Ideas, opinions, and personal essays from respected writers, thinkers, and activists. A project of Beacon Press, an independent publisher of progressive ideas since 1854.
Invisible to the rest, henceforth become my companions;
Follow me ever! desert me not, while I live.
Sweet are the blooming cheeks of the living! sweet
are the musical voices sounding!
But sweet, ah sweet, are the dead, with their silent eyes.
Dearest comrades! all now is over;
But love is not over—and what love, O comrades!
Perfume from battle-fields rising—up from fœtor arising.
Walt Whitman "Hymn of Dead Soldiers," Leaves of Grass (1867)
The Army Hospital Feb 21, 1863. There is enough to
repel, but one soon becomes powerfully attracted also.
Janus Mayfield, (bed 59, Ward 6 Camp[bell] Hosp.)
About 18 years old, 7th Virginia Vol. Has three brothers also in the Union
Army. Illiterate, but cute—can neither read nor write. Has been very sick and
low, but now recovering. Have visited him regularly for two weeks, given him
money, fruit, candy etc.
Albion F. Hubbard—Ward C bed 7 Co F 1st Mass
Cavalry/ been in the service one year—has had two carbuncles one on arm, one on
ankle, healing at present yet great holes left, stuffed with rags—worked on a
farm 8 years before enlisting—wrote letter—for him to the man he lived with/
died June 20th 1863
Richard Voos: In American history the Civil War forms a
turning point in American history however one defines it, in terms of the sheer
number of Americans dead on both sides as well as the transformation of the
United States into a modern industrial nation. It also has a transformative
effect on the role of men, the sheer violence on the role of men, as well as
the ability of women to perform in a different role.
Michael Bronski: That's totally correct. When we look at the
Civil War—and the Civil Ward plays such an important role in the mythology of
American history—it really is central. But I think people don't understand the
role of violence in the Civil War. We all know that all war is violent, but the
sheer number of deaths of American men in the Civil War is tremendous. If we
were to do a percentage, based on our current population, of the Civil War
versus today and the number of deaths, the number of deaths given today's
population would be six million deaths. Which is staggering when you think about
it. So what the Civil War does within the history of American gender is
something quite unique. If after the Revolution we saw the making of the new American
man, the divorcing of the Daniel Boone/Davy Crockett type from the effete fop
from England, that trend continued and the Civil War presents us with a
complete crisis of masculinity. In the two Whitman quotes we heard, we actually
see this sort deluge of mutilation and death and harm to the male body
happening, and at the same time we see this enormous amount of tenderness
towards the male body. Because well, everybody, North and South, who fought in
the Civil War was brave, even if they
were brave for those 35 seconds before they were shot coming into the first big
battle if they were in the first wave of people.
And let’s not forget that the
Civil War deaths were fairly personal: you actually shot people or you
bayonetted them and they were right in front of you. You did not get to be in a
tank and shoot people who were 50, 150 yards away from you. The sheer amount of
death was devastating to the men who fought in the Civil War, and who survived.
So when we hear the Walt Whitman poems, it’s just this endless elegy to male
beauty, to male sentiment, to the uniqueness
of men—and quite sexualized, often, within Whitman's poetry and in his journals.
On the other hand we have… not the image of the brave Union soldier or brave “Johnny
Reb,” but in fact the young vulnerable boy who has simply been torn apart. So
the male body becomes here, and we see this later in World War II, which we'll
discuss in a later podcast, we see the male body completely heroicized and
lionized for being brave, and at the same time pitiable in its vulnerability.
RV: How does the violence associated with the Civil
War continue to influence the definition of manliness after the war?
MB: Having just spoken about the dichotomy between the
brave soldier and the vulnerable soldier, I think one thing to keep in mind
here—and it continues to be a central part of American culture today, but particularly
up until World War II—is that we see the very definition of manhood changing.
So the rite of passage for men from the age of 13, 14 up until 50 in the Civil
War, the rite of passage was actually killing someone. Killing another soldier,
killing another American, even if they had seceded from the Union. So, the very
definition of manhood—quite different from Davy Crockett, if Davy Crockett
proved his manhood by killing animals—the definition during the Civil War was
actually to kill another American.
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Portrait of Victoria Woodhull by Matthew Brady
“Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable,
constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as
short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with
that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.
And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that
right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but as a community, to see I
am protected in it. I trust that I am fully understood, for I mean just that,
and nothing else.” Victoria Woodhull, "And the truth shall make you
free," a speech on the principles of social freedom, 1871
“I think we have wronged the South, though we did not mean
to do so. The reason was, in part, that we had irreparably wronged ourselves by
putting no safeguard on the ballot-box at the North that would sift out alien
illiterates. They rule our cities today; the saloon is their palace, and the
toddy stick their sceptre. It is not fair that they should vote, nor is it fair
that a plantation negro, who can neither read nor write, whose ideas are
bounded by the fence of his own field and the price of his own mule, should be
entrusted with the ballot. . . . The Anglo-Saxon race will never submit to be
dominated by the negro so long as his altitude reaches no higher than the personal
liberty of the saloon.” Frances Willard, the New
York Voice, October 23, 1890
Richard Voos: One
of the themes of Queer History is the
conflict between two political and cultural movements throughout America's
history. On the one hand what you describe in different periods of American
history as the “persecuting society”—the social purity movement—in the civil
rights movements, in contrast to advocates for religious freedom, labor, and
women's rights organizers and the gay liberation movement. Let's start with the
idea of the “persecuting society,” Michael. What is that?
Michael Bronski:
This is a phrase that, as far as I can tell, was invented by a British scholar,
R. I. Moore. He wrote a
great book about the persecuting society in which he speculates that in the
Late Middle Ages, European culture was diverse enough and falling apart enough
that, as a mechanism to maintain social stability, those people in power—the
clergy and the aristocracy—began to single out distinct groups of people to be persecuted. So by persecuting these
distinct groups of people, and I'll name them in a second, the society actually
became more stable. By the exclusion of some people, more specifically some groups of people, what we might call “the
mainstream society” became much more solid.
The first groups that were targeted for persecution were
lepers, heretics, witches, and sodomites. So these are four very distinct
groups, often related to appearance or behavior: Lepers obviously had leprosy;
sodomites were accused of committing sexual sins. It’s interesting to note that
at that point “sodomy” did not just mean, as we think of it today, same-sex
behavior but a whole range of sexual misbehaviors under Canon Law. And “witches”
singled out almost entirely women and heretics who were going against some
Church doctrine. So the connections here are actually quite clear: lepers
probably—we know today this is not true—probably had leprosy because they had
committed some “sin.” Under Canon Law witchcraft was a sin, as was heresy, as
was sodomy. So there is a clear theological bent with all of this here. As
Western societies and Western civilizations progressed, these groups were
modified; we now have a much better attitude about people with leprosy,
although I must say it’s only in the last hundred years that we stopped putting
people in leper colonies. But the notion that you create and maintain a general
society by the exclusion of other people is still with us today.
RV: You cite an
example, Michael, early on in American history and it's one of the mythologies
of American history, when the Puritans expel Anne Hutchinson. Some of the
accusations made against her and her followers are sexual. Not only are they
religious heretics; they're accused of sexual behavior that contravenes the Puritan ideal.
MB: We see that
with Anne Hutchinson, we see it with the Quakers. And the Puritans, the Quakers—actually
there were nine Quakers that were executed on Boston Common. The Quakers are an
interesting case because Quakerism at its core not only attacked the theology
of the Anglican Church but also the social mores and the gender mores of the
time. Quaker men were forbidden to carry guns, a clear sign of manliness in
that society. Quaker women were allowed to speak during meetings, a clear
deviation from “women should be silent within Church.” So from the very
beginnings (in England), Quakerism—the Society of Friends—violated not only
theology but gender norms as well. When the Quakers were in America, the same
charges were also used against them there, too.
RV: We see at the
end of the nineteenth century, with the social purity movement, actual,
explicit—and as we heard earlier with the reading from Frances Willard—an
extremely explicit connection between social control and stability, and the
sexual and the racial.
MB: I think that
the tension here goes back to R.I. Moore's notion of the persecuting society,
which he admits changes over time. But the tension here is really between those
who want to control society—who want to shape society to fit their own
theological, moral, social norms—and another group of people. Emma Goldman is a
good example, being an anarchist who would like to have less state control,
less mainstream cultural control over what’s going on. So when we get to the mid-
to late-nineteenth century and the social purity movements we find a terrific
reformer like Frances Willard—who is for suffrage, who is for lots of
educational change, who is actually for lots of reform within the workplace—being
pretty explicit in her racism, and called on it by Ida B. Wells. So that even in
a progressive movement we have someone like Frances Willard who needs to use
the very concept of a persecuting society to reaffirm what we would all agree
would be generally pretty good ideas, except she's actually using
African-Americans as her foil.
RV: Some of the
ways that that conflict and contrast plays out at the end of the last century
are almost bewildering to us today, or laughable, and I'm thinking about Graham
Crackers, for example. Describe for us the invention of Graham Crackers and the
purpose, and a little bit more about Kellogg and Post. When we think of
breakfast cereal… they were thinking of something very different.
MB: They were
certainly thinking of something very different. When we look at the social
reform movements of the mid- to late-nineteenth century we're looking at people
who are concerned about a variety of social ills: the “uneducation” of people,
factory work, people starving to death. One of the main themes that connects
all of these together, and one of the main places where they place the blame
for this, is on what they would consider a dangerous and renegade male
sexuality. So it’s male sexuality that causes alcoholism, it’s male sexuality
that causes the abuse of women, it’s male sexuality that causes most of the
social ills. So one of the themes within these reform movements was to control
male sexuality. And the focus of this to a large degree—and we see this going
back to European culture as well although not as strongly as we see it in
American culture—is on stopping masturbation which was seen as a degenerative
act that could cause madness, blindness, and would lead to further acts of
sexual perdition. Some of the diet reformers, people who wanted to reform the
food industry and also how Americans thought about food, people whose names we
see in the supermarket everyday—Mr. Kellogg, Mr. Post, Mr. Graham—began to
invent cereals based on the notion that eating whole grains, unprocessed foods,
unprocessed flour, would be not only healthier but would curb masturbation. So the
origin of Corn Flakes and for Graham crackers, while they were healthier for
you in general, were seen as ways to stop—and we're speaking specifically about
men here because good women would not think about masturbating—were ways of
stopping male masturbation.
