How, Nicole Maurantonio wondered, did "not hate" square with a "heritage" grounded in slavery? How do so-called neo-Confederates distance themselves from the actions and beliefs of white supremacists while clinging to the very symbols and narratives that tether the Confederacy to the history of racism and oppression in America? The answer, Maurantonio discovers, is bound up in the myth of Confederate exceptionalism--a myth whose components, proponents, and meaning this timely and provocative book explores. The narrative of Confederate exceptionalism, in this analysis, updates two uniquely American mythologies--the Lost Cause and American exceptionalism--blending their elements with discourses of racial neoliberalism to create a seeming separation between the Confederacy and racist systems. Incorporating several methods and drawing from a range of sources--including ethnographic observations, interviews, and archival documents--Maurantonio examines the various people, objects, and rituals that contribute to this cultural balancing act. Her investigation takes in "official" modes of remembering the Confederacy, such as the monuments and building names that drive the discussion today, but it also pays attention to the more mundane and often subtle ways in which the Confederacy is recalled. Linking the different modes of commemoration, her work bridges the distance that believers in Confederate exceptionalism maintain; while situated in history from the Civil War through the civil rights era, the book brings much-needed clarity to the constitution, persistence, and significance of this divisive myth in the context of our time.
Call Number: E489 .M38 2019Publication Date: 2019-11-08
The Hero's Fight by
A richly textured account of what it means to be poor in America Baltimore was once a vibrant manufacturing town, but today, with factory closings and steady job loss since the 1970s, it is home to some of the most impoverished neighborhoods in America. The Hero's Fight provides an intimate look at the effects of deindustrialization on the lives of Baltimore's urban poor, and sheds critical light on the unintended consequences of welfare policy on our most vulnerable communities. Drawing on her own uniquely immersive brand of fieldwork, conducted over the course of a decade in the neighborhoods of West Baltimore, Patricia Fernández-Kelly tells the stories of people like D. B. Wilson, Big Floyd, Towanda, and others whom the American welfare state treats with a mixture of contempt and pity--what Fernández-Kelly calls "ambivalent benevolence." She shows how growing up poor in the richest nation in the world involves daily interactions with agents of the state, an experience that differs significantly from that of more affluent populations. While ordinary Americans are treated as citizens and consumers, deprived and racially segregated populations are seen as objects of surveillance, containment, and punishment. Fernández-Kelly provides new insights into such topics as globalization and its effects on industrial decline and employment, the changing meanings of masculinity and femininity among the poor, social and cultural capital in poor neighborhoods, and the unique roles played by religion and entrepreneurship in destitute communities. Blending compelling portraits with in-depth scholarly analysis, The Hero's Fight explores how the welfare state contributes to the perpetuation of urban poverty in America.
Call Number: HV4046.B35 F47 2015
Maryland History in Prints, 1743-1900 by
A stunning visual accompaniment to the history of the state with 330 full color reproductions from the glory days of Maryland printmaking, with accompanying essays.
Call Number: F182 .R53 2002
The Road to Jim Crow by
Making extensive use of primary sources, C. Christopher Brown has broken new ground and filled a long overlooked gap in Maryland history. Here is the story of African Americans on Maryland's Eastern Shore, from the promise-filled days following the end of slavery to the rise of lynch law, segregation, and systematic efforts at disenfranchisement. Resisting, as best they could, attempts of the Democratic "White Man's Party" to render them second-class citizens, black communities rallied to their churches and fought determinedly to properly educate their children and gain a measure of political power. The Eastern Shore's Cambridge, guided by savvy and energetic leaders, became a political and cultural center of African American life.
Call Number: E185.93.M2 B86 2016
Voices of the Chesapeake Bay by
The Voices of the Chesapeake Bay radio show has featured hundreds of people who live, work, and play on the Chesapeake Bay. Now host Michael Buckley brings us a fascinating collection of over 50 of these interviews in written form, providing the reader with glimpses into Chesapeake Bay life from a variety of diverse perspectives. Many people travel across the Chesapeak Bay Bridge and only see a big, flat body of water, but Voices of the Chesapeake Bay will help them see deeply into that water. These accounts open windows-each with a view of the Chesapeake-through which we see history, ecology, economy, and how they intertwine with the human soul.
Call Number: F187.C5 B77 2008Publication Date: 2012-05-22
W. E. B. du Bois: Black Reconstruction (LOA #350) by
A definitive edition of the landmark book that forever changed our understanding of the Civil War's aftermath and the legacy of racism in America Upon publication in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois's now classic Black Reconstruction offered a revelatory new assessment of Reconstruction-and of American democracy itself. One of the towering African American thinkers and activists of the twentieth century, Du Bois brought all his intellectual powers to bear on the nation's post-Civil War era of political reorganization, a time when African American progress was met with a white supremacist backlash and ultimately yielded to the consolidation of the unjust social order of Jim Crow. Black Reconstruction is a pioneering work of revisionist scholarship that, in the wake of the censorship of Du Bois's characterization of Reconstruction by the Encyclopedia Britannica, was written to debunk influential historians whose racist ideas and emphases had disfigured the historical record. "The chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself," Du Bois argued, "has been almost barred from court. His written Reconstruction record has been largely destroyed and nearly always neglected." In setting the record straight Du Bois produced what co-editor Eric Foner has called an "indispensable book," a magisterial work of detached scholarship that is also imbued with passionate outrage. Presented in a handsome and authoritative hardcover edition prepared by Foner and co-editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Black Reconstruction is joined here for the first time with important writings that trace Du Bois's thinking throughout his career about Reconstruction and its centrality in understanding the tortured course of democracy in America.
