Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s

Scott W. Stern (Author)

There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou

8,A sweeping study of sexual assault trials in the Jim Crow South, detailing the racial and economic inequities of rape law and the resistance of ordinary women In the early years of the twentieth century, Mississippi County, Arkansas, was a brutal and profitable place. Home to starving, landless farmers, the county produced almost 2 percent of the entire world's cotton. It was also the site of two rape trials that made national headlines: an accusation that sent two Black men, almost certainly innocent, to death row; and the case of two white men, almost certainly guilty, who were likewise sentenced to death but who would ultimately face a very different fate. Braiding together these stories, Scott W. Stern examines how the Jim Crow legal system relied on selectively prosecuting rape to uphold the racial, gender, and economic hierarchies of the segregated, unequal South. But as much as rape law was a site of oppression, it was also, Stern shows, an arena of fierce resistance. Based on deep archival research, this kaleidoscopic narrative includes new information about the early career of Thurgood Marshall, who called one of the Mississippi County trials "worse than any we have ...

Jennifer Rycenga (Author)

Schooling the Nation: The Success of the Canterbury Academy for Black Women

3,Founded in 1833 by white teacher Prudence Crandell, Canterbury Academy educated more than two dozen Black women during its eighteen-month existence. Racism in eastern Connecticut forced the teen students to walk a gauntlet of taunts, threats, and legal action to pursue their studies, but the school of higher learning flourished until a vigilante attack destroyed the Academy. Jennifer Rycenga recovers a pioneering example of antiracism and Black-white cooperation. At once an inspirational and cautionary tale, Canterbury Academy succeeded thanks to far-reaching networks, alliances, and activism that placed it within Black, women's, and abolitionist history. Rycenga focuses on the people like Sarah Harris, the Academy's first Black student; Maria Davis, Crandall's Black housekeeper and her early connection to the embryonic abolitionist movement; and Crandall herself. Telling their stories, she highlights the agency of Black and white women within the currents, and as a force changing those currents, in nineteenth-century America. Insightful and provocative, Schooling the Nation tells the forgotten story of remarkable women and a collaboration across racial and gender lines. ...

Stephen Taylor (Author)

Predator of the Seas: A History of the Slaveship That Fought for Emancipation

8,The dramatic biography of a slaveship turned freedom-fighter--which brings new insights into Britain's involvement in the end of the trade in enslaved people In 1827 the Royal Navy purchased a Baltimore clipper and renamed her the Black Joke. Assigned to the Preventative Squadron, she patrolled the west coast of Africa and freed 3,692 captives from enslavement. Beloved by seafarers and celebrated by the public, the Black Joke would become the most famous weapon in the campaign for abolition. But in her previous life as the Henriqueta, the Black Joke had been a slave ship. Through the experiences of slavers and abolitionists, captives and crew, Stephen Taylor charts the vessel's extraordinary double life. As the Henriqueta she operated as an engine of atrocity, trafficking over 3,000 captives to plantations in Brazil. But subsequently manned by British seamen and Liberian Kru, the Black Joke became the scourge of Spanish and Brazilian slavers. She did so despite limited resources, neglect, and even obstruction by the authorities at home. Taylor offers a gripping account of the world of the transatlantic trade, through the eyes of its perpetrators--and those who sought its end. ...