Book Description
Between 1900 and the 1970s, twenty million southerners migrated north and west. Weaving together for the first time the histories of these black and white migrants, James Gregory traces their paths and experiences in a comprehensive new study that demonstrates how this regional diaspora reshaped America by "southernizing" communities and transforming important cultural and political institutions.
Challenging the image of the migrants as helpless and poor, Gregory shows how both black and white southerners used their new surroundings to become agents of change. Combining personal stories with cultural, political, and demographic analysis, he argues that the migrants helped create both the modern civil rights movement and modern conservatism. They spurred changes in American religion, notably modern evangelical Protestantism, and in popular culture, including the development of blues, jazz, and country music.
In a sweeping account that pioneers new understandings of the impact of mass migrations, Gregory recasts the history of twentieth-century America. He demonstrates that the southern diaspora was crucial to transformations in the relationship between American regions, in the politics of race and class, and in the roles of religion, the media, and culture.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent look in population shift.......2007-07-27
This was required reading for a graduate course in American history.
In his book The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America, author James N. Gregory proceeds thematically, rather than chronologically. His intent is to use a stereoscopic method (stereoscopes set two similar but different images next to each other, thus tricking the eyes and the brain into fusing the images in a way that makes them three dimensional) in order to achieve a third dimension (page 8): not only to examine the great internal movements of black and white peoples from the American South to the American North and West, but also to examine the social, cultural, economic, and political impact that this massive internal movement of peoples had on the history of America during the twentieth century.
Gregory's The Southern Diaspora is divided into nine chapters: Chapter 1, "A Century of Migration," is an overview of the of the migration cycles and the changing economics and demography of these migrations over the course of the twentieth century, concluding that the Southern Diaspora was numerically larger than previous scholars have understood; Chapter 2, "Migration Stories," surveys the public meanings of the two sets of exoduses and highlights the unique role that media institutions and social scientists played in shaping the expectations and interactions of southerners on the move; Chapter 3, "Success and Failure," answers questions about the economic experience of black and white southerners, dismantling the maladjustment paradigm that had been so prominent in previous scholarship while also showing the critical differences in the opportunity structure facing black and white southern migrants; Chapter 4,
"The Black Metropolis," examines the communities that African Americans built in the major cities, resurrecting the label "Black Metropolis" and mapping the new and powerful cultural apparatus of those communities; Chapter 5, "Uptown and Beyond," examines the very different community formations of white southerners who spread out through suburbs and rural areas as well as big cities, struggled with confusing issues of social identity, and developed cultural institutions of historical import (e.g., diaspora country music and the white diaspora literary community would help to reshape understandings of both region and race); Chapter 6. "Gospel Highways," explores the diaspora's impact on American religion as both racial groups built Baptist and Pentecostal churches and helped to revitalize and spread evangelical Protestantism, with important political as well as religious implications for America; Chapter 7, "Leveraging Civil Rights," develops the issue of black political influence, demonstrating how important geography was to the initial phases of what ultimately became the civil rights movement;
Chapter 8, "Re-figuring Conservatism," brings the white migrants into the story of race, class, and regional transformations, exploring contributions to white working class conservatism on the one hand, and to new formulations of white liberalism on the other. Chapter 9, "Great
Migrations," brings te diaspora to a close in the 1970s and 1980s, and summarized some of Gregory's major findings (pages 8 and 9).
One important point made by Gregory is that for as long as there was something called the American South, southerners in significant numbers had been leaving; the South itself expanded through migration as white southerners in the early 1800s carved out new states for cotton and
slavery, while others moved to places north and west that today are understood to be regionally separate from the South. White out-migration was especially heavy in the two decades after the Civil War, with many leaving for farming opportunities and others settling in the North's big
cities-New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago-where the nation's commerce was concentrated. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were more than 1 million southern-born whites living outside their birth region. Census takers also counted more than 335,000 southern born African Americans living in the North and West in 1900 (page 12).
African Americans had left the South in the nineteenth century for different reasons and in different directions. Before the Civil War, some had been taken west by slaveholders who dared to move their human property into places like California and Kansas; others had escaped
northward, typically to Ohio, upstate New York, Massachusetts, and Canada. There was also something of an exodus of free black people from the South after 1830, with many of them settling in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. Emancipation increased out-migration among black southerners, much of it directed toward northern cities (New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago were key destinations for freed people from Virginia and Maryland after the Civil War), but rural destinations were also and equally important: black southern migration, frequently organized by "colonization" or "emigration" societies, moved north into Indiana and west into Kansas from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee in the 1870s and 1880s (pages 12 and 13).
