Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America

Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America
Author: Michele K. Gillespie
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2009-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807136638

Thomas Dixon, Jr. is best remembered as the author of the racist novels that served as the basis for D. W. Griffith's controversial 1915 classic film The Birth of a Nation. He also enjoyed great renown during his lifetime as a minister, lecturer, lawyer, and actor. In Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America, distinguished scholars of religion, film, literature, music history and gender studies offer a provocative examination of Dixon's ideas, personal life and career and, in the process, illuminate the evolution of white racist ideas in the early twentieth century, and their legacy.

The Clansman

The Clansman
Author: Thomas Dixon
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2020-07-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 3752373849

Reproduction of the original: The Clansman by Thomas Dixon

Uncle Tom

Uncle Tom
Author: Adena Spingarn
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2018-06-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1503606090

Uncle Tom charts the dramatic cultural transformation of perhaps the most controversial literary character in American history. From his origins as the heroic, Christ-like protagonist of Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, the best-selling book of the nineteenth century after the Bible, Uncle Tom has become a widely recognized epithet for a black person deemed so subservient to whites that he betrays his race. Readers have long noted that Stowe's character is not the traitorous sycophant that his name connotes today. Adena Spingarn traces his evolution in the American imagination, offering the first comprehensive account of a figure central to American conversations about race and racial representation from 1852 to the present. We learn of the radical political potential of the novel's many theatrical spinoffs even in the Jim Crow era, Uncle Tom's breezy disavowal by prominent voices of the Harlem Renaissance, and a developing critique of "Uncle Tom roles" in Hollywood. Within the stubborn American binary of black and white, citizens have used this rhetorical figure to debate the boundaries of racial difference and the legacy of slavery. Through Uncle Tom, black Americans have disputed various strategies for racial progress and defined the most desirable and harmful images of black personhood in literature and popular culture.

Slavery, Mobility, and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Slavery, Mobility, and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Cuba
Author: Daylet Domínguez
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2023-09-06
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1000932680

With a focus on nineteenth century Cuba, this volume examines understudied forms of mobility and networks that emerged during Second Slavery. After being forcibly taken across the Atlantic, enslaved Africans were moved within Cuba, and sometimes sold to owners in other Caribbean islands or the U.S. South. The chapters included in this book, written by historians and literary critics, pay special attention to debates between abolitionists and proslavery ideologues, the ways in which people and ideas moved from the countryside to the city, from one Caribbean Island to the next, and from the United States or the coasts of West Africa to the sugarcane fields. They examine how enslaved persons ran away or were captured and coerced to relocate; how they mobilized information and ideas to ameliorate their situation; and how they were used to advance other people’s interests. Movement, these chapters show, was regularly deployed to reinforce enslavement and the suppression of rights, while at times helping people in their struggle for freedom. This book will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Latin American Literature, Global Slavery and Postcolonial Studies. The chapters were originally published in the journal Atlantic Studies: Global Currents.

The Limits of the Lost Cause

The Limits of the Lost Cause
Author: Gaines M. Foster
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2024-04-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807181951

The Limits of the Lost Cause challenges prevailing ways of thinking about the impact of the Civil War on the American South. Above all, Gaines Foster’s work encourages Americans to confront the new divisions within their society even as they wrestle with old national—not just southern—failings.

Remembering Reconstruction

Remembering Reconstruction
Author: Carole Emberton
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2017-04-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807166030

Academic studies of the Civil War and historical memory abound, ensuring a deeper understanding of how the war’s meaning has shifted over time and the implications of those changes for concepts of race, citizenship, and nationhood. The Reconstruction era, by contrast, has yet to receive similar attention from scholars. Remembering Reconstruction ably fills this void, assembling a prestigious lineup of Reconstruction historians to examine the competing social and historical memories of this pivotal and violent period in American history. Many consider the period from 1863 (beginning with slave emancipation) to 1877 (when the last federal troops were withdrawn from South Carolina and Louisiana) an “unfinished revolution” for civil rights, racial-identity formation, and social reform. Despite the cataclysmic aftermath of the war, the memory of Reconstruction in American consciousness and its impact on the country’s fraught history of identity, race, and reparation has been largely neglected. The essays in Remembering Reconstruction advance and broaden our perceptions of the complex revisions in the nation's collective memory. Notably, the authors uncover the impetus behind the creation of black counter-memories of Reconstruction and the narrative of the “tragic era” that dominated white memory of the period. Furthermore, by questioning how Americans have remembered Reconstruction and how those memories have shaped the nation's social and political history throughout the twentieth century, this volume places memory at the heart of historical inquiry.

Woodrow Wilson and American Internationalism

Woodrow Wilson and American Internationalism
Author: Lloyd E. Ambrosius
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2017-06-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1107163064

This book critiques President Woodrow Wilson's statecraft and diplomacy during World War I, notably with respect to religion and race.

Circulating Jim Crow

Circulating Jim Crow
Author: Adam McKible
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2024-02-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231559496

In the early twentieth century, the Saturday Evening Post was perhaps the most popular and influential magazine in the United States, establishing literary reputations and shaping American culture. In the popular imagination, it is best remembered for Norman Rockwell’s covers, which nostalgically depicted a wholesome and idyllic American way of life. But beneath those covers lurked a more troubling reality. Under the direction of its longtime editor, George Horace Lorimer, the magazine helped justify racism and white supremacy. It published works by white authors that made heavy use of paternalistic tropes and demeaning humor, portraying Jim Crow segregation and violence as simple common sense. Circulating Jim Crow demonstrates how the Post used stereotypical dialect fiction to promulgate white supremacist ideology and dismiss Black achievements, citizenship, and humanity. Adam McKible tells the story of Lorimer’s rise to prominence and examines the white authors who provided the editor and his readers with the caricatures they craved. He also explores how Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance pushed back against the Post and its commodified racism. McKible places the erstwhile household names who wrote for the magazine in conversation with figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ann Petry, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William Faulkner. Revealing the role of the Saturday Evening Post in normalizing racism for millions of readers, this book also offers a new understanding of how Black writers challenged Jim Crow ideology.