Call Number: E668 .D83 2021Publication Date: 2021-12-14
- Thurgood Marshall: America’s First African American Supreme Court Justice
The great grandson of a slave, Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 2, 1908. At the age of 25, Marshall graduated first in his class from Howard Law and joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the nation's largest and oldest civil rights organization. As NAACP counsel, Marshall used the constitution to successfully argue for a slew of rights now taken for granted, and forced the University of Maryland Law School to admit its first black student, just five years after that same school had rejected Marshall due to his race.
Databases
- Arts & Humanities Database
Articles on arts including visual arts, architecture, design, music, literature, and theatre,
and humanities including history, philosophy, and cultural studies. - History Research This link opens in a new window
Primary documents as well as essays about historical topics and people.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Journals, books, images, and primary sources about many subjects.
- Oxford African American Studies Center This link opens in a new window
Articles and scholarly essays, historical newspaper articles, primary sources, and timelines you can use for African American topics.
- ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Baltimore Sun This link opens in a new window
Primary source articles covering the politics, society and events of the time period 1837 - 1992.
- U.S. History This link opens in a new window
Articles, essays, and primary sources on the history of the United States.
Online from CCBC Libraries
Civil War on Race Street by Publication Date: 2003
Hirelings by
In Hirelings, Jennifer Hull Dorsey re-creates the social and economic milieu of Maryland's Eastern Shore at a time when black slavery and black freedom existed side by side. She follows a generation of manumitted African Americans and their freeborn children and grandchildren through the process of inventing new identities, associations, and communities in the early nineteenth century. Free Africans and their descendants had lived in Maryland since the seventeenth century, but before the American Revolution they were always few in number and lacking in economic resources or political leverage. By contrast, manumitted and freeborn African Americans in the early republic refashioned the Eastern Shore's economy and society, earning their livings as wage laborers while establishing thriving African American communities. As free workers in a slave society, these African Americans contested the legitimacy of the slave system even while they remained dependent laborers. They limited white planters' authority over their time and labor by reuniting their families in autonomous households, settling into free black neighborhoods, negotiating labor contracts that suited the needs of their households, and worshipping in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Some moved to the cities, but many others migrated between employers as a strategy for meeting their needs and thwarting employers' control. They demonstrated that independent and free African American communities could thrive on their own terms. In all of these actions the free black workers of the Eastern Shore played a pivotal role in ongoing debates about the merits of a free labor system.
Publication Date: 2011-04-15
Not in My Neighborhood by
Eugenics, racial thinking, and white supremacist attitudes influenced even the federal government's actions toward housing in the 20th century, dooming American cities to ghettoization. The Federal Housing Administration continued discriminatory housing policies even into the 1960s, long after civil rights legislation. This all-American tale is told through the prism of Baltimore, from its early suburbanization in the 1880s to the consequences of white flight after World War II, and into the first decade of the twenty-first century. The events are real, and so are the heroes and villains. Mr. Pietila's narrative centers on the human side of residential real estate practices, whose discriminatory tools were the same everywhere: restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, predatory lending.
Publication Date: 2010-03-16
Race, Class, Power, and Organizing in East Baltimore by
This book examines the historical and current practices of rebuilding abandoned and disinvested communities in America. Using a community in East Baltimore as an example, Race, Class, Power, and Organizing in East Baltimore shows how the social structure of race and class segregation of the past contributed in the creation of our present day urban poor and low-income communities of color; and continue to affect the way we rebuild these communities today. Specific to East Baltimore is the presence of a powerful and prestigious medical complex which has directly and indirectly affected the abandonment and rebuilding of East Baltimore. While it has grown in power and land over the past 100 years, the neighborhoods around it have decreased in size and capital, widening the gap between the rich and the poor. The author offers a critical analysis of the relationships between powerful private institutions like the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and government and their intention in rebuilding urban communities by asking the question "How do we determine equity in benefit?" Focusing on a current rebuilding project using eminent domain to displace historical African-American communities, and the acquiring of land for private development, this book details the role of community organizing in challenging these types of non-community participatory rebuilding processes, resulting in the gentrification of urban neighborhoods. The detailed analysis of the community organizing process when families are displaced offers similarly affected communities a tool box for challenging current developers and government in unfair rebuilding practices. The context of these practices highlights the current laws and policies that contribute to continued displacement and disadvantage to poor communities without addressing the rhetoric of the intention of government-subsidized private development. This book examines the effect of such non-participatory and non-transparent rebuilding practices on the health of the people and place.
Publication Date: 2012-12-14
Slave Narratives after Slavery by
The pre-Civil War autobiographies of famous fugitives such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs form the bedrock of the African American narrative tradition. After emancipation arrived in 1865, former slaves continued to write about their experience of enslavement andtheir upward struggle to realize the promise of freedom and citizenship. Slave Narratives After Slavery reprints five of the most important and revealing first-person narratives of slavery and freedom published after 1865. Elizabeth Keckley's controversial Behind the Scenes (1868) introduced whiteAmerica to the industry and progressive outlook of an emerging black middle class. The little-known Narrative of the life of John Quincy Adams, When in Slavery, and Now as a Freeman (1872) gave eloquent voice to the African American working class as it migrated from the South to the North in searchof opportunity. William Wells Brown's My Southern Home (1880) retooled the image of slavery delineated in his widely-read antebellum Narrative and offered his reader a first-hand assessment of the South at the close of Reconstruction. Lucy Ann Delaney used From the Darkness Cometh the Light (1891)to pay tribute to her enslaved mother and to exemplify the qualities of mind and spirit that had ensured her own fulfillment in freedom. Louis Hughes's Thirty Years a Slave (1897) spoke for a generation of black Americans who, perceiving the spread of segregation across the South, sought to remindthe nation of the horrors of its racial history and of the continued dedication of the once enslaved to dignity, opportunity, and independence.
Publication Date: 2011-04-25