The central thesis of Gregory's Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America, is threefold. First, the size of the black and white southern diaspora was much more substantial than previously reported: over the course of the
twentieth century, close to 8 million black southerners, nearly 20 million white southerners, and more than 1 million southern-born Latinos participated in the diaspora (page 14). Second, the twentieth century southern diaspora can be divided into two periods: the first phase of migration . starts during the initial decade of the century, grows in the second decade when at least 1.3 million southerners leave home, reaches a peak in the 1920s with 2 million new black and white southern migrants, then tapers off in the 1930s; a much bigger second wave begins with World
War II when more than 4 million southerners move north or west, grows even larger in the 1950s when at least 4.3 million leave the South, remains near that level through the 1960s and 1970s, and then declines in the 1980s and 1990s (pages 14 and 15). Third, white southern out-migrants
outnumbered black southern out-migrants during every decade of the twentieth century, and usually by a large margin. But the southern black exodus had the more important impact: blacks were leaving the South at much higher rates than whites, and many were going to geographic
regions that had known little racial diversity (pages 15 and 17). The largest number of black migrants lived in the Great Lakes states (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin); they were also the key destination for white southerners. The Middle Atlantic states (New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey) were second as a destination for African Americans, but-with the exception of New York City-much less popular with whites. The Pacific states was the third important area of settlement for both groups, especially California: by 1970, more than 1.6
million white and 571,000 black southerners lived in that state. California was also the chief destination for Tejanos and other southern-born Latinos, 213,000 of whom had settled there by 1970; Hispanic southerners had also migrated to Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana (pages 18 and 19).
Gregory challenges the image that southern migrants in the north and west were merely helpless and poor. While they faced many cultural, social, and economic challenges from within and without their culture, these migrants also had a substantial support system of family relations, organizations, and institutions that enabled them not just to survive, but even to thrive and succeed in differing environments despite tremendous odds. Financially, the majority of southern migrants did much better than their contemporaries who chose to remain in the South.
Whites and blacks left the South for related but somewhat different reasons, and found very different opportunities in the North and West. Those differences turned on the central issue of race, and from that flowed other significant differences derived from geography, class dynamics, and community formation patterns. Racial privilege granted southern white migrants significant economic and spatial advantages (i.e., the choice of where, how, and with whom they settled) over their black counterparts; that advantage was used to choose the best housing they could afford in the least dense neighborhoods, often in outlying, rather than central, urban areas. The fact that black and white southerners settled in different sorts of places, in different
concentrations would have implications not just on southern individual and group experiences, but on the North, the West, and the nation as a whole. Despite the fact that white migrants had greater numbers, black migrants gained capacities to influence cultural and political institutions that would ultimately dictate profound historical changes; The fact that whites chose dispersion over concentration, and opted for places that initially would not be centers of political and cultural power, worked against the construction of physically defined southern white communities. The loyalties and activities of elites and middle-class migrants became a key resource for African American communities, while white, middle class expatriates kept their distance from working class migrants, limiting the possibilities for group institution building and political influence. White southern migrants were influential in the promotion of evangelical churches, the development and spread of country music, and in the particular brand of racial conservatism and white working class politics that benefited from southern white symbolism.
African American influence was more comprehensive and consequential: the building of communities in the major cities in America during a period when those cities monopolized important forms of power, especially in media (publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, record companies, theatre, and film), inspired African American literature and artistic endeavors in a myriad of forms and in a slow, but steady and meaningful acknowledgement of its worth. Politically, the particular arrangement of parties, unions, and municipal and federal governments in northern metropolises, especially during the "long New Deal," gave black voters and activists opportunities to leverage governmental power. By working with allies that were available only in those places, by finding balance-of-power openings that appeared as urban regimes reorganized (and as the northern democratic Party tried to consolidate its hold on federal power)-while using tactics that were safe and effective only in those settings-the seams of power were loosened in a governmental system that previously had rarely responded to the demands of socially despised minorities (pages 325-327). Finally, regional reconstruction was the other
important legacy of the Southern Diaspora. Over time, black and white migrants southernized aspects of the regions they settled by introducing tastes, practices, and institutions-including food, music, religion, accents, and political styles-that moderated the differences between the
South and the rest of the United States (page 327).
