[Review of] Dirk Hoerder, ed. The Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s-70s (Three volumes)

Dirk Hoerder has undertaken a truly mammoth task -- the identification, analysis, and the location of surviving collections of the immigrant labor press published in the United States and Canada from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. For the most part his efforts have been successful. Without question he has provided researchers interested in the American immigrant experience or American labor history with a valuable research tool

[Review of] Rodolfo O. De La Garza, Frank D. Bean, Charles M. Bonjean, Ricardo Romo, and Rodolfo Alvarez, eds. The Mexican American Experience: An Interdisciplinary Anthology

Mexican-Americans comprise the second largest minority group in the United States and one of the most rapidly growing elements in the population. Their history in the American southwest goes back almost four hundred years, they have interacted with Anglo·Americans in that region since the early nineteenth century, and have been the most numerous immigrant group coming to the United States since the middle of the twentieth century. Despite this clear evidence of their significance and their impact on this country, scholars in the social sciences have often neglected this ethnic group in their research and writing. This volume makes an effort to correct the oversight

[Review of] Langston Hughes. I Wonder As I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey

I Wonder As I Wander, originally published in 1956, is the second and last volume of Langston Hughes\u27s autobiography. In the first volume, The Big Sea, Hughes focused on his early life and his involvement in the Harlem Renaissance; to a large degree it constitutes his memoirs of the Harlem Renaissance. I Wonder As I Wander is more personal. It is an account of his experiences and his musings during the 1930s, after he had distanced himself from the Harlem Renaissance, while he was in the most political phase of his long career, and while his travels took him across the United States and to the most exciting and troubled areas of the world -- the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, China during the chaotic days preceding the Japanese invasion, Japan during the period when the military was consolidating its power, and Spain during its civil war. During his wanderings Hughes crossed paths with some of his generation\u27s most interesting people. He traveled across Soviet Central Asia with Arthur Koestler and dined with Madam [Madame] Sun Yat Sen in Shanghai. However, the most vivid and interesting sections of the book describe his encounter with common people, often black, often vagabonds like himself -- Emma, the black mammy of Moscow, or Teddy Weatherford, the black jazz musician who befriended him in Shanghai

[Review of] Vernon J. Williams. From a Caste to a Minority: Changing Attitudes of American Sociologists Towards Afro-Americans

Attitudes towards specific racial minorities have been central to the history of the United States. These attitudes have influenced the development of social and cultural institutions, they have determined the structure of our communities, and they have affected our laws and our politics. Given the centrality of race in American culture, it is surprising that until the second half of the twentieth century there was little effort to examine systematically the role of race in US history, or to examine changing attitudes towards race; and the efforts that were made rarely made it into the mainstream of American historiography

[Review of] K. Sue Jewell. Survival of the Black Family: The Institutional Impact of U.S. Social Policy

The impact and effectiveness of the social programs that emerged during the New Deal and were expanded in the Great Society have become seriously debated questions in the conservative 1980s and 1990s. Liberals accept as an article of faith the necessity of federal welfare programs to counter the economic injustice that seems inherent in American capitalism and to reverse the results of generations of racism and inequality; conservatives, on the other hand, contend that federal welfare programs are at best inefficient, and more likely, destructive of initiative and economic progress among the very groups that they are designed to assist, and consequently, should be dismantled. A subset of this debate centers on the impact of US social policy during the last half century on African Americans -- especially on the black family

Social response to ethnic groups in Omaha, Nebraska: 1892-1910

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1968 W558Master of Scienc

Screaming 'Black' Murder: Crime Fiction and the Construction of Ethnic Identities

A significant segment of crime fiction is concerned with the representation of ethnic identities and may to some extent be considered paradigmatic of the participation of literary texts in discourses on race and minorities. This article explores constructions of ethnic identities in American, British, and South African crime fiction from the 1920s to the early twenty-first century. In particular, the focus will be on such texts in which the ethno-cultural identity of the detective gives special prominence not only to the ethnic particularity of the fictional character itself and of its environs but frequently also to that of its author. Main texts discussed are Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure Man Dies (1932), Earl Derr Biggers’ The House Without a Key (1925) and The Black Camel (1929), Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) and Little Scarlet (2004) as well as James McClure’s The Gooseberry Fool (1974) and Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights (2005). It is argued that all of these texts have a distinct subversive potential of which the construction of ethnic identities becomes the main vehicle because these identities are the products and the catalysts of the conflicts negotiated in ethnic crime fiction and correlating to ‘reality’

Review of \u3ci\u3eTexas Wanderlust: The Adventures of Dutch Wurzbach\u3c/i\u3e By Douglas V. Meed

Eight-year-old Emil Frederick Dutch Wurzbach arrived with his family in Galveston in early 1846 as one of the hundreds of German immigrants who sailed to Texas that year. He spent his childhood in central Texas, first at Fredericksburg, then in Austin, and finally on a farm outside Austin. At the age of eleven Wurzbach began a series of frontier jobs, largely with the army, herding livestock or working as a teamster supplying the scattered frontier posts south and west of San Antonio; he also served a brief stint in the Texas Rangers. He encountered legendary frontiersmen, fought Comanches and Apaches, and generally bounced from one adventure to another in Texas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico, with an occasional foray into the Northern Plains. In April 1862 he enlisted in a unit of the 31st Texas Cavalry for service in the Confederate army, spending his war years in Arkansas and Louisiana, and participating in the Red River Campaign of 1864. Douglas V. Meed, the great grandson of Dutch Wurzbach, based this study on his ancestor\u27s memoirs, fleshed out from more conventional sources. The result is an uneven account of life on the southwestern frontier from the mid-1840s through the Civil War. At its best Meed\u27s book provides vivid details of a young frontier freight driver\u27s experiences in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Civil War chapters are also impressive in detailing the exploits of Texas troops in the trans-Mississippi campaigns, though providing little information about Wurzbach\u27s activities. It is easy to criticize Texas Wanderlust for what it is not. First, Meed has not written a traditional biography offering any detailed analysis of the forces that motivated Wurzbach\u27s career and life decisions. Indeed, Meed rarely probes Wurzbach\u27s psychology; instead, he describes his subject simply as a wild young man who quickly grew restless in civilization and was driven by a search for adventure. Nor is the book an introspective memoir of the sort one might expect from a political leader, military commander, or successful entrepreneur. It is, instead, a factual rendering of the particulars of the early life and experiences of a fairly ordinary German-Texan on the mid-nineteenth century frontier, and this is its value. It gives us a rare glimpse into the life of an unexceptional young man who worked as a contract teamster for the US army, fought Indians, searched for fortune in northern Mexico, and served as an enlisted man in the less-glamorous western campaigns of the Civil War. For bringing this segment offrontier experience to life, Meed deserves credit

"Lafayette Players" and "Lafayette Theatre"

Haas A. "Lafayette Players" and "Lafayette Theatre". In: Wintz CD, Finkelman P, eds. Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Routledge; 2004: 676-679