In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West 1528-1990

In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West 1528-1990 PDF Author: Quintard Taylor
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393318893
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Book Description
The American West is mistakenly known as a region with few African Americans and virtually no black history. This work challenges that view in a chronicle that begins in 1528 and carries through to the present-day black success in politics and the surging interest in multiculturalism.

Imagining the African American West

Imagining the African American West PDF Author: Blake Allmendinger
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803210671
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Book Description
The literature of the African American West is the last racial discourse of the region that remains unexplored. Blake Allmendinger addresses this void in literary and cultural studies with Imagining the African American West?the first comprehensive study of African American literature on the early frontier and in the modern urban American West. ø Allmendinger charts the terrain of African American literature in the West through his exploration of novels, histories, autobiographies, science fiction, mysteries, formula westerns, melodramas, experimental theater, and political essays, as well as rap music and film. He examines the histories of James P. Beckwourth and Oscar Micheaux; slavery, the Civil War, and the significance of the American frontier to blacks; and the Harlem Renaissance, the literature of urban unrest, rap music, black noir, and African American writers, including Toni Morrison and Walter Mosley. His study utilizes not only the works of well-known African American writers but also some obscure and neglected works, out-of-print books, and unpublished manuscripts in library archives. ø Much of the scholarly neglect of the ?Black West? can be blamed on how the American West has been imagined, constructed, and framed in scholarship to date. In his study, Allmendinger provides the appropriate theoretical, cultural, and historical contexts for understanding the literature and suggests new directions for the future of black western literature.

Black Cowboys in the American West

Black Cowboys in the American West PDF Author: Bruce A. Glasrud
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806156503
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Book Description
Who were the black cowboys? They were drovers, foremen, fiddlers, cowpunchers, cattle rustlers, cooks, and singers. They worked as wranglers, riders, ropers, bulldoggers, and bronc busters. They came from varied backgrounds—some grew up in slavery, while free blacks often got their start in Texas and Mexico. Most who joined the long trail drives were men, but black women also rode and worked on western ranches and farms. The first overview of the subject in more than fifty years, Black Cowboys in the American West surveys the life and work of these cattle drivers from the years before the Civil War through the turn of the twentieth century. Including both classic, previously published articles and exciting new research, this collection also features select accounts of twentieth-century rodeos, music, people, and films. Arranged in three sections—“Cowboys on the Range,” “Performing Cowboys,” and “Outriders of the Black Cowboys”—the thirteen chapters illuminate the great diversity of the black cowboy experience. Like all ranch hands and riders, African American cowboys lived hard, dangerous lives. But black drovers were expected to do the roughest, most dangerous work—and to do it without complaint. They faced discrimination out west, albeit less than in the South, which many had left in search of autonomy and freedom. As cowboys, they could escape the brutal violence visited on African Americans in many southern communities and northern cities. Black cowhands remain an integral part of life in the West, the descendants of African Americans who ventured west and helped settle and establish black communities. This long-overdue examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black cowboys ensures that they, and their many stories and experiences, will continue to be known and told.

African Americans on the Western Frontier

African Americans on the Western Frontier PDF Author: Monroe Lee Billington
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
Thirteen essays examine the roles African-Americans played in the settling of the American West, discussing the slaves of Mormons and California gold miners; African-American army men, cowboys, and newspaper founders; and others on the frontier. Also includes a bibliographic essay.

Black Frontiers

Black Frontiers PDF Author: Lillian Schlissel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0689833156
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 84

Book Description
Black Frontiers chronicles the life and times of black men and women who settled the West from 1865 to the early 1900s. In this striking book, you'll meet many of these brave individuals face-to-face, through rare vintage photographs and a fascinating account of their real-life history.