In my opinion, Gregory has successfully presented a thematic history of the black and white disapora from the American South to points North and West. The only weakness, as I see it, is that this examination could not have been made in a more chronological, and less thematic fashion. Or given the daunting nature of his effort, if the had been more satisfied to provide a more intensive examination of only one or only several of his intended themes, the work would not give this reader a sense of being "all over the place." Nevertheless, Gregory has contributed a
necessary work of revisionist history of scholastic depth and eminent readability.
Recommended reading for anyone interested in American history.
harder experiences for blacks than for whites.......2007-06-24
By now, several historians have looked at the experiences in the massive migrations of Negroes from the American South to its northern cities from 1900 to the post World War 2 era. But of course, many poor southern whites also voted with their feet and moved north. The unifying theme Gregory has chosen is to look at both migrations. And to compare and contrast the experiences of both groups.
For studying whites, he goes beyond looking at the so-called hillbilly ghettos that sprang up in various northern cities. In the popular (white northern) imagination of the times, these were considered well nigh akin to the often neighbouring black ghettos. Gregory points out that most southern whites had quite different experiences, though they were still invariably stereotyped by white northerners.
We see examples of blacks and whites struggling to improve themselves. Often politically. While there were indeed many common facets, what persistently emerges is that blacks had to work harder to overcome obstacles.
Required for class.......2007-02-10
This book was required reading by a professor. His superior intellect decided this was a good book so I am compelled to agree... even if I didn't read it.
Book Description
This book seeks to explore, in a single, short convenient text, the complex relationship between Africa and the Americas from the early sixteenth century through the end of the twentieth century. Beginning with a preview of the relations between Africa and Europe prior to 1500, the work covers chronologically the transatlantic slave trade, domestic slave trading, slave systems, the abolition movements, and the aftermath of emancipation throughout the Americas. Several chapters provide sweeping surveys of broad regions such as British North America, the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, the Andean countries and Latin America. Others deal with specific territories such as the United States, Venezuela, Cuba or Brazil. The book begins with a chapter on African antiquity and early contacts with Europe. It continues with a comparative history of the slave trade and emancipation. Other topics include the role of free blacks throughout the Americas, women and gender relations, and African-American relations with Europeans and Native American populations. Finally, the book concludes with chapters on modern race and economic relations in the Americas and a chapter on the continuing ties between African Americans and Africa. "On the whole Africans in the Americas accomplishes its purpose well, there is a great deal of fascinating information here. A very useful text." The International Journal of African Historical Studies 28, 633-65 (1995) Michael L. Conniff earned degrees at UC-Berkeley and Stanford (Ph.D. 1976) and has published a number of books on modern Latin American history, most recently A History of Modern Latin America (with Lawrence Clayton) and Populism in Latin America. Thomas J. Davis, Ph.D., J.D., teaches history and law at Arizona State University in Tempe, focusing on race and the law, civil rights, and U.S. constitutional and legal history. His most recent publications include "Race, Identity, and the Law: Underlying Questions in Plessy v. Ferguson," in Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (2002); "The Community of Africans in the Americas: Colonialism to CARICOM and TransAfrica" Research and Diversity Journal (2002) and "Conspiracy and Credibility," William and Mary Quarterly (2002). CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS Patrick Carroll ▪ David Eltis ▪ Patience Essah ▪ Alfred Frederick ▪ Dale Graden ▪ Linda Heywood ▪ Richard Lobban ▪ Colin Palmer ▪ Joseph Reidy ▪ John Thornton ▪ Ronald Walters ▪ Ashton Welch ▪ Winthrop Wright TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface PART I - Africa, Europe, and the Americas 1. Africa to 1500 2. Africa and Europe before 1700 3. Early African Experiences in the Americas PART II - The Slave Trade and Slavery in the Americas 4. Africans in the Caribbean 5. Africans in Brazil 6. Africans in Mainland Spanish America 7. Africans in the Thirteen British Colonies PART III - Ending the Slave Trade and Slavery 8. Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade 9. Emancipation in the Caribbean and Spanish America 10. Emancipation in the United States 11. Emancipation in Brazil PART IV - Africans in the Americas since Abolition 12. African Americans in Postemancipation Economies 13. Race and Politics in the United States 14. Race and Politics in Latin America 15. The Americas' Continuing Ties with Africa AFTERWORD GLOSSARY BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Customer Reviews:
Magnificent! A must for every Black American Library........1998-05-28
This is an excellent book for anyone interested in a historical view of Africans; in Africa, before the Americas, during and after slavery. It is very well written and was extremely engaging. A wonderful reference book ... an important read for all Peoples.