I think if you look at American history, and again this is
mirrored, to some degree in European history as well at the same time, one of
the clearest ways of seeing this divide—and its a divide that's highlighted by
the social purity movement—is to look at the divide between the American
anarchist movement and even homegrown freethinkers and atheists such as
Victoria Woodhull as well. People who are advocating a complete absence or at
least the diminishment, the great diminishment, of state control over people's
lives. So these people, let’s look at Goldman and at Woodhull, are looking to
reform people's lives, to make people's lives better to, make people more free,
and they're doing this by essentially eliminating state control over people's
activities. At the same time we have the social purity movement, people who
firmly believe they want to make a better society and who in many ways make
considerable and very significant changes within society that makes it better
for people. And their way of doing this is to actually reform society, making
society a better place for people but also by controlling people's behaviors as
well.
Part of the social purity movement was the temperance
movement, which was to get people to stop drinking and then to ban liquor. We
see this same tension as time goes on between, let's say the African-American
civil rights movement—a movement that’s done spectacularly fine things to make
American society better—but through reforming
rather than through eliminating state
control. If we want to compare, this is not an exact comparison, but we could
compare Victoria Woodhull to Frances Willard and later on we might compare
Malcolm X, who is looking for complete freedom from white society, essentially
eliminating white society in his life, to Dr. Martin Luther King, who wants to
reform mainstream white society, to make it better for everyone. This is a
Queer History of America and I think this tension is quite a queer tension in
terms of freedom versus control. We see the gay liberation movement in 1969
quickly evolving into the gay rights movement. So the gay liberation movement,
in the tradition of Goldman and to some degree Malcom X, wanting to have
complete freedom from the state and from social controls, versus the gay rights
movement, which actually wants to reform society, to make it better for
lesbians and for gay men.
RV: It seems to
me this plays out in the culture wars of the last 20 years also, some of the
same tensions but in different ways.
MB: I think that
when we look at the culture wars—and I think its useful to see the culture wars
as coming in waves that are slightly different than each other as time goes
on—we see certain ironies. I think one irony of the culture wars of the 70's
and 80's involving the federal funding of gay and lesbian material through the
arts, we see a predicament in which a reformist movement, the gay rights
movement, which has granted the state with quite a bit of authority, is now
faced with the fact that the state has so much authority that they're actually
willing to try to wipe out even the gay rights movement and any representations
of lesbians and gay men. I think our more current cultural crises—cultural wars—involve,
lets say the fights about same-sex marriage in which we have a very clear
notion of the gay rights movement as a reformist movement wanting to support
the state in the broadest way possible, to acknowledge gay and lesbian
relationships. This seemed very radical, and is indeed radical, in our current
political setting but goes back to the early reform movements where monogamous
marriage was praised above everything else, and is quite at odds with the
sentiments of Emma Goldman or Victoria Woodhull.
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For the last few months, I’ve been spending a good deal of my time
and energy promoting my book, which was released in May 2012, titled Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of
Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples. In the book, I provide mini-biographies of selected high-profile
couples from the past. I call the relationships that these couples created
“outlaw marriages” because they existed long before same-sex couples in this
country were legally allowed to marry.
I’ve given any number of interviews and also have talked about the
book during several events at bookstores and book fairs. One question that
several interviewers and people at the readings have asked is a variation of: “Isn’t it unethical for you to expose these people as being gay
when many of them concealed their sexuality and their relationship when they
were alive?”
It’s a valid question, as well as one that I’ve thought quite a
bit about. As an example of such a couple who hid their relationship, I’ll
point to Martha Carey Thomas and Mamie Gwinn.
Thomas is well known among education historians because, in 1885, she
created the first graduate program in this country that accepted
female students. She took that highly progressive step, for the time, while she
was serving as dean of the faculty at the newly created Bryn Mawr College.
In Outlaw Marriages, I
describe how Thomas pulled off that feat, but most of the chapter documents her
and Gwinn’s 26-year personal relationship. The two women first lived together
in Germany, where Thomas earned her doctorate. And then they continued their outlaw
marriage for another 22 years while living in an on-campus residence provided
for Thomas while she was dean of the faculty and then president at Bryn Mawr.
Neither Thomas nor Gwinn, during her lifetime, ever spoke publicly
about being a lesbian. And so, the question could be asked: Was it ethically
justified for me to “out” them?
Yes, I think it was.
(Before I continue, I need to say that I don’t deserve all the
credit for conducting the research that revealed Thomas and Gwinn’s lengthy
relationship. One person who did much of the heavy lifting in that effort was a
scholar named Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. In 1994, she published a book titled The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas,
released by the University of Illinois Press, that unambiguously stated that
the subject of the biography was a lesbian.)
As to why I was on solid ethical ground in discussing Thomas and
Gwinn’s sexuality, even though both women kept the details to themselves while
they were alive, I see two reasons.
First, American society is in a very different place regarding
homosexuality today than it was when Thomas and Gwinn were alive. At that time,
it was against the law for two women or two men to engage in sexual activity, and
they likely would have been imprisoned if their relationship had become public.
What’s more, if their outlaw marriage had become widely known, that
would have done serious damage to both women’s careers. Members of the Bryn
Mawr College Board of Trustees wouldn’t have appointed Thomas dean of the
faculty or, later, president if they’d known she was a lesbian. Nor would they have
allowed Gwinn to serve on the faculty of the English Department, which she did.
But that’s simply not the case today. Openly gay or lesbian
educators are presidents of American colleges and universities, while others serve
in the U.S. Congress, plus any number of celebrities who have come out as either
lesbian or gay—people such as Ellen DeGeneres and Wanda Sykes, Neil Patrick
Harris and Anderson Cooper—are enjoying highly successful careers.
So I believe a strong case can be made that if Martha Carey Thomas
and Mamie Gwinn were alive today, they’d both be open about their sexuality.
These women obviously were progressive in their thinking, as they pursued
professional careers when the vast majority of American women were limiting
their lives to the four walls of the home.
Based on statements that I found in letters that Thomas wrote to
her mother, I also believe she would have been more than happy to tell the
world about her intimate relationship with Gwinn. In 1880, Thomas told her
mother, in a letter the young woman wrote from Germany, “If it were only
possible for women to elect women as well as men for a ‘life’s love,’ I would
do so with Mamie in a minute.” Thomas repeated the same thought two years
later, this time writing that her “fondest dream” was that “Mamie and I could
go through the marriage ceremony together.” Likewise, Gwinn often referred to
herself, in letters she wrote, as being Thomas’s “wife.”
The second of the two reasons why I believe I’m fully justified in
publishing a book that discusses the sexuality of gay men and lesbians from the
past has to do with my readers.
Casting all modesty aside, I believe my book and other works about
high-achieving gay people have enormous benefit for members of today’s LGBT
community. People who are stigmatized because of their sexuality—and, yes,
despite the advances that have been made, gay people still carry a stigma in
the minds of many people—are looking for examples of widely respected individuals
who share their sexual orientation.
Young gay or questioning teenagers, in particular, are eager to
learn about successful members of the LGBT community.
Indeed, the couples who come to life in Outlaw Marriages, I believe, are particularly attractive subjects
for lesbian and gay youths to read about because they’re what I might call
“two-fers.” That is, the individuals in the book not only made major
contributions in their individual fields—such as Jane Addams in social reform, Elsie
de Wolfe in interior design, and Ismail Merchant and James Ivory in
filmmaking—but also triumphed by sharing their lives with another lesbian or gay
man for many years—Addams and Mary Rozet Smith were together for 43 years, de
Wolfe and Bessie Marbury were a couple for 41 years, and Merchant and Ivory were
together for 44 years.
Successful careers + successful outlaw marriages = stellar LGBT role
models.
The story of two Revolutionary-era teenagers who defy their Loyalist families to marry radical patriots, Henry Knox and Benedict Arnold, and are forever changed
When Peggy Shippen, the celebrated blonde belle of Philadelphia, married American military hero Benedict Arnold in 1779, she anticipated a life of fame and fortune, but financial debts and political intrigues prompted her to conspire with her treasonous husband against George Washington and the American Revolution. In spite of her commendable efforts to rehabilitate her husband's name, Peggy Shippen continues to be remembered as a traitor bride.
Peggy's patriotic counterpart was Lucy Flucker, the spirited and voluptuous brunette, who in 1774 defied her wealthy Tory parents by marrying a poor Boston bookbinder simply for love. When her husband, Henry Knox, later became a famous general in the American Revolutionary War, Lucy faithfully followed him through Washington's army camps where she birthed and lost babies, befriended Martha Washington, was praised for her social skills, and secured her legacy as an admired patriot wife.
And yet, as esteemed biographer Nancy Rubin Stuart reveals, a closer look at the lives of both spirited women reveals that neither was simply a "traitor" or "patriot." In Defiant Brides, the first dual biography of both Peggy Shippen Arnold and Lucy Flucker Knox, Stuart has crafted a rich portrait of two rebellious women who defied expectations and struggled-publicly and privately-in a volatile political moment in early America.
Drawing from never-before-published correspondence, Stuart traces the evolution of these women from passionate teenage brides to mature matrons, bringing both women from the sidelines of history to its vital center. Readers will be enthralled by Stuart's dramatic account of the epic lives of these defiant brides, which begin with romance, are complicated by politics, and involve spies, disappointments, heroic deeds, tragedies, and personal triumphs.
Kirkus Reviews: “Stuart… draws on her long experience writing about
women and social history to show that strong women have always driven their
husbands to perform prominent actions, both good and bad.”
Booklist: “With the seemingly endless parade of books devoted to both
founding fathers and revolutionary rascals, it’s nice to see some attention
paid to the fervor with which some remarkable women navigated the romantic,
political, and wartime challenges of the era.”
