Book Review: Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird, by Gene Andrew Jarrett
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.
Of the History of Pennsylvania, Part. 2: Pennsylvania Now
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 a Physician Assistant Studies programme at a small university on short notice. So in May 2018, my eyes on the road and hers on the pages of an anatomy textbook, we drove northeast for five days straight, through the central desert of California, the fragile pine forests of northern Arizona, the Martian strangeness of southeastern Utah, through the flimsy freeway towns of Rifle and Silt under the hard peaks of the Colorado Rockies and through deluging storms in Nebraska and Iowa, through Illinois and Indiana and Ohio, into the ridge-and-valley maple and pine forests of central Pennsylvania, a landscape neither […]
Of the History of Pennsylvania, Part. 1: Pennsylvania Past
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 bears our tool-marks quite so clearly. Following the Last Glacial Maximum, twenty thousand years ago, the globe warmed rapidly, and the Wisconsin ice sheet receded northwards. Millions of square miles of ancient glacier melted away. The Beringia land bridge, which had served as refugium for many mammal species during the ice age, was consumed by rising seas. The Americas were orphaned once more. The Tazewell, the Cary, and the Valders ice retreated, inland glacial seas disjoined, and the modern Great Lakes took their places. Mile by mile, the area that would become the northern states of America was exposed. Pennsylvania […]
The People v. Ossian Sweet
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, and then threefold again between 1920 and 1930.[iii] Over the same two decades, however, the geographical area into which these migrants were herded, ‘a densely populated, sixty-square-block section of the city’s Lower East Side’ called Black Bottom, did not grow at all.[iv] Those who lived in this segregated slum were crowded into dilapidated housing, and they suffered the ill-health that such conditions typically produce. According to the same Free Press reporter, residences in Black Bottom were ‘unspeakably vile’.[v] While the wages new migrants earned at Ford and other factories were relatively high, few had the means to challenge the deepening […]
Review: ‘Visibility/Invisibility: Representation and Community Formation in American Studies’, British Association of American Studies Postgraduate Symposium, Online, 4 December 2021.
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’. Twelve short papers and a keynote address were presented by young academics, each one taking up, reframing or projecting a specific community as its subject. In the interest of brevity, this review will focus on those papers most relevant to my own work. All thirteen of them, however, merit serious consideration. From the first panel, arguments spoke across space to one another. Mori Reithmayr (University of Oxford) argued that José Sarria’s vibrant (if unsuccessful) run for mayor of San Francisco in 1961, the first by an openly gay man, was not evidence for the existence of a gay community already […]