Mixed Race Studies

Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia

University of Georgia Press
June 2012
192 pages
6 b&w photos, 1 map
Trim size: 5.5 x 8.5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8203-3229-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-3230-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8203-4364-8

Eva Sheppard Wolf, Associate Professor of History
San Francisco State University

In Almost Free, Eva Sheppard Wolf uses the story of Samuel Johnson, a free black man from Virginia attempting to free his family, to add detail and depth to our understanding of the lives of free blacks in the South.

There were several paths to freedom for slaves, each of them difficult. After ten years of elaborate dealings and negotiations, Johnson earned manumission in August 1812. An illiterate “mulatto” who had worked at the tavern in Warrenton as a slave, Johnson as a freeman was an anomaly, since free blacks made up only 3 percent of Virginia’s population. Johnson stayed in Fauquier County and managed to buy his enslaved family, but the law of the time required that they leave Virginia if Johnson freed them. Johnson opted to stay. Because slaves’ marriages had no legal standing, Johnson was not legally married to his enslaved wife, and in the event of his death his family would be sold to new owners. Johnson’s story dramatically illustrates the many harsh realities and cruel ironies faced by blacks in a society hostile to their freedom.

Wolf argues that despite the many obstacles Johnson and others faced, race relations were more flexible during the early American republic than is commonly believed. It could actually be easier for a free black man to earn the favor of elite whites than it would be for blacks in general in the post-Reconstruction South. Wolf demonstrates the ways in which race was constructed by individuals in their day-to-day interactions, arguing that racial status was not simply a legal fact but a fluid and changeable condition. Almost Free looks beyond the majority experience, focusing on those at society’s edges to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of freedom in the slaveholding South.

That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia

Indiana University Press
2013
328 pages
12 b&w illustrations
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-253-01043-8

Arica L. Coleman, Assistant Professor of Black American Studies
University of Delaware

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2014

That the Blood Stay Pure traces the history and legacy of the commonwealth of Virginia’s effort to maintain racial purity and its impact on the relations between African Americans and Native Americans. Arica L. Coleman tells the story of Virginia’s racial purity campaign from the perspective of those who were disavowed or expelled from tribal communities due to their affiliation with people of African descent or because their physical attributes linked them to those of African ancestry. Coleman also explores the social consequences of the racial purity ethos for tribal communities that have refused to define Indian identity based on a denial of blackness. This rich interdisciplinary history, which includes contemporary case studies, addresses a neglected aspect of America’s long struggle with race and identity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• Part 1: Historicizing Black—Indian Relations in Virginia
  • Prologue: Lingering at the Crossroads: African-Native American History and Kinship Lineage in Armstrong Archer’s A Compendium on Slavery
  • 1. Notes on the State of Virginia: Jeffersonian Thought and the Rise of Racial Purity Ideology in the Eighteenth Century
  • 2. Redefining Race and Identity: The Indian-Negro Confusion and the Changing State of Black-Indian Relations in the Nineteenth Century
  • 3. Race Purity and the Law: The Racial Integrity Act and Policing Black/Indian Identity in the Twentieth Century
  • 4. Denying Blackness: Anthropological Advocacy and the Remaking of the Virginia Indians (The Other Twentieth Century Project)
• Part 2: Black-Indian Relations in the Present State of Virginia
  • 5. Beyond Black and White: Afro-Indian Identity in the case of Loving V. Virginia
  • 6. The Racial Integrity Fight: Confrontations of Race and Identity In Charles City County, Virginia
  • 7. Nottoway Indians, Afro-Indian Identity, and the Contemporary Dilemma of State Recognition
• Epilogue: Afro-Indian Peoples of Virginia: The Indelible Thread of Black and Red
• Appendix: Racial Integrity Act Text
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country

University of Oklahoma Press
1996
292 pages
6 x 9 in.
Paperback ISBN: 9780806128139

Jennifer S.H. Brown, Professor of History
University of Winnipeg

For two centuries (1670-1870), English, Scottish, and Canadian fur traders voyaged the myriad waterways of Rupert’s Land, the vast territory charted to the Hudson’s Bay Company and later splintered among five Canadian provinces and four American states. The knowledge and support of northern Native peoples were critical to the newcomer’s survival and success. With acquaintance and alliance came intermarriage, and the unions of European traders and Native women generated thousands of descendants.