“An ingenious means of bringing new life to the oldest story in our nation’s past: the American Revolution from the perspective of the young and clear-sighted wives of generals Benedict Arnold and Henry Knox. Tracing the parallel lives of two couples with conflicting loyalties, Nancy Rubin Stuart achieves a you-are-there verisimilitude in Defiant Brides that is rare and not to be missed.” —Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism
"In this lively double-biography, Nancy Rubin Stuart reveals the resilient lives of a leading Patriot and a notorious Loyalist: both of them women. Lucy Flucker Knox and Peggy Shippen Arnold deftly performed the parlor politics that helped to shape the American Revolution in surprising ways." —Alan Taylor, author of The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies
"Written with verve and compassion, Nancy Rubin Stuart's portrait of two extraordinary marriages of the American Revolution offers a valuable and moving reminder that, even in the most dramatic of public events, private passions prevailed and participants remained, first and foremost, husbands and wives." —Marla Miller, author of Betsy Ross and the Making of America
"A captivating look at two marriages, marked by bold rebellion and fierce loyalty. The wives of traitor Benedict Arnold and Revolutionary hero Henry Knox never met, and died an ocean apart, but Stuart’s story of their marriages, full of love, passion, betrayal and disappointments, reads like a Hollywood script." —Betty Boyd Caroli, author of First Ladies From Martha Washington to Michelle Obama
Yom HaShoah began this past Sunday at sundown, beginning Holocaust Remembrance Week. The following books explore the Holocaust and its impact through different perspectives: from inside the camps to the Jewish neighborhoods in New York City, recounting personal history and contemplating how to move forward from tragedy.
A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York's Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother's Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler's deadly path.
The story begins in 1914: Mary, the girl who will become Lillian Faderman's mother, just seventeen and swept up with vague ambitions to be a dancer, travels alone to America, where her half-sister in Brooklyn takes her in. She finds a job in the garment industry and a shop friend who teaches her the thrills of dance halls and the cheap amusements open to working-class girls. This dazzling life leaves Mary distracted and her half-sister and brother-in-law scandalized that she has become a "good-time gal." They kick her out of their home, an event with consequences Mary will regret for the rest of her life.
Eighteen years later, still barely scraping by as a garment worker and unmarried at thirty-five, Mary falls madly in love and has a torrid romance with a man who will never marry her, but who will father Lillian Faderman before he disappears from their lives. America is in the midst of the Depression, Hitler is coming to power in Europe, and New York's garment workers are just beginning to unionize. Mary makes tentative steps to join, despite her lover's angry opposition. As National Socialism engulfs Europe, Mary realizes she must find a way to get her family out of Latvia, and she spends frenetic months chasing vague promises and false rumors of hope. Pregnant again, after having submitted to two wrenching back-room abortions, and still unmarried, Mary faces both single motherhood and the devastating possibility of losing her entire Eastern European family.
Drawing on family stories and documents, as well as her own tireless research, Lillian Faderman has reconstructed an engrossing and essential chapter in the history of women, of workers, of Jews, and of the Holocaust as immigrants experienced it from American shores.
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of others he treated later in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory-known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")-holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.
At the time of Frankl's death in 1997, Man's Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages. A 1991 reader survey for the Library of Congress that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.
by Rena Kornreich Gelissen and Heather Dune Macadam
Sent to Auschwitz on the first Jewish transport, Rena Kornreich survived the Nazi death camps for over three years. While there she was reunited with her sister Danka. Each day became a struggle to fulfill the promise Rena made to her mother when the family was forced to split apart--a promise to take care of her sister.
One of the few Holocaust memoirs about the lives of women in the camps, Rena's Promise is a compelling story of the fleeting human connections that fostered determination and made survival a possibility. From the bonds between mothers, daughters, and sisters, to the links between prisoners, and even prisoners and guards, Rena's Promise reminds us of the humanity and hope that survives inordinate inhumanity.
This unusual memoir is the story of a self-described "dark, pudgy, mean, defiant little brat," born in Berlin in 1929 of a half-Jewish mother and a Catholic father and sent to a concentration camp almost, it seems, as a bureaucratic formality. Raised Catholic, Cordelia Edvardson had little in common with her fellow inmates, some of whom despised her as a "German swine." Singled out for punishment, she was selected to act as a secretary for the monstrous "angel of Auschwitz," Josef Mengele. Impressionistic and naïve, Edvardson's third-person memoir retains a highly effective childlike quality ("she had learned that anything can happen, no matter what and no matter when, and for inexplicable reasons") that holds even in the most horrifying episodes. After World War II ended, Edvardson moved to Sweden, where this book was first published. She then converted to Judaism and moved to Israel.
Claire Conner’s father was a national spokesperson for the John Birch Society for more than thirty years; her mother was also a staunch follower. Conner holds a degree in English from the University of Dallas and a graduate degree from the University of Wisconsin. Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America’s Radical Right(coming in July from Beacon Press) gives an inside look at one of the most radical right-wing movements in American history and shows how it impacts our politics today.
Every year, during
Holocaust Remembrance Week, the people of the United States promise to “never
forget” the six million who perished in Hitler’s death camps. I make the same
promise. Then I add my own personal vow—to never forget Dr. Revilo P. Oliver, a
classics professor from the University of Illinois and a founding member of the
John Birch Society. Using an energized, anti-Communist right wing network,
Oliver peddled his revised history of World War II; one in which the Jews
invented the Holocaust and foisted the story of their imaginary persecution on
an unsuspecting world. I heard Oliver spin his vile “Holohoax” ideas right in
my parents’ living room.
In late 1958, my
parents became the first two members of the John Birch Society in Chicago. They
were welcomed into the brand new organization by founder, Robert Welch, who
introduced them to Oliver. Welch and Oliver were personal and professional
friends. Over the years, Welch often described Oliver as one of the “ablest
speakers on the Americanist side.”
Any friend of Welch
got a warm welcome from my parents. The first time I met the man, however, he
gave me the creeps. His long face was exaggerated by black hair slicked back
with greasy pomade, bushy eyebrows and beady eyes and wide handlebar mustache.
I never saw Oliver smile. But his lips often curled in a nasty snarl,
especially when he was berating someone who dared to disagree.
Oliver was a frequent
contributor to National Review,
William F. Buckley’s magazine, and to the John Birch Society’s magazine, American Opinion. In the pages of these
journals, he expressed some of his most controversial positions including a
1965 slam against the United States for “an insane, but terribly effective,
effort to destroy the American people and Western civilization by subsidizing .
. . the breeding of the intellectually, physically, and morally unfit.”
Oliver peppered his
speeches and his articles with racial slurs and discredited historical
assumption. In his role as a member of the John Birch Society speakers’ bureau,
he railed against Communist subversion inside our government while insisting that
President Roosevelt tricked the United States into World War II in order to
help his friend, Joseph Stalin, the Russian dictator.
Along with this
interpretation of World War II, Oliver peddled his version of the Holocaust,
one in stark contrast to everything I’d learned from our Jewish neighbors and
my own father. Gone were the yellow stars and the death camps. Gone were the
gas chambers and crematoria. Even the witness of American soldiers who
liberated Buchenwald and Dachau was repudiated. Instead, Oliver said that there
were no gas chambers and no exterminations.
My parents parroted
Oliver. The Holocaust stopped being so terrible, the death camps turned into
detention camps. Jews were imprisoned because they were traitors, not because
of their faith. The “Final Solution” became fiction, and the Nazis were loyal
military men following orders.
I’d met Jews with
tattoos on their arms. I’d seen photographs from Buchenwald. I knew that
millions of men, women and children were gassed and their ashes coated everything
when the fires roared. I knew all of this as well as I knew my name. I was not
even 14 and I thought my parents had lost their minds. Dr. Oliver had helped
them
No matter what Revilo
Oliver said, he continued to serve (with my father) on the John Birch Society
National Council, the inner circle of the organization. My parents drank in
everything he said and repeated most of it, almost verbatim. Robert Welch heaped
praise on Oliver for his outstanding contributions to the Birch cause.
All of this Oliver
devotion stopped abruptly in July of 1966, when Oliver headlined the New
England Rally for God, Family, and Country, an annual Birch-sponsored festival
held in Boston and billed as a reunion for conservative Americans. In his
speech, “Conspiracy or Degeneracy, Oliver talked about “vaporizing” Jews as
part of the “beatific vision.”
Oliver’s statements
generated an avalanche of negative press, followed by internal Birch turmoil on
how to respond. Oliver had said all of this and more for years and every single
member of the Birch leadership had heard him. But time this was different. Oliver’s
public and blatant racism sounded like it echoed John Birch Society policies.
And the press covered it.
In early August,
Welch told council members that Oliver had resigned. In a split-second, he
vanished from my parents’ conversation. They pretended that Oliver had never
been a Birch leader or a personal friend.
Revilo Oliver lived
the rest of his life as a hero to neo-Nazis, skin heads and white supremacists.
His views never moderated. In 1982, twelve years before his death by suicide,
Oliver wrote that democracy would only be possible by “deporting, vaporizing,
or otherwise disposing of swarms of Jews, Congoids (Africans), Mongoloids and
mongrels (mixed-race) that now infest our territory.”
Oliver put an
indelible mark on the John Birch Society, built a network of Holocaust deniers and
recruited countless followers to spread his message of hate. This year, the theme of the Holocaust
Remembrance is “heeding the warning signs.” There is no warning sign of more
significance than the continuing presence of Holocaust denial in our public
life. We can’t begin to understand today’s deniers if we don’t take a hard look
at the man who fueled the denial movement.
Lillian Faderman is an internationally known scholar of lesbian history and literature, as well as of ethnic and immigrant history. She is the author of such acclaimed works as To Believe in Woman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Surpassing the Love of Men, I Begin My Life All Over, and her memoir Naked in the Promised Land.
Last Thursday, Faderman read from her new book, My Mother's Wars, at one of our favorite bookstores, the Brookline Booksmith. We recorded her reading a few passages from the book, and we're happy to share those videos with you here.
A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York's Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother's Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler's deadly path.
The story begins in 1914: Mary, the girl who will become Lillian Faderman's mother, just seventeen and swept up with vague ambitions to be a dancer, travels alone to America, where her half-sister in Brooklyn takes her in. She finds a job in the garment industry and a shop friend who teaches her the thrills of dance halls and the cheap amusements open to working-class girls. This dazzling life leaves Mary distracted and her half-sister and brother-in-law scandalized that she has become a "good-time gal." They kick her out of their home, an event with consequences Mary will regret for the rest of her life.
In the first passage, Faderman reads about her mother's participation in a garment workers' strike.
In the third passage, Mary has discovered that she is pregnant again, after having submitted to two wrenching back-room abortions. Unmarried, Mary faces the prospect of single motherhood.
