Category: History

  • Biracial Afro-Germans search for their identity in a country where many think that to be German is to be white.

  • Lost kin University of Chicago Magazine May/June 2015 Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History Stanford University Excerpt from A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2014 by Allyson Hobbs. Used by permission. All rights reserved. “Going as white” permanently created confusion…

  • Commodification of the Black Body, Sexual Objectification and Social Hierarchies during Slavery The Earlham Historical Journal: An Undergraduate Journal of Historical Inquiry Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana Volume VII: Issue II (Spring 2015) pages 21-43 Iman Cooper The horror of the institution of slavery during the late eighteenth century was not that it displaced millions of…

  • Crucifying the White Savior (Film) Shadow and Act 2016-06-29 Andre Seewood We no longer have to forgive them, for they know exactly what they are doing. The new film by Gary Ross, “The Free State of Jones” is uncontestably a White savior film. Laid bare, “The Free State of Jones” is a simplistically constructed tale…

  • Barack Obama and the Rhetoric of Hope McFarland 2013 204 pages softcover (6 x 9) Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-6793-8 Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4766-0339-1 Mark S. Ferrara, Assistant Professor of English State University of New York, Oneonta The historical and literary antecedents of the President’s campaign rhetoric can be traced to the utopian traditions of the Western world.…

  • The Myth of White Purity and Narratives That Fed Racism in South Africa The Wire 2016-06-18 Nicky Falkof, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa An apartheid-era sign from South Africa. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. The rhetoric of racial purity is full of suggestive terms like illness, weakening and dilution. These…

  • The Faux-Enlightened Free State of Jones The Atlantic 2016-06-28 Vann R. Newkirk II STX Productions Matthew McConaughey’s new movie is a predictable but instructive journey of white saviorhood. “Somehow, some way, and some time, everybody is somebody else’s nigger,” is an actual quote that happens around midway through Free State of Jones. Uttered by Matthew…

  • Black and White in the Free State of Jones Process: A Blog For American History 2016-07-14 Nina Silber, Professor of History Boston University I’ll confess: I was fully prepared to be disappointed with the recently-released Free State of Jones. Not out of any disrespect toward the excellent historical scholarship behind the film, including Victoria Bynum’s…

  • Making Jokes and History in An Octoroon African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) 2016-06-25 Christopher Bonner, Assistant Professor of History University of Maryland Last weekend I saw a performance of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins‘ play An Octoroon, which is a reimagining of Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, a popular 1859 melodrama set on a Louisiana plantation. There is…

  • An interview with Victoria Bynum, historian and author of The Free State of Jones—Part 1 World Socialist Web Site 2016-07-12 David Walsh and Joanne Laurier Victoria Bynum Free State of Jones, the film directed by Gary Ross, powerfully and movingly recounts a significant episode of the American Civil War, the insurrection against the Confederacy led…