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It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential electoral black
politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War--as of
1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in
bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily
increased their influence in U.S. electoral politics over the
course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to
disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North,
sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections. In this
meticulously researched book, Van Gosse offers a sweeping
reappraisal of the formative era of American democracy from the
Constitution's ratification through Lincoln's election, chronicling
the rise of an organized, visible black politics focused on the
quest for citizenship, the vote, and power within the free states.
Full of never-before-told stories and thorough examinations of
political battles, this book traces a First Reconstruction of black
political activism following emancipation in the North. From
Portland and New Bedford to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men
operated as voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color
could define citizenship.
Revolutions and Reconstructions gathers historians of the early
republic, the Civil War era, and African American and political
history to consider not whether black people participated in the
politics of the nineteenth century but how, when, and with what
lasting effects. Collectively, its authors insist that historians
go beyond questioning how revolutionary the American Revolution
was, or whether Reconstruction failed, and focus, instead, on how
political change initiated by African Americans and their allies
constituted the rule in nineteenth-century American politics, not
occasional and cataclysmic exceptions. The essays in this
groundbreaking collection cover the full range of political
activity by black northerners after the Revolution, from cultural
politics to widespread voting, within a political system shaped by
the rising power of slaveholders. Conceptualizing a new black
politics, contributors observe, requires reorienting American
politics away from black/white and North/South polarities and
toward a new focus on migration and local or state structures.
Other essays focus on the middle decades of the nineteenth century
and demonstrate that free black politics, not merely the politics
of slavery, was a disruptive and consequential force in American
political development. From the perspective of the contributors to
this volume, formal black politics did not begin in 1865, or with
agitation by abolitionists like Frederick Douglass in the 1840s,
but rather in the Revolutionary era's antislavery and citizenship
activism. As these essays show, revolution, emancipation, and
Reconstruction are not separate eras in U.S. history, but rather
linked and ongoing processes that began in the 1770s and continued
through the nineteenth century. Contributors: Christopher James
Bonner, Kellie Carter Jackson, Andrew Diemer, Laura F. Edwards, Van
Gosse, Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, M. Scott Heerman, Dale Kretz,
Padraig Riley, Samantha Seeley, James M. Shinn Jr., David
Waldstreicher.
The ignominious failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 marked
the culmination of a curious episode at the height of the Cold War.
At the end of the fifties, restless and rebellious youth,
avant-garde North American intellectuals, old leftists, and even
older liberals found inspiration in the images and achievements of
Fidel Castro's revolutionary guerrillas. "Fidelismo" swept across
the US, as young North Americans sought to join the 26th of July
Movement in the Sierra Maestra.
Drawing equally on cultural and political materials, from James
Dean and Desi Arnaz to C. Wright Mills and "Studies on the Left,"
Gosse explains how the peculiar conjuncture of 1950s America
produced the first great Third World solidarity movement, the Fair
Play for Cuba Committee, which became a locus for the New Left
emerging from the ashes of Kennedy's New Frontier.
"Where the Boys Are" captures the strange essence of that
much-abused decade, the 1950s, at once demonstrating the perfidy of
Cold War American liberal opinion towards Cuba and its revolution
while explaining why Fidel and his "companeros" made such appealing
idols for the young, the restless, and the politically adventurous.
It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral
politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as
of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in
bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily
increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of
the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them,
black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers
sufficient to swing elections. In this meticulously-researched
book, Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the formative era
of American democracy from the Constitution's ratification through
Abraham Lincoln's election, chronicling the rise of an organized,
visible black politics focused on the quest for citizenship, the
vote, and power within the free states. Full of untold stories and
thorough examinations of political battles, this book traces a
First Reconstruction of black political activism following
emancipation in the North. From Portland, Maine and New Bedford,
Massachusetts to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men operated as
voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color could define
citizenship.
How can we make sense of the fact that after decades of right wing
political mobilizing the major social changes wrought by the
Sixties are more than ever part of American life? "The World the
Sixties Made, the first academic collection to treat the last
quarter of the twentieth century as a distinct period of U.S.
history, rebuts popular accounts that emphasize a conservative
ascendancy. The essays in this volume survey a vast historical
terrain to lease out the meaning of the not-so-long ago. They trace
the ways in which recent U.S. culture and politics continue to be
shaped by the legacy of the New Left's social movements, from
feminism to gay liberation to black power. Together these essays
demonstrate that the America that emerged in the 1970s was a nation
profoundly even radically democratized.
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