C. Vann Woodward is one of the most significant historians of the post-Reconstruction South. Over his career of nearly seven decades, he wrote nine books; won the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes; penned hundreds of book reviews, opinion pieces, and scholarly essays; and gained national and international recognition as a public intellectual. Even today historians must contend with Woodward's sweeping interpretations about southern history. What is less known about Woodward is his scholarly int...

In Keywords for Southern Studies, editors Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson have compiled an eclectic collection of new essays that address the fluidity of southern studies by adopting a transnational, interdisciplinary focus. The essays are structured around critical terms pertinent both to the field and to modern life in general.The nonbinary, nontraditional approach of Keywords unmasks and refutes standard binary thinking—First World/Third World, self/other...

For most historians, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the hostilities of the Civil War and the dashed hopes of Reconstruction give way to the nationalizing forces of cultural reunion, a process that is said to have downplayed sectional grievances and celebrated racial and industrial harmony. In truth, says Natalie J. Ring, this buoyant mythology competed with an equally powerful and far-reaching set of representations of the backward Problem South—one that shaped and r...

Although the origins, application, and socio-historical implications of the Jim Crow system have been studied and debated for at least the last three-quarters of a century, nuanced understanding of this complex cultural construct is still evolving, according to Stephanie Cole and Natalie J. Ring, coeditors of The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South. Indeed, they suggest, scholars may profit from a careful examination of previous assumptions and conclusions ...

A National Book Award winnerThe New York Times bestselling history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society.**“An engrossing and relentless intellectual history of prejudice in America.” -**Washington PostSome Americans insist that we’re living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America—...

A history of the African American woman's experience in America and an analysis of the relationship between sexism and racism.When and Where I Enter is an eloquent testimonial to the profound influences of African American women on race and women's movements throughout American history. Drawing on speeches, diaries, letters, and other original documents, Paula Giddings powerfully portrays how black women have transcended racist and sexist attitudes—often co...

A leading historian offers a sweeping new account of the African American experience over four centuriesFour great migrations defined the history of black people in America: the violent removal of Africans to the east coast of North America known as the Middle Passage; the relocation of one million slaves to the interior of the antebellum South; the movement of more than six million blacks to the industrial cities of the north and west a century later; and since th...

Winner of the John Hope Franklin PrizeA Moyers & Company Best Book of the Year“A brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us.”—Darryl Pinckney, New York Review of BooksHow did we come to think of race as synonymous with crime? A brilliant and deeply disturbing biography of the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America, The Condemnation of Blackness reveals the influence this...

The pivotal and troubling role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of modern American liberalismIn Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. E...

**An incisive and unflinching study from the national bestselling author of Say it Loud! that tackles a stigma of America's racial discourse: selling out.“Brisk and enjoyable, no small feat given the density of its ideas.”—Los Angeles Times**Randall Kennedy explains the origins of the concept of selling out, and shows how fear of this label has haunted prominent members of the black community—including, most recently, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Ba...

After Reconstruction, African Americans found themselves free, yet largely excluded from politics, higher education, and the professions. Drawing on his professional research into political leadership and intellectual development in African American society, as well as his personal roots in the social-gospel teachings of black churches and at Lincoln University (PA), the political scientist Martin Kilson explores how a modern African American intelligentsia developed in the face of institu...

Lauded for its contribution to the theory and conceptualization of the field of women’s history and for its sensitivity to the differences of class, ethnicity, race, and culture among women, The Majority Finds Its Past became a classic volume in women’s history following its publication in 1979. This edition includes a foreword by Linda K. Kerber, introducing a new generation of readers to Gerda Lerner’s considerable body of work and highlighting the importance of the essays in th...