An examination of the failure of the United States as a broker in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, through three key historical moments
For more than seven decades the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people has raged on with no end in sight, and for much of that time, the United States has been involved as a mediator in the conflict. In this book, acclaimed historian Rashid Khalidi zeroes in on the United States's role as the purported impartial broker in this failed peace process.
Khalidi closely analyzes three historical moments that illuminate how the United States' involvement has, in fact, thwarted progress toward peace between Israel and Palestine. The first moment he investigates is the "Reagan Plan" of 1982, when Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin refused to accept the Reagan administration's proposal to reframe the Camp David Accords more impartially. The second moment covers the period after the Madrid Peace Conference, from 1991 to 1993, during which negotiations between Israel and Palestine were brokered by the United States until the signing of the secretly negotiated Oslo accords. Finally, Khalidi takes on President Barack Obama's retreat from plans to insist on halting the settlements in the West Bank.
Through in-depth research into and keen analysis of these three moments, as well as his own firsthand experience as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation at the 1991 pre-Oslo negotiations in Washington, DC, Khalidi reveals how the United States and Israel have actively colluded to prevent a Palestinian state and resolve the situation in Israel's favor. Brokers of Deceit bares the truth about why peace in the Middle East has been impossible to achieve: for decades, US policymakers have masqueraded as unbiased agents working to bring the two sides together, when, in fact, they have been the agents of continuing injustice, effectively preventing the difficult but essential steps needed to achieve peace in the region.
Rashid Khalidi is the author of several books about the Middle East, including Palestinian Identity, Resurrecting Empire, The Iron Cage, and Sowing Crisis. His writing on Middle Eastern history and politics has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and many journals. For his work on the Middle East, Professor Khalidi has received fellowships and grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. He is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York.
In the Media
Click here to read a post by Khalidi at the Foreign Policy website.
“Unpacking these episodes in sharp, take-no-prisoners prose,
Khalidi maintains that the U.S. and Israel, ‘by far the most powerful actors in
the Middle East,’ through successive administrations and a variety of key
officials … have conspired to deny Palestinians any semblance of
self-determination. A stinging indictment of one-sided policymaking destined,
if undisturbed, to result in even greater violence.” —Kirkus Reviews
“What has happened to the Palestinian people since 1948 is one of the great
crimes of modern history. Of course, Israel bears primary responsibility for
this tragedy. However, as Rashid Khalidi shows in his smart new book, American
presidents from Truman to Obama have sided with Israel at almost every turn and
helped it inflict immense pain and humiliation on the Palestinians. At the same
time, they have employed high-sounding but dishonest rhetoric to cover up
Israel’s brutal behavior. As Brokers of Deceit makes clear,
the United States richly deserves to be called ‘Israel’s lawyer.’” —John J.
Mearsheimer, coauthor of The Israel Lobby
Drawing on his own experience as a Palestinian negotiator and recently released
documents, Rashid Khalidi mounts a frontal attack on the myths and
misconceptions that have come to surround America’s role in the so-called ‘peace
process,’ which is all process and no peace. The title is not too strong: the
book demonstrates conclusively that far from serving as an honest broker, the
United States continues to act as Israel’s lawyer—with dire consequences for
its own interests, for the Palestinians, and for the entire region. Professor
Khalidi deserves much credit for his superb exposition of the fatal gap between
the rhetoric and reality of American diplomacy on this critically important
issue.” —Avi Shlaim, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford
and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World
“Khalidi has combined history, common sense, and his firsthand understanding of
Arab-Israeli peace talks, as brokered by Washington, to make the case that
American national security interests would be best served by a just peace in
the Middle East. Instead, he writes with great sadness, Washington’s efforts to
be an honest broker fall ‘somewhere between high irony and farce’—and put
democratic America, with its avowed commitment to freedom for all, in the
position of enabling the continued subjugation of the Palestinian people. This
is an important book” —Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker
“For those of us who believe that a two-state solution is the path to justice
and peace for Israel and Palestine, Rashid Khalidi’s trenchant analysis is
powerful and disturbing. The United States has failed repeatedly to be an
honest broker, accepting the status quo of Israeli occupation and settlements
when a true peace agreement would be deeply in the interest of all parties,
Israel, Palestine, and the US itself. Khalidi emphasizes that the deceptions of
language and deed have serious long-term costs and that the United States might
soon impose and incur still greater costs through ill-conceived policies
vis-à-vis Syria, Iran, and other countries in the Middle East.” —Jeffrey D.
Sachs, author of The End of Poverty
“Rashid Khalidi is arguably the foremost U.S. historian of the modern Middle
East.” —Warren I. Cohen, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“With a deep knowledge of the Middle East and a felicitous literary style,
Khalidi . . . examines the history of U.S. involvement in the area against the
backdrop of European colonialism.” —Ronald Steel, The Nation
“Khalidi’s role is as a historian, working to show how historical forces,
largely ignored in the U.S., have shaped the modern Middle East. He takes
particular delight in demolishing the various clichés used to describe the
Middle East, bred out of what he terms ‘America’s historical amnesia.’” —Chris
Hedges, New York Times
An acclaimed writer on her mother's tumultuous life as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York and her life-long guilt when the Holocaust claims the family she left behind in Latvia
A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York's Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother's Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler's deadly path.
The story begins in 1914: Mary, the girl who will become Lillian Faderman's mother, just seventeen and swept up with vague ambitions to be a dancer, travels alone to America, where her half-sister in Brooklyn takes her in. She finds a job in the garment industry and a shop friend who teaches her the thrills of dance halls and the cheap amusements open to working-class girls. This dazzling life leaves Mary distracted and her half-sister and brother-in-law scandalized that she has become a "good-time gal." They kick her out of their home, an event with consequences Mary will regret for the rest of her life.
Eighteen years later, still barely scraping by as a garment worker and unmarried at thirty-five, Mary falls madly in love and has a torrid romance with a man who will never marry her, but who will father Lillian Faderman before he disappears from their lives. America is in the midst of the Depression, Hitler is coming to power in Europe, and New York's garment workers are just beginning to unionize. Mary makes tentative steps to join, despite her lover's angry opposition. As National Socialism engulfs Europe, Mary realizes she must find a way to get her family out of Latvia, and she spends frenetic months chasing vague promises and false rumors of hope. Pregnant again, after having submitted to two wrenching back-room abortions, and still unmarried, Mary faces both single motherhood and the devastating possibility of losing her entire Eastern European family.
Drawing on family stories and documents, as well as her own tireless research, Lillian Faderman has reconstructed an engrossing and essential chapter in the history of women, of workers, of Jews, and of the Holocaust as immigrants experienced it from American shores.
"This is an exquisite piece of history—both resonantly personal and full of revelatory moments in the history of women and of New York in the early days of the garment workers union and the shadow of the Holocaust." —Dorothy Allison
"Faderman's story of her immigrant mother is so vividly imagined that you can taste the borscht Mary eats, squirm at the claustrophobia of her tiny rented room, and be swept up in the sensual delight that will betray her." —Janice Steinberg, the author ofThe Tin Horse
"This book is a work of originality, written with such imaginative sympathy that I read it with unabating pleasure from beginning to end." —Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments "Lillian Faderman is an extraordinary storyteller, one of the few who can tell a painful story, with a complex ending—and imbue it with humor, sensuality and earthy grace, in every sentence." —Amy Bloom, author of Away
"My Mother's Wars tells the aching story of immigrant factory workers in the decades preceding World War II -- sad lives made sadder by the terrified knowledge that their families in Europe are being extinguished. The book is part memoir, part reconstruction … and all artistry." —Edith Pearlman, author of Binocular Vision
At the Nation website, Jeanne Theoharis (The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks) and Marwa Amer take issue with the message sent by the unveiling of a statue of Rosa Parks in the Capitol Rotunda this week:
On Wednesday, President Obama and a bipartisan collection of Congressional leaders paid tribute to the legacy of Rosa Parks by unveiling a statue of her at the Capitol. The 9-foot bronze figure of Parks desegregated Statuary Hall; hers is the first statue of a black woman to be installed at the Capitol and currently the only statue of a black person (a statue of Frederick Douglass is set to be moved there shortly).
Yet, the statue of Rosa Parks—seated and clutching her purse—turned her into a meek and redemptive figure. To the end of her life, Parks believed the United States had a long way to go in the struggle for social and racial justice. Yesterday’s ceremony, however, was largely an exercise in national self-congratulation and a demonstration of American pride and pageantry. It invoked the history of racial injustice to put that history in the past.
“The statue speaks for itself,” House Speaker John Boehner began, noting how its placement in the hall embodied “the vision of a more perfect union.” “What a story, what a legacy, what a country,” Senator Mitch McConnell extolled at the close of his remarks.
As these words were spoken, across the Washington Mall, the Supreme Court heard arguments challenging provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v Holder. Only one speaker at the dedication, Representative James Clyburn, made specific reference to the case, which threatens to undermine the gains that Parks helped bring about.
[Read the rest here]
Sarah Garland is a staff writer at the Hechinger Report. She has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, American Prospect, New York Sun, Newsweek, Washington Monthly, Newsday, New York, and Marie Claire, among other publications. She was a 2009 recipient of the Spencer Fellowship in Education Reporting at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Garland grew up in a middle-class suburb and was bused to an inner-city elementary school in Louisville, Kentucky. In 2007, a case brought by African American parents in Louisville brought to a close the era of school desegregation, and Garland examines the circumstances around this case in her new book, Divided We Fail. We asked her three questions about the book for our blog.
In honor of Black History Month, you can purchase Divided We Fail along with many other Black History titles for 20% off and free shipping at Beacon.org. Use Promo Code FEB2013 at checkout. Buy two or more titles and get a free King Legacy tote bag.
The traditional narrative of desegregation paints a picture of heroic children like Ruby Bridges marching past angry whites opposed to integrated schools. We don't hear much beyond those first, contentious post-Brown v. Board of Education days. How does this simplification gloss over the achievements and problems of desegregation?
Desegregation of the schools was a major achievement—and one that was long fought. But in celebrating that history, the story of black civil rights heroes and their white antagonists often obscures what some in the black community saw as very unfortunate side effects: the closure of traditionally black schools, the firing of black teachers, and a loss of power for black communities in overseeing their schools. No one wanted to go back to the era of Jim Crow, but people were frustrated that in the process of desegregating schools, whites maintained the upper hand and black students still faced many inequities. That’s not to undermine what was achieved with Brown v. Board of Education, but to suggest that desegregation didn’t live up to the hopes many people had for it.
