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Special Series

Not just Yo’ Mama but Rap’s Mama: The Dozens, African American Culture and the Origins of Battle Rap

The most famous Dozens recording is the 1938 recording performed by Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, the self-proclaimed inventor of Jazz music. This concept of taking an African-American oral tradition and putting it to music is a time honored tradition that continues until this very day. The utilization of rhyming mechanisms and swift off the cuff lyrics needed during bouts of The Dozens was easily transferred into the linguistic styles utilized by MC’s during rap battles in the early days of the Hip-Hop era. This makes it clear then that The Dozens, as Elijah Wald writes, is “Rap’s Mama”.

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The Legacy of African American Abolitionist Frederick Douglass in Britain

Frederick Douglass is the most famous African American of the nineteenth century, and is regarded today as a celebrated Civil Rights activist and social reformer. Douglass should be a central figure for Black History Month in Britain on this basis alone, but even more so when we consider his relationship with the UK. Douglass travelled here in 1845 for nearly two years, and visited Britain at least twice more before his death. His increasing fame here led to a successful career in America, and his legal freedom was ‘purchased’ by a family in Newcastle. Douglass would also not have been able to establish his newspaper, “The North Star,” without the support and donations from his British friends.

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Book Review: Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790-2010 by Paula T. Connolly

Connolly’s text is well-situated to help lay a foundation for the continuing study of American children’s literature as an individual field unto itself. This ambitious and highly accomplished work examines an extraordinary breadth of material. Connolly situates both the specific popular texts she explores and the genres of which they are representative as a foundation upon which two didactic goals are accomplished vis-à-vis American children and childhood: first, these texts inform the development of children’s identities, both as racialized individuals and as Americans (and all the cultural baggage that American-ness involves), and second, each successive generation of texts generates a complicated understanding of contemporaneous racial politics by reshaping the historical memory established by its precedents.

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Re-Imagining the Blues: A Transatlantic Approach to African-American Culture

Revisionists writers, such as Elijah Wald and Marybeth Hamilton, have argued that representations [of the blues] by white and, therefore, ‘alien’ observers during the post-war blues revival of the 1950s and 1960s distorted historical truths, and ‘invented’ the blues as we know it […] The work of [blues writer] Paul Oliver … is representative of the fact that meanings and representations of African American music and culture have been constructed within a transatlantic context. […] His work demonstrates how the blues became a reified ideal constructed in opposition to the forces of modernity, represented by the commercial music industry and the growth of teenage oriented pop in the 1950s and 1960s. African American music became a source of cultural capital for those that were disillusioned with Western consumerism and mass culture in the post-war era.

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“A Northern city with Southern characteristics”: Ferguson and the History of Race Relations in the St. Louis Region

In 1970, Ferguson was 99% white and 1% black; in 2010, Ferguson was 29% white and 67% black. However, the town leadership and police do not reflect this shift—only three of the community’s fifty-three police officers are black […] St. Louis is a Northern industrial city with Southern characteristics. The effects of this combination caused one anthropologist to argue that St. Louis holds a Deep South ideology and social structure “straitjacketed in northern-style industrial infrastructure” resulting in an “astounding record of poverty and ethnic segregation.”

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The NED in Action: US Democracy Promotion in Chile and Nicaragua, 1988 – 1989

“Although, legally, autonomous from the US government, in both Chile and Nicaragua the NED’s programmes constituted a key aspect of US foreign policy. Through special appropriations, the US was able to channel money to friendly organisations and exert subtle influence over the two countries without risking an international incident.”

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Obama’s West Point Vision: Or, How to Retreat from Military Intervention and Democracy Promotion

“Ultimately, Obama’s stance represents an accommodation to the current reality that at present, America is unwilling and unable to pay the potential economic, military and political costs of a more expansive strategic and ideological posture.”

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The Cold War and the Origins of US Democracy Promotion

“However, previous strategic tensions re-emerged as the George W. Bush and Obama administrations both soft-pedalled democracy promotion in friendly Middle Eastern states such as Egypt when it clashed with immediate geopolitical objectives, and were able to do so because the US government funds the NED and now implements the bulk of US democracy promotion programs. Due to this back-tracking the fall of the authoritarian Mubarak regime was followed by a power struggle between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military rather than a pro-US democratic successor elite.”

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