Book Description
In 1485 the Portuguese Crown and Catholic Church began to kidnap Jewish children, forcibly convert the young conscripts, and ship them to São Tomé Island off the African equator to work the government sugar plantations. The collision of slavery, sugar agriculture, and discovery of The Americas transformed this island colony into the nidus of the wholesale black slave trade that infected Africa and Western commerce for the next 350 years. This is a unique and little-known chapter of the Diaspora which also reveals the Medieval Church's complicity in the business of slavery.
São Tomé tells the story of young Marcel Saulo and his sister Leah who were abducted with other children from their synagogue in Lisbon and shipped 4,000 miles to the West-African island.
Customer Reviews:
The road to hell began here.......2007-10-07
Sometime around the end of the 15th century, the Portuguese Inquisition began kidnapping Jewish children from their families and expatriating them to the remote island of Sao Tome off the African coast, where they were forcibly converted to Catholicism and sent to work as slaves on the sugar plantations. When the Western Hemisphere was split between Spain and Portugal with Spain receiving the lion's share of the spoils, the Portuguese realized that while Spain got most of the territory, Portugal could get rich from importing slaves to work the land. Sao Tome became one of the first jump-off points for the voyage through the middle passage, through which 25 million Africans were transported to the Americas on the slave ships.
Paul Cohn tells the story of Sao Tome through a young Portuguese Jew, Marcel Saulo, who is kidnapped and sent to the island at the age of 14, enduring the trials of semi-slavery, ultimately freeing himself and working his own sugar plantation with African servants of his own. How he runs afoul of the island regimes that insist that all blacks be subjugated to slavery while he treats his own servants as free men and women, and his problems with maintaining his Jewish identity and heritage while passing as a Catholic in order to survive the Inquisition, whose long arm reached even as far as Sao Tome, make up the backbone of the story.
Cohn is a gifted storyteller and he has written a page-turner that keeps you interested in the plot from beginning to end. The plot, and the historical background, are fascinating enough to overcome the book's one-dimensional characters and pedestrian writing. Cohn did manage to hold my interest enough to make me want to learn more about this period in history, which makes the book ultimately succeed as a historical novel.
Judy Lind
Memorable Historical Novel.......2007-10-02
Incredible and riveting, this story was a page turner from the beginning to the end. It contains characters you care about and is beautifully written. I loved it. Definitely memorable!!
Little Known History: The Beginning of Slavery.......2007-03-22
São Tomé is an inordinately readable novel based on fact, one of those discoveries that not only introduces a fine author but also reveals information known by all too few of us. In his Foreword author Paul D. Cohn reveals the source of his novel: the Saulo Chronicle was written between 1497 and 1500, the journal history of a young Jewish lad from Portugal who was kidnapped by the Catholic Church as part of the Inquisition and shipped to the West African Island of São Tomé where he endured hardships not only of separation from his family but also the filthy unhealthful living conditions as a slave on the sugar cane plantations and yet survived to witness (and fight against) the inception of the commerce of slavery spurred on by the discovery by his fellow countryman Christopher Columbus of the New World.
Cohn's writing technique is very straightforward and narratively complex while remaining riveting as story telling. His descriptions Marcel Saulo's two month ship journey from Portugal to Africa, the treatment of the Jewish children who were expected to convert to Catholicism once on the island (or be killed), and the gradual adaptation to live in a strange place whose indigenous problems included virulent malaria and typhoid fever in addition to the local wars occurring between separate parts of the island as well as rebellion as the African slaves were brought together to sell to slave traders - all elements that defy belief yet are convincingly recounted. How Saulo met and married a Jewish girl only to lose her to tragedy and subsequently bonded with other girls both Jewish and African and how he managed to maintain his Jewish soul while converting to the Catholic ways in order to survive, challenging in his own way the concept of slavery by treating his 'workers' as free men and women, and how he fought the changes in the island regimes and in Portugal's government of the island all make for a story that is a journey of courage and bravery and faith.