Are contemporary school reform movements—charter schools, Race to the Top, focusing on "accountability"—achieving better results than desegregation in closing the racial gap in education?
In a word, no. There is still not a lot of research on how new reform ideas like Race to the Top are impacting schools, and what research there is on charter suggests that while some charters are succeeding in closing the achievement gap, most are not. Desegregation, by contrast, corresponded with the most rapid shrinking of the achievement gap for black children yet. It was not the only factor contributing to those gains, but research suggests it had a hand, and also that diverse environments can be very positive for minority student achievement. That said, the gap didn’t fully close during desegregation (possibly because of the continued inequities perpetuated in the new systems).
I think reformers today can look back at what worked and what didn’t and learn something. Already some are. Recently, there’s been something of a resurgence of support for integration: Some charter operators are trying to create diverse student bodies and a handful of school superintendents are rethinking the role of racial and economic diversity in schools.
How did your experiences as a student bused to an integrated school inform your research and writing?
Busing was a formative experience for me. Probably for all of us who went through it. I loved my school, which was near downtown Louisville amid some of the poorest housing projects in the city. I had good teachers and great memories of frequent field trips—we would walk in a line through those inner city streets to get to the museums downtown. I think the experience made the persistence of poverty and inequality in our society vividly real to me. But even though my school was diverse and in this neighborhood very different from my own suburban enclave, my days were spent with classmates who looked just like me. We were divided inside the school into advanced, honors and regular classes, and all but a couple of students in the advanced classes were white and middle class. That disparity also stayed with me, and was one of the main reasons I decided to write the book.
In honor of Black History Month, you can purchase any of the books in the King Legacy series along with many other Black History titles for 20% off and free shipping at Beacon.org. Use Promo Code FEB2013 at checkout. Buy two or more titles and get a free King Legacy tote bag.
The
global Martin Luther King, Jr. has occupied my thinking for some two decades. I
have often wondered how the man who, in his book The Trumpet of Conscience(1968), described himself as “a citizen
of the world,” could be so ignored in terms of his international
significance. Even King scholars have
largely neglected King’s vision of what he variously termed “the world house,” “the
new world order,” and “a new humanity.” Knowing that King’s birthday is
recognized and/or celebrated in some one hundred countries, I set out to
produce a volume of his writings and speeches on racism as a world problem,
European colonialism, global poverty, war, the Middle East crisis, and
religious bigotry and intolerance.
In a Single Garment of Destiny reclaims
the global Martin Luther King, Jr. through the prism of his own words and
activities on behalf of world peace and community. I have come to see that we cannot understand
King if we limit him to a southern black preacher or an “American Gandhi.” We must view him as a leader who moved beyond
the particularities of the African American and the American experiences to
speak and act on behalf of a world fragmented by bigotry, injustice,
intolerance, and war.
“The dreamer” is the title by which Martin
Luther King, Jr. is known around the world. While he spoke optimistically of the coming realization of the “American
dream,” we must never forget his larger vision of “a world made new.” This is
why King, in his last two books, Where Do
We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?(1967) and The Trumpet of Conscience, focused so much on world
problems, on racism, poverty, and war, and on the need for humans across the
globe to move beyond a mere intellectual analysis of nonviolence to an
experimentation with that method in every sphere of human conflict.
As a world figure, King transcends the past
in terms of his meaning, authority, and inspiration. He still has meaning for the contemporary
world, especially as we deal with environmental protection concerns, post-Cold
War ethnic cleansings, global terrorism, genocide, religiously-based violence,
political assassinations, and the mounting cycles of violence, repression, and
reprisal in the Middle East. We need a
new appreciation of King’s thought and legacy in the contemporary world.
Today would have been the 100th birthday of Rosa Parks. To honor the day, we share these Ten Things You Didn't Know About Rosa Parks, compiled by Jeanne Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.
Buy this book at Beacon.org and use code FEB2013 at checkout for 20% off. Learn more about this and other books about Black History at the Beacon Press website.
1. Parks had been thrown off the bus a decade earlier by the same bus driver -- for refusing to pay in the front and go around to the back to board. She had avoided that driver's bus for twelve years because she knew well the risks of angering drivers, all of whom were white and carried guns. Her own mother had been threatened with physical violence by a bus driver, in front of Parks who was a child at the time. Parks' neighbor had been killed for his bus stand, and teenage protester Claudette Colvin, among others, had recently been badly manhandled by the police.
2. Parks was a lifelong believer in self-defense. Malcolm X was her personal hero. Her family kept a gun in the house, including during the boycott, because of the daily terror of white violence. As a child, when pushed by a white boy, she pushed back. His mother threatened to kill her, but Parks stood her ground. Another time, she held a brick up to a white bully, daring him to follow through on his threat to hit her. He went away. When the Klu Klux Klan went on rampages through her childhood town, Pine Level, Ala., her grandfather would sit on the porch all night with his rifle. Rosa stayed awake some nights, keeping vigil with him.
3. Her husband was her political partner. Parks said Raymond was "the first real activist I ever met." Initially she wasn't romantically interested because Raymond was more light-skinned than she preferred, but she became impressed with his boldness and "that he refused to be intimidated by white people." When they met he was working to free the nine Scottsboro boys and she joined these efforts after they were married. At Raymond's urging, Parks, who had to drop out in the eleventh grade to care for her sick grandmother, returned to high school and got her diploma. Raymond's input was crucial to Parks' political development and their partnership sustained her political work over many decades.
4. Many of Parks' ancestors were Indians. She noted this to a friend who was surprised when in private Parks removed her hairpins and revealed thick braids of wavy hair that fell below her waist. Her husband, she said, liked her hair long and she kept it that way for many years after his death, although she never wore it down in public. Aware of the racial politics of hair and appearance, she tucked it away in a series of braids and buns -- maintaining a clear division between her public presentation and private person.
5. Parks' arrest had grave consequences for her family's health and economic well-being.After her arrest, Parks was continually threatened, such that her mother talked for hours on the phone to keep the line busy from constant death threats. Parks and her husband lost their jobs after her stand and didn't find full employment for nearly ten years. Even as she made fundraising appearances across the country, Parks and her family were at times nearly destitute. She developed painful stomach ulcers and a heart condition, and suffered from chronic insomnia. Raymond, unnerved by the relentless harassment and death threats, began drinking heavily and suffered two nervous breakdowns. The black press, culminating in JET magazine's July 1960 story on "the bus boycott's forgotten woman," exposed the depth of Parks' financial need, leading civil rights groups to finally provide some assistance.
6. Parks spent more than half of her life in the North. The Parks family had to leave Montgomery eight months after the boycott ended. She lived for most of that time in Detroit in the heart of the ghetto, just a mile from the epicenter of the 1967 Detroit riot. There, she spent nearly five decades organizing and protesting racial inequality in "the promised land that wasn't."
7. In 1965 Parks got her first paid political position, after over two decades of political work. After volunteering for Congressman John Conyers's long shot political campaign,
Parks helped secure his primary victory by convincing Martin Luther King, Jr. to come to Detroit on Conyers's behalf. He later hired her to work with constituents as an administrative assistant in his Detroit office. For the first time since her bus stand, Parks finally had a salary, access to health insurance, and a pension -- and the restoration of dignity that a formal paid position allowed.
8. Parks was far more radical than has been understood. She worked alongside the Black Power movement, particularly around issues such as reparations, black history, anti-police brutality, freedom for black political prisoners, independent black political power, and economic justice. She attended the Black Political Convention in Gary and the Black Power conference in Philadelphia. She journeyed to Lowndes County, Alabama to support the movement there, spoke at the Poor People's Campaign, helped organize support committees on behalf of black political prisoners such as the Wilmington 10 and Imari Obadele of the Republic of New Africa, and paid a visit of support to the Black Panther school in Oakland, CA.
9. Parks was an internationalist. She was an early opponent of the Vietnam War in the early 1960s, a member of The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a supporter of the Winter Soldier hearings in Detroit and the Jeannette Rankin Brigade protest in D.C. In the 1980s, she protested apartheid and U.S. complicity, joining a picket outside the South African embassy and opposed U.S. policy in Central America. Eight days after 9/11, she joined other activists in a letter calling on the United States to work with the international community and no retaliation or war.
10. Parks was a lifelong activist and a hero to many, including Nelson Mandela. After his release from prison, he told her, "You sustained me while I was in prison all those years."
Baseball legend Jackie Robinson was born on this day in 1919. In honor of his birthday, we share this excerpt from Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston by sports journalist and author Howard Bryant. Bryant is also the author of The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron.
Jackie Robinson was already fatalistic about the
tryout. He didn’t believe the Red Sox were serious about integration and wasn’t
especially thrilled about his own situation. He had only played for the Negro
League’s Kansas City Monarchs for a few weeks and was already disappointed by
the league’s air of gambling and disorganization, the very type of lowbrow
behavior that made white baseball people hesitant about allowing blacks into
the big leagues. Robinson was fastidious in his adherence to his own personal
code, and seeing the chaos of the Negro leagues only frustrated him further. It
was the stereotypes of corruption and anarchy that not only plagued black
baseball, thought historian Edmund G. White, but also gave whites a secure
excuse to keep blacks out of the major leagues:
When the Negro
Leagues had come within the consciousness of those within organized baseball,
they had been seen as a reverse mirror image. If Organized baseball was free
from gambling and corruption, the Negro Leagues were run by racketeers. If
Organized baseball was premised on the roster stability of the reserve clause,
the Negro Leagues were the province of contract jumpers. If Organized baseball
was structured around the permanent franchise cities and regular schedules, the
Negro Leagues were a kaleidoscope of changing franchises and whimsical
scheduling. If Organized baseball was a clean, wholesome, upwardly mobile
sport, Negro League games were the scenes of rowdy, disorderly, vulgar
behavior. By being the opposite of Organized baseball’s idealized image, the
Negro Leagues served as their own justification for the exclusion of blacks
from the major leagues. They appeared to demonstrate just how “contaminated”
major league baseball would become if blacks were allowed to play it.
When Robinson arrived in Boston, the tryout was
delayed for two more days in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s death. He told
Smith of his disappointment during the days of delay. “Listen, Smith, it really
burns me up to come fifteen hundred miles for them to give me the runaround.”