Jennifer Brown’s Strangers in Blood is the first work to look systematically at these parents and their children. Brown focuses on Hudson’s Bay Company officers and North West Company wintering partners and clerks-those whose relationships are best known from post journals, correspondence, accounts, and wills. The durability of such families varied greatly. Settlers, missionaries, European women, and sometimes the courts challenged fur trade marriages. Some officers’ Scottish and Canadian relatives dismissed Native wives and “Indian” progeny as illegitimate. Traders who took these ties seriously were obliged to defend them, to leave wills recognizing their wives and children, and to secure their legal and social status-to prove that they were kin, not “strangers in blood.”

Brown illustrates that the lives and identities of these children were shaped by factors far more complex than “blood.” Sons and daughters diverged along paths affected by gender. Some descendants became Métis and espoused Métis nationhood under Louis Riel. Others rejected or were never offered that course-they passed into white or Indian communities or, in some instances, identified themselves (without prejudice) as “half breeds.” The fur trade did not coalesce into a single society. Rather, like Rupert’s Land, it splintered, and the historical consequences have been with us ever since.

My Bondage and My Freedom

Yale University Press
2014 (originally published in 1855 by Miller, Orton & Mulligan)
432 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Paperback ISBN: 9780300190595

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895)

Introduction and Notes by David W. Blight

Born into slavery in 1818, Frederick Douglass escaped to freedom and became a passionate advocate for abolition and social change and the foremost spokesperson for the nation’s enslaved African American population in the years preceding the Civil War. My Bondage and My Freedom is Douglass’s masterful recounting of his remarkable life and a fiery condemnation of a political and social system that would reduce people to property and keep an entire race in chains.

This classic is revisited with a new introduction and annotations by celebrated Douglass scholar David W. Blight. Blight situates the book within the politics of the 1850s and illuminates how My Bondage represents Douglass as a mature, confident, powerful writer who crafted some of the most unforgettable metaphors of slavery and freedom—indeed of basic human universal aspirations for freedom—anywhere in the English language.

Things That Must Not Be Forgotten: A Childhood in Wartime China

Waveland Press, Inc.
2000
240 pages
Paperback ISBN 10: 1-57766-784-0; ISBN 13: 978-1-57766-784-1

Michael David Kwan

Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize

Things That Must Not Be Forgotten is a beautifully written collection of Michael David Kwan’s childhood experiences in China during the 1930s and 1940s. Born into privilege, David saw his pampered life disintegrate as the Japanese overran China. His father, the wealthy administrator for China’s railroads, took a position in the pro-Japanese government to work covertly for the Chinese resistance.

In Beijing, the Kwan household became a gathering place for resistance members. At their summer villa in Beidaihe, the family surreptitiously aided the guerillas in the nearby mountains. In Qingdao, the Kwans lived next door to a Japanese admiral and his wife. From a tree house overlooking their garden, young David enjoyed listening to the music they played, while his father worked secretly for the resistance. David’s other memories (for example, cricket hunting with his father’s tenant farmer, performing rituals as an altar boy, being tormented in school, gardening with the owner of an antique shop, and participating in Boy Scouts) provide fascinating insights into life in China during those turbulent times.

In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Within days, Japan surrendered. Chiang Kai-shek’s regime replaced the Japanese puppet government in Nanking. Chiang declared that all who had links to the defunct government would be considered traitors until proven otherwise. David’s father was imprisoned. During the Japanese occupation, Chiang’s Kuomintang and Mao Zedong’s Communists had been united against the invaders, but once Japan was defeated, China moved toward chaos as the two factions vied for power. At age twelve, David was sent to live with relatives in Shanghai before being spirited out of the country, not knowing if he’d ever see his family again. Things That Must Not Be Forgotten will stay in readers’ hearts and minds long after they’ve turned the final, wrenching page.

Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject

Duke University Press
2010
344 pages
51 illustrations, incl. 18 in color
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4247-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4266-3

Kirsten Pai Buick, Associate Professor of Art History
University of New Mexico

Child of the Fire is the first book-length examination of the career of the nineteenth-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, best known for her sculptures inspired by historical and biblical themes. Throughout this richly illustrated study, Kirsten Pai Buick investigates how Lewis and her work were perceived, and their meanings manipulated, by others and the sculptor herself. She argues against the racialist art discourse that has long cast Lewis’s sculptures as reflections of her identity as an African American and Native American woman who lived most of her life abroad. Instead, by seeking to reveal Lewis’s intentions through analyses of her career and artwork, Buick illuminates Lewis’s fraught but active participation in the creation of a distinct “American” national art, one dominated by themes of indigeneity, sentimentality, gender, and race. In so doing, she shows that the sculptor variously complicated and facilitated the dominant ideologies of the vanishing American (the notion that Native Americans were a dying race), sentimentality, and true womanhood.

