Review: The Student Struggle Against The Holocaust

Jewish Studie

New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America: Essays in Honor of Kenneth M. Stampp

For more than three decades race relations have been at the forefront of historical research in America. These new essays on race and slavery—some by highly regarded, award-winning veterans in the field and others by talented newcomers—point in fresh directions. They address specific areas of contention even as together they survey important questions across four centuries of social, cultural, and political history. Looking at the institution itself, Robert McColley reconsiders the origins of black slavery in America, while William W. Freehling presents a striking interpretation of the Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy of 1822. In the political arena, William E. Gienapp and Stephen E. Maizlish assess the power of race and slave issues in, respectively, the Republican and Democratic parties of the 1850s. For the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, Reid Mitchell profiles the consciousness of the average Confederate soldier, while Leon F. Litwack explores the tasks facing freed slaves. Arthur Zilversmit switches the perspective to Washington with a reevaluation of Grant\u27s commitments to the freedmen. Essays on the twentieth century focus on the South. James Oakes traces the rising fortunes of the supposedly vanquished planter class as it entered this century. Moving to more recent times, John G. Sproat looks at the role of South Carolina\u27s white moderates during the struggle over segregation in the late 1950s and early 1960s and their failure at Orangeburg in 1968. Finally, Joel Williamson assesses what the loss of slavery has meant to southern culture in the 120 years since the end of the Civil War. A wide-ranging yet cohesive exploration, New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America takes on added significance as a volume that honors Kenneth M. Stampp, the mentor of all the authors and long considered one of the great modern pioneers in the history of slavery and the Civil War. Robert H. Abzug, associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, is author of Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps. Stephen E. Maizlish, associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington, is author of The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics, 1844-1856.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_united_states_history/1041/thumbnail.jp

West of center: Jews on the real and imagined frontiers of Texas.

This dissertation is a narrative history of Texas Jewry focusing on ways that the idea of the frontier has shaped Jewish life and religious practice in Texas. It covers the experience of Texas Jews from the late sixteenth century---when "secret Jews" fleeing the Spanish Inquisition may have settled in South Texas---to the present. It includes topics such as the appearance of the first Jews in the state, the beginnings of Jewish communities and religious institutions; the Galveston Immigration Movement; the creation of the state's first Jewish newspaper; the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the ideological clashes over Zionism and religious orthodoxy that culminated in the Houston Controversy of 1942; the impact on Texas Jews of the Holocaust, World War II, and the establishment of Israel; the conflicted feelings of Jewish Texans toward the Civil Rights Movement; and the nature of the community today.As a diasporic people living in what one Jewish historian described as "one of the last corners of the Dispersion," Texas Jews built religious communities far from the acknowledged centers of Jewish culture and history, doing so with an awareness of themselves as a peripheral community. Early chapters of this study explore the effect of the "material" frontier---the realities of space, distance and remoteness---on nineteenth-century Texas Jewish communities. Even when the material frontier disappeared, however, Texas Jews continued to imagine themselves as a peripheral people. The geographic distance that separated them from Jewish centers, formerly a critical factor in defining their communities and religious lives, became an imagined distance, an "interior" frontier composed of symbolic distinctions between Texas Jews and other groups. Later chapters examine this phenomenon and trace through the social and political developments of the twentieth century how Texas Jews continue to define themselves as a distinct people in contrast both to other Texans and other Jews.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Texas at Austin, 2003.School code: 0227