One month since Rio Tinto's blasting of the Juukan Gorge, Australia's Indigenous heritage is again under threat. The Doma Group, a property development company, is planning to build an apartment complex at the base of Mount Ainslie in Canberra, over the top of a sacred Indigenous site. The site also contains survey markers placed during the planning of Canberra as a capital city.
The control of public and private space in African American lives and communities was a central part of white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. Laws defined where African Americans ate and drank, played, lived, attended school, and worked, while the informal, extralegal authority that underwrote white supremacy allowed for the violation of the private space of homes and families. However, as recent works have shown, black people found ways of creating their own spaces within their churches, schools, fraternal orders, and families that sustained them through some of the darkest phases of U.S. history. The interdisciplinary essays in this collection discuss how African Americans throughout their history have both contested and forged their own social, political, and cultural spaces. The editors have organized the essays around the categories of community building; intellectual and political spaces; segregated spaces; schools and educational spaces; urban space and leisure; and churches and sacred spaces. The essays cover a range of topics, including the creation and disappearance of Seneca Village in antebellum New York City; the formation of the Chicago Woodlawn Association in the 1960s; Luther P. Jackson, who educated teachers for social justice at Virginia State University; a brief history of the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta; the social geography of leisure on the Southside of Chicago in the early decades of the twentieth century; the famous conflict between Columbia University and the black community around the building of a gym in the late 1960s; African American suburbanization and the conflicts over integrated communities; the integration of Philadelphia's street cars in the mid-nineteenth century; contested memories over historical sites related to slavery, burial grounds, and the civil rights movement; rural churches and schools; courtrooms; and fugitive slaves who lived in swamps.
The Rural South Since World War II. Edited by R. Douglas Hurt. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Pp. viii, 202. Acknowledgments, suggested readings, contributors, illustrations, index. $35.00.) This book, writes Douglas Hurt, is intended to provide a road map for the most important concerns, issues, and developments in Southern rural life since 1945 (p. 4). Thus, the essays in this volume cover a range of topics, beginning with Donald Winters' discussion of the changes in Southern agriculture after the post-World War II shift from a labor intensive to a capital intensive method of production. No longer a single crop cotton economy, the rural South diversified to also produce soybeans, catfish, and poultry-enterprises that produced a business mentality among farmers. Vernon Burton then traces the changes in race relations after the war, especially the developments after the civil rights battles of the pre1968 years. Burton notes that rural communities suffer poverty, have inferior educational facilities, and are often dumping grounds for toxic waste, conditions exacerbated during the conservative Reagan years. Yet, Burton insists the rural South has made greater progress than the urban North in trying to heal racial wounds, noting Southern Baptists' recent apology for slavery, the efforts of segregated rural churches to hold occasional services together, and the common values rooted in evangelical Protestantism and the food and folkways that both races share. Sally McMillen looks at African-American and white rural women, describing the shift from farm-related work to factory and government jobs by the late twentieth century. As farms mechanized and food became cheaper and easier to purchase, farm women took jobs in the growing service industries, food processing plants, and government installations, jobs that are, more often than not, low-paying with few benefits. So much of the rural South's poor population, she reminds us, continues to consist of women and children. two of the most provocative essays, Bill Malone and Ted Ownby describe the Southern confrontation with modernity through its music and religion. In the fifty years since the end of World War notes Bill Malone, musical styles born in the South-gospel (black and white), rhythmand-blues, rock-and-roll, Cajun, cowboy, and country-have moved into the nation's mainstream (p. 96). Malone locates the rise of Southern music within the postwar transformations. When country music began its impressive national expansion after World War II, it spoke as the voice of a people who were moving away from agriculture and rural life to take up life as wage earners in the towns and cities of America. many ways, it was the `language of a subculture.' However, Malone notes that it now speaks to, and for, a vast constituency that has no memories of tenant farms, coal camps, mill villages, Farm Security camps, or even housing projects. Many of its fans, of course, have Left the ranks of blue-collar labor. But even though the specific loci of country music support can no longer be precisely determined, the music still carries the imprints of its earlier history. As the music of a people torn between tradition and modernity, who have struggled to make sense of their experiences, country music has bequeathed a style and message that finds resonance in the hearts of millions of Americans everywhere who are still trying to understand and come to terms with a complex society that increasingly seems beyond control (p. …
Journal Article Agrarian Capitalism in Theory and Practice. By Susan Archer Mann. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. xvi + 211 pp. $29.95.) Get access Nan Elizabeth Woodruff Nan Elizabeth Woodruff Penn State University, University Park Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 1, June 1991, Page 283, https://doi.org/10.2307/2078110 Published: 01 June 1991
Journal Article Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era. By Patricia Sullivan. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. xvi, 335 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2260-4. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8078-4564-7.) Get access Nan Elizabeth Woodruff Nan Elizabeth Woodruff Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 4, March 1997, Pages 1457–1458, https://doi.org/10.2307/2953016 Published: 01 March 1997
Journal Article As Rare as Rain: Federal Relief in the Great Southern Drought of 1930–31. By Nan Elizabeth Woodruff. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. xii + 203 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, selected bibliography, and in- dex. $18.95.) Get access Donald H. Grubbs Donald H. Grubbs University of the Pacific Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 1, June 1986, Pages 235–236, https://doi.org/10.2307/1903703 Published: 01 June 1986