Buick considers the institutions and people that supported Lewis’s career—including Oberlin College, abolitionists in Boston, and American expatriates in Italy—and she explores how their agendas affected the way they perceived and described the artist. Analyzing four of Lewis’s most popular sculptures, each created between 1866 and 1876, Buick discusses interpretations of Hiawatha in terms of the cultural impact of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha; Forever Free and Hagar in the Wilderness in light of art historians’ assumptions that artworks created by African American artists necessarily reflect African American themes; and The Death of Cleopatra in relation to broader problems of reading art as a reflection of identity.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Preface. Framing the Problem: American Africanisms, American Indianisms, and the Processes of Art History
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Inventing the Artist: Locating the Black and Catholic Subject
• 2. The “Problem” of Art History’s Black Subject
• 3. Longfellow, Lewis, and the Cultural Work of Hiawatha
• 4. Identity, Tautology, and The Death of Cleopatra
• Conclusion. Separate and Unequal: Toward a More Responsive and Responsible Art History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American

University of Chicago Press
March 2014
256 pages
1 halftone, 5 line drawings, 3 tables
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780226033662
Paper ISBN: 9780226033839
E-book ISBN: 9780226033976

G. Cristina Mora, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

How did Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Cubans become known as “Hispanics” and “Latinos” in the United States? How did several distinct cultures and nationalities become portrayed as one? Cristina Mora answers both these questions and details the scope of this phenomenon in Making Hispanics. She uses an organizational lens and traces how activists, bureaucrats, and media executives in the 1970s and ’80s created a new identity category—and by doing so, permanently changed the racial and political landscape of the nation.

Some argue that these cultures are fundamentally similar and that the Spanish language is a natural basis for a unified Hispanic identity. But Mora shows very clearly that the idea of ethnic grouping was historically constructed and institutionalized in the United States. During the 1960 census, reports classified Latin American immigrants as “white,” grouping them with European Americans. Not only was this decision controversial, but also Latino activists claimed that this classification hindered their ability to portray their constituents as underrepresented minorities. Therefore, they called for a separate classification: Hispanic. Once these populations could be quantified, businesses saw opportunities and the media responded. Spanish-language television began to expand its reach to serve the now large, and newly unified, Hispanic community with news and entertainment programming. Through archival research, oral histories, and interviews, Mora reveals the broad, national-level process that led to the emergence of Hispanicity in America.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Organizations
• Introduction: Making Hispanics: Classification and the Politics of Ambiguity
• One: Civil Rights, Brown Power, and the “Spanish-Speaking” Vote: The Development of the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish Speaking People
• Two: The Rise of a Hispanic Lobby: The National Council of La Raza
• Three: “The Toughest Question”: The US Census Bureau and the Making of Hispanic Data
• Four: Broadcasting Panethnicity: Univision and the Rise of Hispanic Television
• Conclusion: The Hispanic Category and the Development of a New Identity Politics in America
• Notes
• Index

Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860

University of Nebraska Press
2011
648 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-2405-6

Anne F. Hyde, William R. Hochman Professor of History
Colorado College

• Winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize
• 2012 Pulitzer Prize Finalist

To most people living in the West, the Louisiana Purchase made little difference: the United States was just another imperial overlord to be assessed and manipulated. This was not, as Empires, Nations, and Families makes clear, virgin wilderness discovered by virtuous Anglo entrepreneurs. Rather, the United States was a newcomer in a place already complicated by vying empires. This book documents the broad family associations that crossed national and ethnic lines and that, along with the river systems of the trans-Mississippi West, formed the basis for a global trade in furs that had operated for hundreds of years before the land became part of the United States.