Nearly fifty-five years after Cap Anson engineered
the removal of the last black major leaguers in the late nineteenth century,
the tryout finally took place at Fenway Park at eleven on the morning of April
16, 1945. Two above-average Negro leaguers, Sam Jethroe and Marvin Williams,
joined Jackie Robinson. The Red Sox players were white and were mostly minor
league pitchers. Starting the season the following day in New York, the big
league roster was given the day off by Joe Cronin. The routine was mundane. The
players fielded, threw, and took batting practice. Hugh Duffy, the former great
Red Sox out- fielder, ran the tryout and took notes on index cards. Cronin sat,
according to one account, “stone-faced.” Another depicted Cronin barely
watching at all. Muchnick marveled at the hitting ability of Robinson, whose
mood apparently darkened. When it ended, he, Williams, and Jethroe received
platitudes from Duffy. Joe Cashman of the Boston Record sat with Cronin
that day and reported that the manager was impressed with Robinson. He wrote
cryptically, with virtually little comprehension, that he could have been
witnessing a historic moment. “Before departing, Joe and his coaches spent some
90 minutes in the stands at Fenway surveying three Negro candidates. . . . Why
they came from such distant spots to work out for the Red Sox was not learned.”
The Boston Globe did not cover the tryout.
Robinson himself was satisfied with his
performance, although by the time he left Fenway he was smoldering about what
he felt to be a humiliating charade. As the three players departed, Eddie
Collins told them they would hear from the Red Sox in the near future. None of
them ever heard from the Red Sox again.
Eighteen months later, the Dodgers signed Robinson,
who would begin a legendary career a year and half later. Jethroe, at age
thirty-three, integrated Boston pro baseball with
the Braves in 1950 and would become the National League Rookie of the Year.
Williams would stay in the Negro leagues, never again coming so close to the
majors.
The remaining details of that morning are
completely speculative. Robinson never spoke in real detail about the tryout.
Joe Cronin, who next to Collins and was the most powerful member of the Red Sox
next to Yawkey, also never offered a complete account about the tryout except
to say that he remem- bered that it occurred, although he and Robinson would
never speak.
Thirty-four years later, Cronin would discuss the
tryout; he explained the Red Sox position as well as the game’s:
I remember the
tryout very well. But after it, we told them our only farm club available was
in Louisville, Kentucky, and we didn’t think they’d be interested in going
there because of the racial feelings at the time. Besides, this was after the season
had started and we didn’t sign players off tryouts in those days to play in the
big leagues. I was in no position to offer them a job. The general manager did
the hiring and there was an unwritten rule at that time against hiring black
players. I was just the manager.
It was a great
mistake by us. He [Robinson] turned out to be a great player. But no feeling
existed about it. We just accepted things the way they were. I recall talking
to some players and they felt that they didn’t want us to break up their
league. We all thought because of the times, it was good to have separate
leagues.
Clif Keane would give the day its historical
significance. A reporter for the Globe, Keane said he heard a person
yell from the stands during the tryout. The words—“Get those niggers off the
field”—were never attributed to one person, but they have haunted the Red Sox
as much as Pinky Higgins’ proclamation a decade and a half later. Numerous Red
Sox officials, from Joe Cronin to Eddie Collins to Tom Yawkey himself, have
been credited with the taunt, if it was ever said at all. Keane has always
believed it was Yawkey.
What cannot be disputed about the events of that
April day are the final results and the consequences that followed. It was an
episode from which the reputation and perception of the franchise have never
recovered.
Susie Bright, in addition to being a best-selling author, activist, and podcast host, is editor at large for Audible. Susie's blog, The Bright List, keeps readers and listeners apprised of new audiobooks.
Imagine a time when gay/lesbian couples weren't a hot-button issue— a time when same-sex celebrity couples flourished— what a novel idea!
In Outlaw Marriages, cultural historian Rodger Streitmatter reveals that gay marriage is not a 21st century idea— and that in fact, there have always been numerous well-known gay couples who lived an "outlaw" life together, despite conventional mores.
Some of the notables profiled are playwright Tennessee Williams, literary icon Gertrude Stein, and movie legend Greta Garbo.
Who had the long-lasting relationships— and who had a tumultuous love life? Whose lover ended up being their muse for their most famous work?
Outlaw Marriages gives a delicious look behind the curtain. You’ll be surprised at some of the answers!
Couples featured: Walt Whitman & Peter Doyle, Martha Carey Thomas & Mamie Gwinn, John Marshall & Ned Warren, Jane Addams & Mary Rozet Smith, Bessie Marbury & Elsie de Wolfe, J. C. Leyendecker & Charles Beach, Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas, Janet Flanner & Solita Solano, Greta Garbo & Mercedes de Acosta, Aaron Copland & Victor Kraft, Tennessee Williams & Frank Merlo, James Baldwin & Lucien Happersberger, Jasper Johns & Robert Rauschenberg, James Ivory & Ismail Merchant, Audre Lorde & Frances Clayton
The definitive political biography of Rosa Parks examines her six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement.
"In the first sweeping history of Parks's life, Theoharis shows us . . . [that] Parks not only sat down on the bus; she stood on the right side of justice for her entire life." —Julian Bond, chairman emeritus, NAACP
"At last, Jeanne Theoharis answers the question, who was Rosa Parks? The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks will undoubtedly be hailed as one of the most important scholarly contributions to Civil Rights history ever written. Theoharis details Parks as a radical, independent, careful and lifelong activist who has been unfairly frozen in a single time and place: 1955 Montgomery. Theoharis liberates Parks from this singular moment and finally asks the questions that previous journalists and scholars seemed insufficiently curious to ask. And the answers will surprise readers. I can't wait to assign this book in every class I teach.” —Melissa Harris-Perry, Host, MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry Show
"Jeanne Theoharis brings all of her talents as a political scientist and historian of the Civil Rights Movement to bear on this illuminating biography of the great Rosa Parks, whose symbolic act in 1955 made her an icon of the movement and whose lifelong commitment to social justice made her something even more profound: a multidimensional political actor in the hard-fought (and ongoing) battle for equality and full citizenship." —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
"Charisma is not a word often used to describe Rosa Parks yet we have to recognize her star. The Rosa Parks challenge to the political system was deep and lasting even while she never raised her voice. The first female Speaker of the House of Representatives once said, 'You can get a lot done if you don't need to take credit for it.' She took a page from the book of Parks. Theoharis' scholarship brings forth a woman whom many followed without ever realizing they were. She was courageous and strong. She also had a wonderful sense of humor. And an awesome sense of responsibility. This is a much needed book on the woman who is, arguably, the most important person in the last half of the twentieth century. Just as the Lincoln Memorial needs a statue of Frederick Douglass gently bending over with a pen in his hand for Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, the statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. needs a statue of Rosa Parks just one or two steps ahead mouthing the words: 'Come on, Dr. King. We've got work to do.'" —Nikki Giovanni, Poet
When Rosa Parks died in October 2005, she became the first woman and second African American to lie in honor at the nation's capital. Yet much of the memorialization reduced her historical contribution to a single act on a bus on a long-ago December evening. In this revealing and comprehensive biography-the first critical treatment of Parks's life-historian Jeanne Theoharis shows that the standard portrayal of Rosa Parks as a quiet and demure accidental actor is far from true.
Presenting a powerful corrective to the popular iconography of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who with a single act birthed the modern civil rights movement, Theoharis excavates Parks's political philosophy and six decades of political work to reveal a woman whose existence demonstrated-in her own words-a "life history of being rebellious." From her family's support of Marcus Garvey to her service with the NAACP in Alabama in the 1940s and 1950s, and from her courageous bus arrest and steadfast efforts on behalf of the Montgomery bus boycott to her work in Detroit challenging Northern racial inequality on behalf of a newly elected Congressman John Conyers and alongside Black Power advocates, Parks's contributions to the civil rights movement go far beyond a single day. Even as economic hardship and constant death threats exacted a steep toll on Rosa and her husband, Raymond, she remained committed to exposing and eradicating racial inequality in jobs, schools, public services, and the criminal justice system.
In The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, Theoharis masterfully details the political depth of a national heroine who dedicated her life to fighting American inequality and, in the process, resurrects an inspiring civil rights movement radical who has been hidden in plain sight far too long.
What Reviewers are saying about The Rebellious LIfe of Mrs. Rosa Parks:
Kirkus Reviews: “How Theoharis learned the true nature of this woman is a story in itself. Parks always stood in the background, never volunteered information about herself and eschewed fame. There were no letters to consult; even her autobiography exposed little of the woman’s personality. She hid her light under a bushel, and it has taken an astute author to find the real Parks. Even though her refusal to give up her bus seat sparked a revolution, Rosa Parks was no accidental heroine. She was born to it, and Theoharis ably shows us how and why.”
Booklist: “Historian Theoharis offers a complex portrait of a forceful, determined woman who had long been active before the boycott she inspired and who had an even longer career in civil rights afterward.”
Publishers Weekly: "Theoharis submits a lavishly well-documented study of Parks’s life and career as an activist.”
Library Journal: "Verdict: This meticulously researched book is for everyone; advanced middle school and beyond."
An unprecedented and timely collection that captures the global vision of Dr. King—in his own words
Too many people continue to think of Dr. King only as "a southern civil rights leader" or "an American Gandhi," thus ignoring his impact on poor and oppressed people around the world. "In a Single Garment of Destiny" is the first book to treat King's positions on global liberation struggles through the prism of his own words and activities.
From the pages of this extraordinary collection, King emerges not only as an advocate for global human rights but also as a towering figure who collaborated with Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert J. Luthuli, Thich Nhat Hanh, and other national and international figures in addressing a multitude of issues we still struggle with today-from racism, poverty, and war to religious bigotry and intolerance. Introduced and edited by distinguished King scholar Lewis Baldwin, this volume breaks new ground in our understanding of King.
"Baldwin's readable, thoughtful, and fresh compilation gives full voice to King's belief that "[a]ll inhabitants of the globe are now neighbors."—Publishers Weekly
Did you unwrap an e-reader this holiday season? Or did you treat yourself to one? (Don't worry, we won't judge.) Here are Beacon's most popular e-book titles for 2012 along with a few suggestions for titles sure to be on next year's bestseller list. Download one or two and see why they've inspired people to click and read.
At the time of Frankl's death in 1997, Man's Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages. A 1991 reader survey for the Library of Congress that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.