If the novel has a flaw it is in the need to edit the number of side stories that flood the pages. Characters arise and disappear so quickly that the reader needs to back reference to keep the flow of the novel in line. But that is a small dent in a novel that commands respect and enlightens the reader. This is an extraordinary accomplishment and pleads for a wide readership. Grady Harp, March 07
A Wonderful Historical Novel.......2006-04-13
Paul Cohn's Sao Tome is a beautifully written, thoroughly researched historical novel. The characters are engaging, the story is compelling, and the descriptions of life on Sao Tome are richly detailed. This book inspired me and moved me to tears. I loved it.
An excitingTale.......2006-02-10
Sao Tome is an exciting read. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Paul Cohn describes the harrowing experiences of a young
Portugese, Jewish boy who was kidnapped and sent to Sao Tome
Island during the Inquisition. The tale, based on historical records, recounts the fate of the children sent from Portugal and also tells the tale of the slaves imported from Africa
to work on the sugar plantations. It is written with sympathy
and shows the reader the unbelievable difficulty of life for those who were victims of the Inquisition and of slavery.
Book Description
In this study of the largest population of free and slave Africans in the New World, Herman L. Bennett has uncovered much new information about the lives of slave and free blacks, the ways that their lives were regulated by the government and the Church, the impact upon them of the Inquisition, their legal status in marriage, and their rights and obligations as Christian subjects.
Customer Reviews:
Some reservations... otherwise interesting.......2005-07-03
Bennett takes on a formidable task of combing the dispersed Mexican archives for information about Blacks in the first century after Cortés' conquest and the structuring of "New Spain." His use of secondary sources is laudable, but I'm having trouble with his definition of the term "creole." This is not a Spanish term, but rather an English one, and I suppose I should give him a "by" on that. I'm troubled however that he defines the term as "Africans born in New Spain, as creoles were known." By whom? The Spanish term "Criollo"(from which I'm assuming he has taken "creole")NEVER meant Africans exclusively, but rather SPANISH people born in the New World. I am troubled that he never gives any citation for this, which is clearly at odds with everything else I've read for 25 years. Such a novel use of a term should have been more carefully explained. Although I'm impressed by his otherwise wide-spectrum knowledge of colonial Mexico, I'm wondering how much this misinterpretation of terminology impacts his conclusions. I would like to know of other Colonialists who use the term this way--certainly no one living in Mexico in the seventeenth century used the term as Bennett does.
Average customer rating:
- An Outstanding Blend of Scholarship and Humanity
|
Strangers in the Land of Paradise: Creation of African American Community in Buffalo (Blacks in the Diaspora)
Lillian Serece Williams
Manufacturer: Indiana University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 General
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| State & Local
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
New York
| State & Local
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Northeast
| State & Local
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
History
| African Americans
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Cultural
| Anthropology
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
African-American Studies
| Special Groups
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0253335523 |
Book Description
Strangers in the Land of Paradise examines the creation of an African American community as a distinct cultural entity. It delineates values and institutions that the black migrant population brought with it from the South, as well as those that evolved as a result of their interaction with blacks native to the city and the city itself.
Customer Reviews:
An Outstanding Blend of Scholarship and Humanity.......2000-03-04
"Strangers in the Land of Paradise" by Lillian Serece Williams is a brilliantly written book about the creation of an African American community in Buffalo, New York from 1900-1940. Illuminating with new information, pictures and graphs, it answers many questions about the daily life experiences of a group of Americans adjusting to political and economic changes. The family support system that Williams delineated in this turn-of-the-century community is one of those strengths that too often are overlooked in contemporary literature on African Americans. Yet these are important strengths that are present in contemporary African American communities across the nation and upon which I frequently draw to treat some of my patients.
This timely, outstanding blend of scholarship and humanity places this work in the category of a genuine classic. The book is a "must" for every serious scholar of American history. "No Shame in my Game" by Katherine Neuman would be a wonderful contemporary companion.
Book Description
Notes, index.
Customer Reviews:
A comprehensive account of Black History in the Caribbean.......2001-03-28
This book is a must for those who want an account of Black History in North America and the Caribbean. It really provides a foundation for you to view the Caribbean in different light and to understand why we are now where we are today. It is both informative and disturbing. This should be part of the National Curriculum in so many countries. The account Mr Segal gives on each Island is rewarding. I has a 'sense' of what I saw when I went to Martinique and the book provides firm facts which have enabled me to reflect on my journey and forthcoming journeys. If only more people from Europe and within the Islands read a book like this!!