Empires, Nations, and Families shows how the world of river and maritime trade effectively shifted political power away from military and diplomatic circles into the hands of local people. Tracing family stories from the Canadian North to the Spanish and Mexican borderlands and from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Anne F. Hyde’s narrative moves from the earliest years of the Indian trade to the Mexican War and the gold rush era. Her work reveals how, in the 1850s, immigrants to these newest regions of the United States violently wrested control from Native and other powers, and how conquest and competing demands for land and resources brought about a volatile frontier culture—not at all the peace and prosperity that the new power had promised.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgments: Adventures in the Land of the Dead
• Introduction: The Geography of Empire in 1804
• Part I: Replacing a State: The Continental Web of Family Trade
  • Chapter 1: Families and Fur: The Personal World of the Early
  • Chapter 2: Fort Vancouver’s Families: The Custom of the Country
  • Chapter 3: Three Western Places: Regional Communities
• Part II: Americans All: The Mixed World of Indian Country
  • Chapter 4: The Early West: The Many Faces of Indian Country
  • Chapter 5: Empires in Transition: Indian Country at Midcentury, 1825–1860
• Part III: From Nations to Nation: Imposing a State, 1840–1865
  • Chapter 6: Unintended Consequences: Families, Nations, and the Mexican War
  • Chapter 7: Border Wars: Disorder and Disaster in the 1850s
  • Chapter 8: The State and Its Handmaidens: Imposing Order
• Epilogue: How It All Turned Out
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Read an excerpt here.

Daughter of the Empire State: The Life of Judge Jane Bolin

University of Illinois Press
December 2011
168 pages
6 x 9 in.
4 black & white photographs
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-03657-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-252-09361-6

Jacqueline A. McLeod, Associate Professor of History and African & African American Studies
Metropolitan State College of Denver

The trailblazing work of the first African American woman judge

This long overdue biography of the nation’s first African American woman judge elevates Jane Matilda Bolin to her rightful place in American history as an activist, integrationist, jurist, and outspoken public figure in the political and professional milieu of New York City before the onset of the modern Civil Rights movement.

Bolin was appointed to New York City’s domestic relations court in 1939 for the first of four ten-year terms. When she retired in 1978, her career had extended well beyond the courtroom. Drawing on archival materials as well as a meeting with Bolin in 2002, historian Jacqueline A. McLeod reveals how Bolin parlayed her judicial position to impact significant reforms of the legal and social service system in New York.

Beginning with Bolin’s childhood and educational experiences at Wellesley and Yale, Daughter of the Empire State chronicles Bolin’s relatively quick rise through the ranks of a profession that routinely excluded both women and African Americans. Deftly situating Bolin’s experiences within the history of black women lawyers and the historical context of high-achieving black New Englanders, McLeod offers a multi-layered analysis of black women’s professionalization in a segregated America.

Linking Bolin’s activist leanings and integrationist zeal to her involvement in the NAACP, McLeod analyzes Bolin’s involvement at the local level as well as her tenure on the organization’s national board of directors. An outspoken critic of the discriminatory practices of New York City’s probation department and juvenile placement facilities, Bolin also co-founded, with Eleanor Roosevelt, the Wiltwyck School for boys in upstate New York and campaigned to transform the Domestic Relations Court with her judicial colleagues. McLeod’s careful and highly readable account of these accomplishments inscribes Bolin onto the roster of important social reformers and early civil rights trailblazers.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Her Standing in Poughkeepsie: Family Lineage and Legacy
• 2. On Her Own: The Years at Wellesley and Yale
• 3. Politics of Preparation: The Making of the Nation’s First African American Woman Judge
• 4. Politics of Practice: An African American Woman Judge on the Domestic Relations Court
• 5. Speaking Truth to Power: A View from the Benchof Judge Jane Bolin
• 6. Persona Non Grata: Jane Bolin and the NAACP, 1931–50
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index

Mixed Experiences: Growing up mixed race – mental health and well-being

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
February 2014
96 pages
210mm x 148mm / 8.5in x 5.5in
Paperback ISBN: 9781909391154

Dinah Morley and Cathy Street

Mixed race is the fastest growing population group of children and young people in England and Wales. The diversity of the mixed race group’s does not allow for a one-size-fits-all assessment of needs, and this is the challenge for practitioners.

This guide offers practitioners an insight into the experiences of racism, discrimination and identity confusion that mixed race children and young people encounter. With a focus on mental health, it discusses the policy context and considers the learning from projects and local services that have targeted mixed race children, young people and families.

It will be of value to all practitioners working with children and young people, especially those in the mental health field, and also in health more generally, early years services, social care, education, youth justice and the voluntary sector.