"One of the great books of our time." —Harold S. Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People
"One of the outstanding contributions to psychological thought in the last fifty years." —Carl R. Rogers (1959)
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Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.
"Octavia Butler is a writer who will be with us for a long, long time, and Kindred is that rare magical artifact . . . the novel one returns to, again and again." —Harlan Ellison
"One cannot finish Kindred without feeling changed. It is a shattering work of art with much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now." —Sam Frank, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
"In Kindred, Octavia Butler creates a road for the impossible and a balm for the unbearable. It is everything the literature of science fiction can be." —Walter Mosley
In this beautiful and lucid guide, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh offers gentle anecdotes and practical exercise as a means of learning the skills of mindfulness--being awake and fully aware. From washing the dishes to answering the phone to peeling an orange, he reminds us that each moment holds within it an opportunity to work toward greater self-understanding and peacefulness.
"Thich Nhat Hanh's ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity." -Martin Luther King, Jr.
"He has immense presence and both personal and Buddhist authority. If there is a candidate for 'Living Buddha' on earth today, it is Thich Nhat Hanh." -Roshi Richard Baker, author of Original Mind: The Practice of Zen in the West
All Souls by: A Family Story from Southie Michael Patrick MacDonald
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A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald's Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. Rocked by Whitey Bulger's crime schemes and busing riots, MacDonald's Southie is populated by sharply hewn characters like his Ma, a miniskirted, accordion-playing single mother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children. Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community's code of silence, MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but moving honesty.
The Cure for Everything! Untangling Twisted Messages About Health, Fitness, and Happiness by Timothy Caulfield
In The Cure for Everything, health-policy expert and fitness enthusiast Timothy Caulfield debunks the mythologies of the one-step health crazes, reveals the truths behind misleading data, and discredits the charlatans in a quest to sort out real, reliable health advice. He takes us along as he navigates the maze of facts, findings, and fears associated with emerging health technologies, drugs, and disease-prevention strategies, and he presents an impressively researched, accessible take on the production and spread of information in the health sciences.
Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health by Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, Dr. Lisa M. Schwartz, and Dr. Steven Woloshin
Drawing on twenty-five years of medical practice and research, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch and his colleagues, Dr. Lisa M. Schwartz and Dr. Steven Woloshin, have studied the effects of screenings and presumed preventative measures for disease and "pre-disease." Welch argues that while many Americans believe that more diagnosis is always better, the medical, social, and economic ramifications of unnecessary diagnoses are in fact seriously detrimental. Unnecessary surgeries, medication side effects, debilitating anxiety, and the overwhelming price tag on health care are only a few of the potential harms of overdiagnosis.
Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels by Hella Winston
When Hella Winston began talking with Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn for her doctoral dissertation in sociology, she was surprised to be covertly introduced to Hasidim unhappy with their highly restrictive way of life and sometimes desperately struggling to escape it. Unchosen tells the stories of these "rebel" Hasidim, serious questioners who long for greater personal and intellectual freedom than their communities allow. In her new Preface, Winston discusses the passionate reactions the book has elicited among Hasidim and non-Hasidim alike.
"Winston . . . builds fascinating case studies, inviting readers into her interviewees' conflicted, and often painful, lives . . . show[ing] us a Hasidic underworld where large families and a lack of secular education have resulted in extreme poverty and some serious at-risk behavior among youth. Her story of courage and intellectual rebellion will inspire anyone who has ever felt like a religious outcast." -Publishers Weekly, starred review
Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters was playing cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like roaring surf, one of them said later. Like a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence, said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window-"Oh my God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!"
A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outset traveled at 35 miles an hour. It demolished wooden homes, even the brick fire station. The number of dead wasn't known for days. It would be years before a landmark court battle determined who was responsible for the disaster.
Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish by Joe Mackall
Joe Mackall has lived surrounded by the Swartzentruber Amish community of Ashland County, Ohio, for over sixteen years. They are the most traditional and insular of all the Amish sects: the Swartzentrubers live without gas, electricity, or indoor plumbing; without lights on their buggies or cushioned chairs in their homes; and without rumspringa, the recently popularized "running-around time" that some Amish sects allow their sixteen-year-olds.
Over the years, Mackall has developed a steady relationship with the Shetler family (Samuel and Mary, their nine children, and their extended family). Plain Secrets tells the Shetlers' story over these years, using their lives to paint a portrait of Swartzentruber Amish life and mores. During this time, Samuel's nephew Jonas finally rejects the strictures of the Amish way of life for good, after two failed attempts to leave, and his bright young daughter reaches the end of school for Amish children: the eighth grade. But Plain Secrets is also the story of the unusual friendship between Samuel and Joe. Samuel is quietly bemused—and, one suspects, secretly delighted—at Joe's ignorance of crops and planting, carpentry and cattle. He knows Joe is planning to write a book about the family, and yet he allows him a glimpse of the tensions inside this intensely private community.
“I was born male and now I’ve got medical and government documents that say I’m female—but I don’t call myself a woman, and I know I’m not a man. . . .”
Scientologist, husband and father, tranny, sailor, slave, playwright, dyke, gender outlaw—these are just a few words which have defined Kate Bornstein during her extraordinary life. For the first time, it all comes together inA Queer and Pleasant Danger, Kate Bornstein’s stunningly original memoir that’s set to change lives and enrapture readers.
Wickedly funny and disarmingly honest, this is Bornstein’s most intimate book yet. With wisdom, wit, and an unwavering resolution to tell the truth (“I must not tell lies”), Bornstein shares her story: from a nice Jewish boy growing up in New Jersey to a strappingly handsome lieutenant of the Church of Scientology’s Sea flagship vessel, and later to 1990s Seattle, where she becomes a rising star in the lesbian community. In between there are wives and lovers, heartbreak and triumph, bridges mended and broken, and a journey of self-discovery that will mesmerize readers.
The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals by Lauren Slater
From the time she is nine years old, biking to the farmland outside her suburban home, where she discovers a disquieting world of sleeping cows and a "Private Way" full of the wondrous and creepy creatures of the wild-spiders, deer, moles, chipmunks, and foxes-Lauren Slater finds in animals a refuge from her troubled life. As she matures, her attraction to animals strengthens and grows more complex and compelling even as her family is falling to pieces around her. Slater spends a summer at horse camp, where she witnesses the alternating horrific and loving behavior of her instructor toward the animals in her charge and comes to question the bond that so often develops between females and their equines. Slater's questions follow her to a foster family, her own parents no longer able to care for her. A pet raccoon, rescued from a hole in the wall, teaches her how to feel at home away from home. The two Shiba Inu puppies Slater adopts years later, against her husband's will, grow increasingly important to her as she ages and her family begins to grow.
The $60,000 Dog is Lauren Slater's intimate manifesto on the unique, invaluable, and often essential contributions animals make to our lives. As a psychologist, a reporter, an amateur naturalist, and above all an enormously gifted writer, she draws us into the stories of her passion for animals that are so much more than pets. She describes her intense love for the animals in her life without apology and argues, finally, that the works of Darwin and other evolutionary biologists prove that, when it comes to worth, animals are equal, and in some senses even superior, to human beings.
Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America. With a keen eye, he examines everything from the significance of the protest novel to the motives and circumstances of the many black expatriates of the time, from his home in "The Harlem Ghetto" to a sobering "Journey to Atlanta."
Notes of a Native Son inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the twentieth century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic. His criticism on topics such as the paternalism of white progressives or on his own friend Richard Wright's work is pointed and unabashed. He was also one of the few writing on race at the time who addressed the issue with a powerful mixture of outrage at the gross physical and political violence against black citizens and measured understanding of their oppressors, which helped awaken a white audience to the injustices under their noses. Naturally, this combination of brazen criticism and unconventional empathy for white readers won Baldwin as much condemnation as praise.
Notes is the book that established Baldwin's voice as a social critic, and it remains one of his most admired works. The essays collected here create a cohesive sketch of black America and reveal an intimate portrait of Baldwin's own search for identity as an artist, as a black man, and as an American.
Melanie Hoffert longs for her North Dakota childhood home, with its grain trucks and empty main streets. A land where she imagines standing at the bottom of the ancient lake that preceded the prairie: crop rows become the patterned sand ripples of the lake floor; trees are the large alien plants reaching for the light; and the sky is the water’s vast surface, reflecting the sun. Like most rural kids, she followed the out-migration pattern to a better life. The prairie is a hard place to stay—particularly if you are gay, and your home state is the last to know. For Hoffert, returning home has not been easy. When the farmers ask if she’s found a “fella,” rather than explain that—actually—she dates women, she stops breathing and changes the subject. Meanwhile, as time passes, her hometown continues to lose more buildings to decay, growing to resemble the mouth of an old woman missing teeth. This loss prompts Hoffert to take a break from the city and spend a harvest season at her family’s farm. While home, working alongside her dad in the shop and listening to her mom warn, “Honey, you do not want to be a farmer,” Hoffert meets the people of the prairie. Her stories about returning home and exploring abandoned towns are woven into a coming-of-age tale about falling in love, making peace with faith, and belonging to a place where neighbors are as close as blood but are often unable to share their deepest truths.
In this evocative memoir, Hoffert offers a deeply personal and poignant meditation on land and community, taking readers on a journey of self-acceptance and reconciliation.
The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution tells the story of George Robert Twelves Hewes, a Boston shoemaker who participated in such key events of the American Revolution as the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party. Hewes story might have been lost to history if not for his longevity and the historical mood of the 1830's. When the Tea Party became a leading symbol of the Revolutionary era fifty years after the actual event, this 'common man' in his nineties was 'discovered' and celebrated in Boston as a national hero. Hewes story continues to inspire and instruct today, thanks to the work of one historian.
Alfred F. Young, author of The Shoemaker and the Tea Party as well as many other works, died on November 6. He was a man beloved for his warmth and good nature and respected for his scholarship. When his wife, Marilyn, sent an email to her late husband's contact list, including Beacon editor Gayatri Patnaik, many responded to the news with memories of the man and his work. Gayatri sent an email to Marilyn:
"I’ve been an executive editor at Beacon Press for ten years and had the very good fortune to know Al. I’ve been reading all the emails from his friends and colleagues over the past few days and am struck, though not surprised, at the many people he touched. I myself was always humbled when I interacted with him, not because of his legacy as a historian but also by his generosity and kindness."