Excellent source of African-based culture outside of Africa.......1998-09-23
Ronald Segal's book "The Black Diaspora" is an excellent historical and cultural account of African descendents living outside of Africa. This book is so smoothly written that it is impossible not to enjoy and learn a great deal from its pages. The format and flow are so well put together that Segal's many topics of discussion are beautifully linked with easy transitions. I loved this book and learned a huge amount about the black diaspora despite having read many, many other books on this same topic.
Book Description
This powerful book covers the vast and various terrain of African American music, from bebop to hip-hop. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., begins with an absorbing account of his own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago, evoking Sunday-morning worship services, family gatherings with food and dancing, and jam sessions at local nightclubs. This lays the foundation for a brilliant discussion of how musical meaning emerges in the private and communal realms of lived experience and how African American music has shaped and reflected identities in the black community. Deeply informed by Ramsey's experience as an accomplished musician, a sophisticated cultural theorist, and an enthusiast brought up in the community he discusses, Race Music explores the global influence and popularity of African American music, its social relevance, and key questions regarding its interpretation and criticism.
Beginning with jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel, this book demonstrates that while each genre of music is distinct--possessing its own conventions, performance practices, and formal qualities--each is also grounded in similar techniques and conceptual frameworks identified with African American musical traditions. Ramsey provides vivid glimpses of the careers of Dinah Washington, Louis Jordan, Dizzy Gillespie, Cootie Williams, and Mahalia Jackson, among others, to show how the social changes of the 1940s elicited an Afro-modernism that inspired much of the music and culture that followed.
Race Music illustrates how, by transcending the boundaries between genres, black communities bridged generational divides and passed down knowledge of musical forms and styles. It also considers how the discourse of soul music contributed to the vibrant social climate of the Black Power Era. Multilayered and masterfully written, Race Music provides a dynamic framework for rethinking the many facets of African American music and the ethnocentric energy that infused its creation.
Download Description
This powerful book covers the vast and various terrain of African American music, from bebop to hip-hop. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., begins with an absorbing account of his own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago, evoking Sunday-morning worship services, family gatherings with food and dancing, and jam sessions at local nightclubs. This lays the foundation for a brilliant discussion of how musical meaning emerges in the private and communal realms of lived experience and how African American music has shaped and reflected identities in the black community. Deeply informed by Ramsey's experience as an accomplished musician, a sophisticated cultural theorist, and an enthusiast brought up in the community he discusses, Race Music explores the global influence and popularity of African American music, its social relevance, and key questions regarding its interpretation and criticism. Beginning with jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel, this book demonstrates that while each genre of music is distinct--possessing its own conventions, performance practices, and formal qualities--each is also grounded in similar techniques and conceptual frameworks identified with African American musical traditions. Ramsey provides vivid glimpses of the careers of Dinah Washington, Louis Jordan, Dizzy Gillespie, Cootie Williams, and Mahalia Jackson, among others, to show how the social changes of the 1940s elicited an Afro-modernism that inspired much of the music and culture that followed.
Customer Reviews:
extraordinary.......2003-07-06
Race Music is a wonderful example of music scholarship. Ramsey's work provides a rigourous, fresh, and inciteful look into African American Music. Unlike many music scholars who unsuccessfully negotiate the academic and popualar terrains simultaneously, Ramsey presents an unflinchingly academic book in a way that allows the lay public access into his wonderful world of idas. A must read!!!!
Amazon.com
King, a historian at Michigan State University, has researched the lives of children growing up in slavery during the last century. Her sources include personal papers and U.S. government interviews with former slaves, all compiled in the 1930s. Children saw the carefree joys of their younger days fade as the grim boundaries of their lives became apparent. The humiliation and punishment of slaves was often inflicted publicly--a father whipped in front of his son as a salutary lesson to both the boy and the man. Parents could be sold off, losing all contact with their children. King relates how the songs and games of the children came to incorporate this harsh reality.
Book Description
Enslaved peoples were brought to the Americas from many places in Africa, but a large majority came from relatively few ethnic groups. Drawing on a wide range of materials in four languages as well as on her lifetime study of slave groups in the New World, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall explores the persistence of African ethnic identities among the enslaved over four hundred years of the Atlantic slave trade.
