Chaired by Keele University’s own Kristen Brill, the panel ‘Race and Reassessment in the Recent Past’ featured only two speakers, but the range of material presented was nonetheless extensive. Addressing thorny developments in the recent histories of American lineage societies and the poet Walt Whitman, the two presenters asked their… Continue reading
A comprehensive biography of Dunbar was long overdue. His brief life was influenced by most of the major forces affecting Black life after emancipation: the legacy of slavery, Reconstruction, civil rights, migration from South to North, city life and the limited integration it brought. His remarkable and swift ascent to fame showed the possibilities and the limitations of Black art for a population that sorely needed public voices. I understand Dunbar’s central place in the story of the late nineteenth-century better now than I did, and for that reason I am glad I read Jarrett’s biography. Still, I hope that those who seek this story in the future will have the opportunity to read a revised edition. Continue reading
This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies I came to Clearfield by a rare route, though in truth no route is common. My fiancée Christy and I were living in California, five miles from the Mexican border, when she was accepted into… Continue reading
This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies Whatever discoveries are made in the future that complicate what we know of human antiquity, the “New World” will always be new. No anthropoid species existed in the Americas before Homo sapiens. No land mass… Continue reading
In the first decades of the twentieth century, no northern city drew more southern migrants than Detroit, ‘City of Tomorrow’.[i] As one Free Press reporter noted in 1917, ‘Detroit’s unexampled prosperity is the lodestone that is attracting thousands of Negroes’.[ii] Between 1910 and 1920, Detroit’s Black population increased almost eightfold,… Continue reading
One distinct advantage of the breadth of a field like American Studies is that the same prompt may be honestly engaged by a host of scholars without fear of repetition, only resonance. The unifying theme of the 2021 BAAS postgraduate symposium was ‘Visibility/Invisibility: Representation and Community Formation in American Studies’…. Continue reading