A Personal Look at America\u27s Foremost Communist

There is nothing quite like the experience of being in the beautiful, sunlit special collections reading room on the top floor of Bird Library—especially when one is about to dive into 86 meticulously cataloged boxes of family history. I was there to do research for a documentary about my grandfather, Earl Browder, as well as a joint biography of him and my grandmother, Raissa Berkmann Browder—a task that was almost overwhelming to contemplate. After all, my grandfather Earl Browder was the head of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) during its most influential period—the Great Depression. He coined the slogan “Communism is 20th-century Americanism.” He ran for president twice against Roosevelt and appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1938. In 1946, on Stalin’s orders, he was expelled from the Communist Party for revisionism. During all of these years, he was tracked by both the FBI and the KGB, and in the mid-1990s, the VENONA project was published—a series of KGB cables that named my grandfather as a Soviet spy

Women\u27s Gun Culture in America

A recent article in the New York Times focused on the possible increase in female gun ownership in the United States. This “new” phenomenon of women and guns is of course far from new: as early as the 1870s, trapshooting for women was publicized by gun manufacturers as yet another feminine activity, not far removed from shopping or club work. The ultra-feminine Annie Oakley, who in the 1880s became an international star in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, personally taught fifteen thousand women to shoot. By the turn of the twentieth century, gun manufacturers were promoting hunting as a healthful activity for women

Summer Schooled: My Summer as a Bad Student

We all complain about our weak students--their slacking off during group work; their bizarre inability to comprehend simple directions; their disorganization; their need to tell us how smart they really are, despite appearances; the way they sometimes put their heads down on their desks. Imagine my dismay when I enrolled in summer school and found myself exhibiting most of those behaviors. Returning to the classroom as a student after working as a professor for almost 20 years has changed the way I look at my own students--and has been profoundly humbling for me. Because I was not just a returning student, but a bad student

The Heart is a Strange Muscle

Rachel’s beeper went off just as her back began growing numb, jammed against the pieces of broken and discarded furniture in the storage room. A second later, Bobby’s went off too. She unwrapped her legs from around his sweaty back, pulled herself up to a sitting position, and groped through the jumble of clothing

Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities

In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant\u27s narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace\u27s former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities. Significantly, notes Browder, these ersatz autobiographies have tended to appear at flashpoints in American history: in the decades before the Civil War, when immigration laws and laws regarding Native Americans were changing in the 1920s, and during the civil rights era, for example. Examining the creation and reception of such works from the 1830s through the 1990s--against a background ranging from the abolition movement and Wild West shows to more recent controversies surrounding blackface performance and jazz music--Browder uncovers their surprising influence in shaping American notions of identity.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1070/thumbnail.jp

Well Traveled: Strong relationships and unique challenges are revealed in “Driving Richmond: Stories and Portraits of GRTC Bus Drivers”

Here’s a well-kept secret: The regional GRTC Transit System is among the most progressive organizations in Richmond. The nonprofit plays a major role in reducing pollution, easing traffic congestion and connecting people to jobs. Its reform-minded leadership is eager to play a larger role. Its unionized bus drivers, which included some of the first waves of black and female drivers, help hold it all together. And those drivers love their jobs — to a degree unusual for workers in any profession. That’s what I learned through interviews with 16 current and former drivers this summer for an exhibition at the Richmond Street Art Festival, which opens today. Bruce Korusek, who has an amazing collection of GRTC photos and ephemera, took his first bus picture at age 5. Leslie Zink used to pretend as a child to be a bus driver picking up passengers on her bike. “I love to drive,” KaSandra Ellis says. “So, this job was perfect for me. Because I’ll drive from here to Timbuktu.

The Meaning of the Soldier: \u3cem\u3eIn the Year of the Pig and Hearts and Minds\u3c/em\u3e

In the Year of the Pig (1968) and Hearts and Minds (1974)—the first an Academy Award nominee, the second an Academy Award winner—are the two best-known Vietnam War documentaries of their time. They are works that could hardly be more different—one a cool, intellectual take on the origins and then-current state of the war, and the second a highly emotional appeal to end the war. By viewing them together it is possible not only to connect the dots between the contrasting intellectual and filmic traditions from which each emerged, but also to see, through the viewpoints of each film, how radically the image of the American soldier in Vietnam had changed between 1968 and 1974—and why, politically speaking, this view mattered so much to both war opponents and war proponents

The Curious Case of Asa Carter and The Education of Little Tree

Little Tree was number one on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list on October 4, 1991, when historian Dan T. Carter published an op-ed piece in the New York Times that demolished the image of the book’s author, explaining that Forrest Carter was in reality Asa Carter, and he was no Indian. Rather, Dan Carter (no relation) wrote, “Between 1946 and 1973, the Alabama native [Asa Carter] carved out a violent career in Southern politics as a Ku Klux Klan terrorist, right-wing radio announcer, home-grown American fascist and anti-Semite, rabble-rousing demagogue and secret author of the famous 1963 speech by Gov. George Wallace of Alabama: ‘Segregation now…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever.’” As Dan Carter concluded, “What does it tell us that we are so easily deceived?” To his question, pundits and readers quickly added others: Were the allegations true? And if they were true, could Asa Carter have had a change of heart and become a new person

When Mommy Goes to War (Leaving the Kids Behind)

While our culture has always seemed able to cope with the idea of fathers as warriors--think of all those photographs on the front page of your local newspaper, featuring a returning soldier seeing his baby for the first time, or reuniting with older children--we may be less able to handle the idea of deploying mothers. We have learned, through watching countless war movies, that the bonds forged between (male) comrades during war can be stronger than those of family, but it may be a surprise to learn that this is true for many women as well

Women Home From War

The first time I heard a woman describe her deployment in glowing terms, I was taken aback. Marine Colonel Jenny Holbert told me that being in charge of public affairs for the second battle of Fallujah was probably one of the biggest events of my life, other than birthing two children. I thought, cynically, that this enthusiasm was all part of her role as a public-affairs officer. It took me a while to understand how compelling the experiences of being in a combat zone could be for the women I talked with. Colonel Holbert\u27s enthusiasm for deployment was only one of many surprises I encountered over the course of the 52 interviews I did with women soldiers, sailors, coasties, airmen, and marines across the eastern seaboard