Hall traces the linguistic, economic, and cultural ties shared by large numbers of enslaved Africans, showing that despite the fragmentation of the diaspora many ethnic groups retained enough cohesion to communicate and to transmit elements of their shared culture. Hall concludes that recognition of the survival and persistence of African ethnic identities can fundamentally reshape how people think about the emergence of identities among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas, about the ways shared identity gave rise to resistance movements, and about the elements of common African ethnic traditions that influenced regional creole cultures throughout the Americas.
Customer Reviews:
An introduction to an essential field.......2007-06-17
This book is an introduction to the expanding analysis of slave trade, slavery, and other records that give us a concrete look at what parts of Africa and which societies and cultures, the millions of slaves who were brought to the New World came from and where they went. Contrary to the earlier model that slaves were a culturally atomised group, the research by Hall and other contemporary scholars has disclosed that slaves from particular areas in Africa often went to particular places in the Americas. This was a product of trading routes, geography, political divisions, and slave marketers views that Africans from particular areas had particular skills or behavior patterns that made them attractive to particular purchasers.
Rather than an atomization of different African cultures, the Americas were populated by accumulations of Africans from particular regions who continued and adapted the culture they possessed in Africa and created new African American cultures.
Hall's book is decisive for anyone involved in the serious study of slavery either in the Americas and Africa, not only due to her content,but due to the way that she outlines the source material of records of the different slaving countries as well as the new databases of slavery records being developed on an international level.
Her book attempts to show the broad outlines and covers all of Africa and all of the Americas. As such she cannot go into a richer detail. Her work on Lousiana does this. For a more detailed look at these questions as they purtain to Africans in the current United States, Michael Gomez's _Exchanging our Country Marks_ is a necessary companion to this book. Both titles are required reading for anyone who wants to really know about African American history and identity, as well as the impact of slavery on Africa.
An important work.......2006-04-29
Anyone who has travelled extenisvely in Africa is aware of the diversity of ethnic and tribal groups. Anyone who has then travelled or perhaps recalled their previous experience in the Americas is shocked to realize then that the African diaspora in the Americans must reflect this, or at least used to reflect this diversity in some way.
This book does an amazing job in contributing to our understanding of the nature of the African diaspora in AMerica, from tribal to language to ethnic groups in the new world. We see now that slaves originated from certain ports and thus from certain groups in western Africa and eastern Africa. The Bantus from eastern Africa and Islamis ensalved peoples of western Africa. Usually the Africans who were enslaved in the interior by Arab slave raiders came from certain tribes, usually those tribes who had dared to resist or not convert to Islam, sometimes local tribal groups were employed to war against neighboring groups. In this certain tribes simply became factories for creating surplus people to be enslaved. A fasctinating story.
Seth J. Frantzman
Book Description
"The 18 papers in this volume are original, clearly written, and of consistently high quality. . . . Highly recommended . . . " --Choice
These essays reflect the international dimensions, commonalities, and discontinuities in the histories of diasporan communities of color. ¸Crossing Boundaries embraces the challenge to probe differences embedded in Black ethnicities and helps to discover and to weave into a new understanding the threads of experience, culture, and identity across diasporas.
Books:
- The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion
- The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
- The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
- Traditions And Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past
- Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford History of Art)
- Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public
- Western Civilization: Volume II: Since 1500
- Words of Wisdom: Daily Affirmations of Faith
- Zach's Lie
- Zebra In Lion Country: The Dean Of Small Cap Stocks Explains How To Invest In Small Rapidly Growin
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- At Home in the Muddy Water: A Guide to Finding Peace Within Everyday Chaos
- The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation
- Round Buildings, Square Buildings, and Buildings that Wiggle Like a Fish
- Phoenix: The Lonely Empress: Elizabeth of Austria
- The Complete Idiot's Guide to Playing Drums, 2nd Edition
- The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, One Volume, Expanded Edition
- The Neighborhood Forager: A Guide for the Wild Food Gourmet
- The Librarian's Internet Survival Guide: Strategies for the High-tech Reference Desk
- Real Resumix & Other Resumes for Federal Government Jobs: Including Samples of Real Resumes Used
- The 100 Best Mutual Funds You Can Buy, 2001
Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939
The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)
Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration
The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory
White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)