Thinking that the thoughts of his colleagues and friends would be a fitting tribute to a man much admired here at Beacon Press, we've asked their permission to share what we publish here today.
We'll begin with an email Young received before his death but never read, as it arrived in the final days of his illness. It is from Geoffrey Charles Peart, a descendent of George Robert Twelves Hewes, the subject of The Shoemaker and the Tea Party.
Dear Dr. Young, In doing some research on my family history, I came across your book on George Robert Twelves Hewes. I am a direct descendant of his by way of his son George Robert Twelves Fifteen Hewes. I was fascinated to read your account, and see in print the same stories my grandmother (born 1907) told me as a child.
While all letters and documentation I have are in relation to his descendants living in Michigan, we do have a portrait at home that family tradition holds is of G. R. T. Hewes. Below I have attached a scanned version. Should you have any questions, I would be more than happy to share what I have.
Thank you for the wonderful book!
Geoffrey Charles Peart
Portrait of George Robert Twelve Hewes
It has been deeply moving to read the tributes about Al Young so many historians and comrades--especially from the many younger scholars for whom he was an inspiration and to whom he gave encouragement and support. He and I were roughly of the same generation--he was a few years older than I--and our work on popular and artisanal resistance movements and their connection with festivity took place at the same time: his in revolutionary America, mine in early modern France. We didn't know each other then, but I recognized him as a co-conspirator, and I'm sure he felt the same about me. It was thrilling to meet him in later years. And also so get to know his daughter Liz Young, who has carried on his tradition in another field. His legacy is a rich one.
This is incredibly sad news. Al was ahead of his time in so many ways, showing us how to mobilize the new social history to uncover political dynamics, how to get at the politics of memory--and above all, how to do our work with generosity, as part of a collective. I will miss him.
Reeve Huston, Associate Professor of History, Duke University
Al leaves a grand legacy as an inspired scholar, a person of principles, and a prince of a man. He took history seriously and presenting it to the public even more seriously.
Terry J. Fife (co-author with Alfred Young and Mary E. Janzen of We the People)
As an NIU colleague for years I can add that there was no truer friend, no stauncher fighter for what was right, no better model of what a senior colleague should be and stand for, or forhow a committed scholar, sensing the right moment, could literally change the way man, many thousands of others understood their citizenship, their country, and their world.
Very sad. He was a great scholar and elegant stylist but also a model of modesty. I counted him as a friend and mentor and mourn his passing. The world's a much smaller place.
Bruce Laurie, Professor Emeritus, UMass Amherst Department of History
Al was hugely important to my own development, from when he first noticed me in 1973 onwards. We all stood in his shadow one way or another. He was a scholar, a gentleman, and a total mensch.
Ed Countryman, University Distinguished Professor, Southern Methodist University Department of History
Al befriended me when I was working as an administrative assistant in the Newberry Library. He took me seriously, although I was a young graduate student, and he has been a mentor, ally, and friend ever since. I admired his work tremendously. But I admired him as a person even more. And I will miss him.
Laura Edwards, Professor of History, Duke University
From Ray Raphael, author of A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence and Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past and coeditor of Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation.
About six years ago, Al approached me with an idea: since people love to digest history in the form of biography, shouldn't there be a book featuring biographical essays of radicals of the Revolutionary Era?
Good idea, I responded. Then I continued to pump him with questions for my own work-in-progress.
A few weeks later, he mentioned his idea again, then again and again for perhaps a year, until he finally asked outright if I would be interested in working with him on such a project. I had been blind, I realized; he had been asking me all along, but I hadn't taken his hints. At a younger age, he would have charged into this on his own, but now he sought company.
I had two books in the works, but I could hardly say no. Gary Nash signed on as well, and for three years or so, the three of us tried to fulfill Al's vision. Truly, Revolutionary Founders was his book.
Al was my teacher years before he knew I existed. When I started studying people's history of the American Revolution in the mid-90s, I gleaned onto the classic collection of essays he had published in 1976 that gave the field definition, and I used the long historiographic essay he had just published as my starting roadmap. I didn't yet know him when he blurbed my first Am Rev book, The People's History of the American Revolution, but after that I introduced myself by email and phone, and from that moment onward, he was my constant advisor. Whenever I had any question, I turned to Al first, and he would rattle off, from the top of his head, a readings list I should pursue.
And now I would be working side-by-side with a mentor! It was a thrilling prospect, but Al proved to be a tough taskmaster. Email followed email, five or six per day at times, and in the course of the project, a thousand at least. He was direct and spoke his mind, relentless and demanding in his pursuit of historical truth, but he could be curt. Intermittently we quibbled over this or that. At one low ebb, when the tone seemed to turn a bit sour, I headed East with a mission: to meet Al in person. Never have I lived with someone so long and so intensely without meeting him first.
Durham, NC, the fall of 2009: Al and I hit it off famously, working together for three days, tidying up this essay and that, jamming on the intro, talking shop. Through work was how Al related most deeply, as musicians do with their music. I was face to face with a dedicated, highly effective, rigorous historian and a truly wonderful man; these went hand-in-hand. That visit was a gift; especially now, I am thankful for it. In point of fact, who among us does not owe Al great thanks? He defined who we are, collectively and to some extent individually.
Staughton, in his Nov. 9 email tribute, says Al was "a product of the Popular Front atmosphere of the late 1930s," and he suggests that Al was somehow locked within that framework, promoting "the people" without fully embracing the African American and Native American experiences. That's not how I saw him. Al grew with the times and in fact he helped the times grow with him. He saw the Revolution as a complex affair in which there were many renditions of "the people." In our book, he insisted on including women, blacks, and Native Americans and felt uncomfortable to the end with not featuring such groups more; unfortunately, a central essay on the black experience was never completed.
Al was a true scholar, open to fully honest discussion. Once, on the phone, I confessed that in two footnotes to People's History, I had taken him to task on points in his Hewes essay. Had he noticed these? "Of course," he responded. "That's what most attracted me to you. You took me seriously."
And he took me seriously, critiquing my work as only a master can. In an early draft for Revolutionary Founders, I had presented a tolerably good essay on Timothy Bigelow, a radical leader from Worcester who happened to be a blacksmith. Not strong enough, said Al. You need to bring out the blacksmith thing, that is crucial. Here, in fact, is an email on the subject I just retrieved from June 25, 2009, when Al was 84 and still, as you see, at the top of his game. I'll let him have the last word so we can see him in process, tireless, determined, and exacting. It’s a primary source, presented exactly as written. This was vintage Al as I knew him: supreme clarity of mind but working quickly, with his typing fingers not always up to the pace.
To explain why a blacksmith might have a following: Of all the artisans he is the one most essential to farmers and townspeople. They need him to shoe their oxen and horses, to mend their tools. He might make other household ironware too.
He is the one artisans who people would visit and have to stay a while while he shod their horses or repaired a pitchfork.
Only other comparable figure might be the miller but farmers would bring him their grains at infrequent intervals.
He is also a craftstmen whose work you could evaluate yourself and know whether he was a good man.
So it not just men talked as men will do as you say. He was familiar to many people; they knew him; they had confidence in him.
Would the Brit iron policies have been a felt grievance. Interesting question. Do you have a source saying it was.
The iron act of 1750 forbade colonists to erect any new slitting mills.[ not quite sure distinction from a forge]
And the importation of raw iron from the colopnies was encouraged. But says Merrill Jensen"the act did not serve either puroose. There was a staedy increase in iron production, but mostof it was used in the colony where it was produced... or shipped to other colonies where it was made into finished iron products by locval artisans'... colonial governors closed their eyes to the the fact of 'local slitting mills]
Jensen ed Colonial Engkish Histirical D ocuments ed Jensen NY Ocford 1955. Jensen is even handed about these matters.
Do you have any other evidence? My guess is the average blacksmith had all he could do managing the damnds of local farmers.
BUT the boycot movement was accompanied by a buy American movement, big in Mass. with a long list of p;ropducts colonists were encouraged to buy from amer manufacturers. I wrote in my mechanics essay as I recall that the prospect of of increasing Amer manufactures was an appeal to artisans rather than saying the restrictions were a felt grievance. A distinction. The visio of the prospects for Amer manufactures was an appeal ti many artisans. Wteher you can say this for Bigelow.I dont know
Two people—a black woman and a white man—confront the legacy of slavery and racism head-on.
Thomas DeWolf—a descendent of slaveholders—and Sharon Morgan—a descendent of slaves—come together to openly discuss how the legacy of slavery and racism has impacted their lives. Together, they disclose the various difficulties and rewards they experience as individuals striving to heal. Gather at the Table is a timely, candid, and deeply relevant book that offers an engaging model of restorative justice.
Visit the Gather at the Table website to learn more about the authors, their writing, and upcoming appearances.
Gather at the Tableis an extraordinary story of an honest, meaningful conversation across the racial divide. At times it hurts to read. And well it should. Centuries of injustice and trauma that face us every day in this country have no place for half-truths. Sharon and Tom took the harder road-searching for healing, they literally walked together into painful histories and found authentic friendship.”—John Paul Lederach, co-author of When Blood and Bones Cry Out: Journeys through the Soundscape of Healing and Reconciliation
“Sharon and Tom take us on a heart-opening journey of awakening. As a nation, we owe them a deep bow of gratitude as they help us navigate the deep divides of race and otherness.”—Belvie Rooks, Co-Founder, Growing A Global Heart
“Gather at the Table is an honest exploration into the deep social wounds left by racism, violence and injustice, as the authors work through their own prejudices in search of reconciliation–and ultimately find friendship.” —Leymah Gbowee, 2011 Nobel Peace Laureate
“What a courageous journey—communicated in an engaging, readable style, with candor, humor, and deep feeling. This book shed light on the thoughts, questions, and feelings I have about race, society, culture, historical, generational and structurally-induced trauma—and the human ability to transcend. In reading it, I realized there are questions I'm still afraid to ask about race, things I'm afraid to say, and yet I realized anew the power of acknowledgment, mercy, justice, and conflict transformation. I'm grateful to DeWolf and Morgan for not just taking the journey, but for sharing their story with us.”—Carolyn Yoder, Founding Director of STAR: Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience and author of The Little Book of Trauma Healing: When Violence Strikes and Community is Threatened
“The authors’ accomplishment stands on its own, but their book also serves as a great introduction to a shared past that ought to be better known.”—Kirkus Reviews
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