HIST 219: In Motion - African Americans in the U.S.

Industrial Segregation by Walter Greason; David Goldberg

Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago by Robert Gioielli Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis focuses on the wave of environmental activism and grassroots movements that swept through America's older, industrial cities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Robert Gioielli offers incisive case studies of Baltimore, St. Louis, and Chicago to show how urban activism developed as an impassioned response to a host of racial, social, and political conflicts. As deindustrialization, urban renewal, and suburbanization caused the decline of the urban environment, residents--primarily African Americans and working-class whites--organized to protect their families and communities from health threats and environmental destruction.

From Bondage to Contract by Amy Dru Stanley This book explores how a generation of American thinkers and reformers - abolitionists, former slaves, feminists, labor advocates, jurists, moralists, and social scientists - drew on contract to condemn the evils of chattel slavery as well as to measure the virtues of free society. Their arguments over the meaning of slavery and freedom were grounded in changing circumstances of labor and home life on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. At the heart of these arguments lay the problem of defining which realms of self and social existence could be rendered market commodities and which could not. From Bondage to Contract reveals how the problem of distinguishing between what was saleable and what was not reflected the ideological and social changes wrought by the concurrence of abolition in the South and burgeoning industrial capitalism in the North."

Garbage Wars (Urban and Industrial Environments): The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago by David Pellow A study of the struggle for environmental justice, focusing on conflicts over solid waste and pollution in Chicago.In Garbage Wars, the sociologist David Pellow describes the politics of garbage in Chicago. He shows how garbage affects residents in vulnerable communities and poses health risks to those who dispose of it. He follows the trash, the pollution, the hazards, and the people who encountered them in the period 1880-2000. What unfolds is a tug of war among social movements, government, and industry over how we manage our waste, who benefits, and who pays the costs.Studies demonstrate that minority and low-income communities bear a disproportionate burden of environmental hazards. Pellow analyzes how and why environmental inequalities are created. He also explains how class and racial politics have influenced the waste industry throughout the history of Chicago and the United States.

Going down Jericho Road by Michael K. Honey Memphis in 1968 was ruled by a paternalistic "plantation mentality" embodied in its good-old-boy mayor, Henry Loeb. Wretched conditions, abusive white supervisors, poor education, and low wages locked most black workers into poverty. Then two sanitation workers, seeking shelter from one of the city's notorious torrential rains, were chewed up like refuse in the back of a faulty truck, igniting a months-long public-employee strike that would shake the nation.""With novelistic drama and rich scholarly detail, Michael Honey brings to life the magnetic characters who clashed on the Memphis battlefield: the resolute black workers; strike leaders like the impoverished, driven T.O. Jones; black ministers like Martin Luther King's longtime ally, the inspired and dedicated Reverend James Lawson, and his flamboyant colleague, Reverend Ralph Jackson; union men; the first black members of the Memphis city council; dynamic black women like civil rights leader Maxine Smith and community advocate Cornella Crenshaw; and volatile young Black Power advocates like Coby Smith and Charles Cabbage."

Political Economy of the Black Ghetto by William K. Tabb Professor Tabb analyses the manner in which vested interests use economic power to resist ghetto reform and sets forth new proposals to do away with the restriction that hedge in ghetto occupants and prevent them from achieving a fair share of American prosperity.

Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 by Eric Foner Chronicles how Americans responded to the changes unleashed by the Civil War and the end of slavery.

The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place, 1870–1875 by Kirt Wilson

The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914 by Nancy Cohen Tracing the formation of liberal political ideology from the end of the Civil War to the early 20th century, Nancy Cohen offers an interpretation of the origins and character of modern American liberalism. She argues that these values and programmes were formulated in the Gilded Age.

The Retreats of Reconstruction by David E. Goldberg This book examines how de facto segregation unfolded and operated at the New Jersey shore after the Civil War. Weaving together histories of race, leisure, and consumption, it argues that the politics of mass consumption contained early desegregation efforts and prolonged Jim Crow.

Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson by Blair Murphy Kelley Focusing on three key cities--New Orleans, Richmond, and Savannah--Kelley explores African Americans' organized efforts to resist the passage of segregation laws dividing trains and streetcars by race in the early Jim Crow era. The book forces a reassessment of the timelines of the black freedom struggle, revealing that a period once dismissed as the age of accommodation should in fact be characterized as part of a history of protest and resistance.

Second Founding by David Quigley The author retraces New York City's rich political heritage, arguing that the city's political and social structures resisted Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War.

The Separate City by Christopher Silver; John V. Moeser A ground-breaking collaborative study merging perspectives from history, political science, and urban planning, The Separate City is a trenchant analysis of the development of the African-American community in the urban South. While similar in some respects to the racially defined ghettos of the North, the districts in which southern blacks lived from the pre-World War II era to the mid-1960s differed markedly from those of their northern counterparts. The African- American community in the South was (and to some extent still is) a physically expansive, distinct, and socially heterogeneous zo.

Sweet Land of Liberty by Thomas J. Sugrue Sweet Land of Liberty is an epic, revelatory account of the abiding quest for justice in states from Illinois to New York, and of how the intense northern struggle differed from and was inspired by the fight down South.