Uninvited Neighbors

Uninvited Neighbors PDF Author: Herbert G. Ruffin
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 080614582X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
In the late 1960s, African American protests and Black Power demonstrations in California’s Santa Clara County—including what’s now called Silicon Valley—took many observers by surprise. After all, as far back as the 1890s, the California constitution had legally abolished most forms of racial discrimination, and subsequent legal reform had surely taken care of the rest. White Americans might even have wondered where the black activists in the late sixties were coming from—because, beginning with the writings of Fredrick Jackson Turner, the most influential histories of the American West simply left out African Americans or, later, portrayed them as a passive and insignificant presence. Uninvited Neighbors puts black people back into the picture and dispels cherished myths about California’s racial history. Reaching from the Spanish era to the valley’s emergence as a center of the high-tech industry, this is the first comprehensive history of the African American experience in the Santa Clara Valley. Author Herbert G. Ruffin II’s study presents the black experience in a new way, with a focus on how, despite their smaller numbers and obscure presence, African Americans in the South Bay forged communities that had a regional and national impact disproportionate to their population. As the region industrialized and spawned suburbs during and after World War II, its black citizens built institutions such as churches, social clubs, and civil rights organizations and challenged socioeconomic restrictions. Ruffin explores the quest of the area’s black people for the postwar American Dream. The book also addresses the scattering of the black community during the region’s late yet rapid urban growth after 1950, which led to the creation of several distinct black suburban communities clustered in metropolitan San Jose. Ruffin treats people of color as agents of their own development and survival in a region that was always multiracial and where slavery and Jim Crow did not predominate, but where the white embrace of racial justice and equality was often insincere. The result offers a new view of the intersection of African American history and the history of the American West.

The African American West

The African American West PDF Author: Bruce A. Glasrud
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Book Description
A collection of stories written by African-American authors about the American West over the course of the twentieth century.

The Harlem Renaissance in the American West

The Harlem Renaissance in the American West PDF Author: Cary D Wintz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136649107
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description
The Harlem Renaissance, an exciting period in the social and cultural history of the US, has over the past few decades re-established itself as a watershed moment in African American history. However, many of the African American communities outside the urban center of Harlem that participated in the Harlem Renaissance between 1914 and 1940, have been overlooked and neglected as locations of scholarship and research. Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negro's Western Experience will change the way students and scholars of the Harlem Renaissance view the efforts of artists, musicians, playwrights, club owners, and various other players in African American communities all over the American West to participate fully in the cultural renaissance that took hold during that time.

African American Women of the Old West

African American Women of the Old West PDF Author: Tricia Martineau Wagner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1461748429
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
The brave pioneers who made a life on the frontier were not only male—and they were not only white. The story of African-American women in the Old West is one that has largely gone untold--until now. The story of ten African-American women is reconstructed from historic documents found in century-old archives. The ten remarkable women in African American Women of the Old West were all born before 1900, some were slaves, some were free, and some lived both ways during their lifetime. Among them were laundresses, freedom advocates, journalists, educators, midwives, business proprietors, religious converts, philanthropists, mail and freight haulers, and civil and social activists.

Freedom's Racial Frontier

Freedom's Racial Frontier PDF Author: Herbert G. Ruffin
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806161248
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Book Description
Between 1940 and 2010, the black population of the American West grew from 710,400 to 7 million. With that explosive growth has come a burgeoning interest in the history of the African American West—an interest reflected in the remarkable range and depth of the works collected in Freedom’s Racial Frontier. Editors Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack have gathered established and emerging scholars in the field to create an anthology that links past, current, and future generations of African American West scholarship. The volume’s sixteen chapters address the African American experience within the framework of the West as a multicultural frontier. The result is a fresh perspective on western-U.S. history, centered on the significance of African American life, culture, and social justice in almost every trans-Mississippi state. Examining and interpreting the twentieth century while mindful of events and developments since 2000, the contributors focus on community formation, cultural diversity, civil rights and black empowerment, and artistic creativity and identity. Reflecting the dynamic evolution of new approaches and new sites of knowledge in the field of western history, the authors consider its interconnections with fields such as cultural studies, literature, and sociology. Some essays deal with familiar places, while others look at understudied sites such as Albuquerque, Oahu, and Las Vegas, Nevada. By examining black suburbanization, the Information Age, and gentrification in the urban West, several authors conceive of a Third Great Migration of African Americans to and within the West. The West revealed in Freedom’s Racial Frontier is a place where black Americans have fought—and continue to fight—to make their idea of freedom live up to their expectations of equality; a place where freedom is still a frontier for most persons of African heritage.