The Shadow of Selma evaluates the 1965 civil rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, the historical memory of the campaign's marches, and the continuing relevance of and challenges to the Voting Rights Act. The contributors present Selma not just as a keystone event but, much like Ferguson today, as a transformative place: a supposedly unimportant location that became the focal point of epochal historical events. By shifting the focus from leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. to the thousands of unheralded people who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge-and the networks that undergirded and opposed them-this innovative volume considers the campaign's long-term impact and its place in history. The volume recalls the historical currents that surrounded Selma, discussing grassroots activism, the role of President Lyndon B. Johnson during the struggle for the Voting Rights Act, and the political reaction to Selma at home and abroad. Using Ava DuVernay's 2014 Hollywood film as a stepping stone, the editors bring together various essays that address the ways media-from television and newspaper coverage to "race beat" journalism-represented and reconfigured Selma. The contributors underline the power of misrepresentation in shaping popular memory and in fueling a redemptive narrative that glosses over ongoing racial problems. Finally, the volume traces the fifty-year legacy of the Voting Rights Act. It reveals the many subtle and overt methods by which opponents of racial equality attempted to undo the act's provisions, with a particular focus on the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that eliminated sections of the act designed to prevent discrimination. Taken together, the essays urge readers not to be blind to forms of discrimination and injustice that continue to shape inequalities in the United States. They remind us that while today's obstacles to racial equality may look different from a literacy test or a grimfaced Alabama state trooper, they are no less real. Contributors: Alma Jean Billingslea Brown | Ben Houston | Peter Ling | Mark McLay | Tony Badger | Clive Webb | Aniko Bodroghkozy | Mark Walmsley | George Lewis | Megan Hunt | Devin Fergus | Barbara Harris Combs | Lynn Mie Itagaki

Beginning in the era of Manifest Destiny, U.S. settlers, writers, politicians, and boosters worked to bind California and Hawai‘i together in the American imagination, emphasizing white settlement and capitalist enterprise. In California and Hawai‘i Bound Henry Knight Lozano explores how these settlers and boosters promoted and imagined California and Hawai‘i as connected places and sites for U.S. settler colonialism, and how this relationship reveals the fraught constructions of an Americanized Pacific West from the 1840s to the 1950s. The growing ties of promotion and development between the two places also fostered the promotion of “perils� over this transpacific relationship, from Native Hawaiians who opposed U.S. settler colonialism to many West Coast Americans who articulated social and racial dangers from closer bonds with Hawai‘i, illustrating how U.S. promotional expansionism in the Pacific existed alongside defensive peril in the complicated visions of Americanization that linked California and Hawai‘i. California and Hawai‘i Bound demonstrates how the settler colonial discourses of Americanization that connected California and Hawai‘i evolved and refracted alongside socioeconomic developments and native resistance, during a time when U.S. territorial expansion, transoceanic settlement and tourism, and capitalist investment reconstructed both the American West and the eastern Pacific.

The Shadow of Selma provides a comprehensive assessment of the 1965 civil rights campaign, the historical memory of the marches, and the continuing relevance of and challenges to the Voting Rights Act. The essays consider Selma not just as a keystone event but, much like Ferguson today, a transformative place: a supposedly unimportant location that became the focal point of epochal historical events. Contributors to this innovative volume examine the relationship between the memorable figures of the campaign?Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, among others?and the thousands of other unheralded people who also crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way from Selma to Montgomery. They analyze networks that undergirded as well as opposed the movement, placing it in broader historical, political, and international contexts. Addressing the influential role of media representations from contemporary newspaper and television coverage to the 2014 Hollywood film by Ava DuVernay, several of the essays challenge the redemptive narrative that has shaped popular memory, one that glosses over ongoing racial problems. Finally, the volume explores the fifty-year legacy of the Voting Rights Act, with particular focus on Shelby County vs. Holder, which in 2013 seemed to suggest that the Act had solved the disfranchisement problems of the civil rights era and was outdated. Taken together, the essays argue that while today the obstacles to racial equality may look different than a literacy test or a grim-faced Alabama State Trooper, they are no less real.