"Union County Black Americans is a first-time glimpse into the struggles and triumphs of local Blacks from the first days of English rule to contemporary times. Using a wide array of images and concisely written original text, the book juxtaposes Black historical figures, events, and places with mainstream recordings of local, state, and national history.

This book tells the remarkable story of Robert F. Williams--one of the most influential black activists of the generation that toppled Jim Crow and forever altered the arc of American history. In the late 1950s, as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP, Williams and his followers used machine guns, dynamite, and Molotov cocktails to confront Klan terrorists. Advocating "armed self-reliance" by blacks, Williams challenged not only white supremacists but also Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights establishment. Forced to flee during the 1960s to Cuba--where he broadcast "Radio Free Dixie," a program of black politics and music that could be heard as far away as Los Angeles and New York City--and then China, Williams remained a controversial figure for the rest of his life. Historians have customarily portrayed the civil rights movement as a nonviolent call on America's conscience--and the subsequent rise of Black Power as a violent repudiation of the civil rights dream. But Radio Free Dixie reveals that both movements grew out of the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom. As Robert Williams's story demonstrates, independent black political action, black cultural pride, and armed self-reliance operated in the South in tension and in tandem with legal efforts and nonviolent protest.

Includes the Papers and proceedings of the annual meeting.

This book is about the true history of black Americans, which started about the seventeenth century with indentured servitude in British America and progressed on to the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States. Between those landmarks were other events and issues, both resolved and ongoing, that were faced by black Americans. Some of these were slavery, reconstruction, development of the black community, participation in the great military conflicts of the United States, racial segregation, and the civil rights movement. Black Americans make up the single largest minority in the United States, the second-largest group after whites in the United States. The Great Migrations, Underground Railroad and Abolitionist, Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and Women in Black-American History.

This insightful book explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese. Would Japan's remarkable post–World War II economic success enable the East Asian nation to overtake the United States? Or could Japan's globe-trotting corporations serve as a model for battered U.S. industries, pointing the way to a future of globalized commerce and culture? While popular films and literature recycled old anti-Asian imagery and crafted new ways of imagining the "yellow peril," and formal U.S.-Japan relations remained locked in a holding pattern of Cold War complacency, a remarkable shift was happening in countless local places throughout the United States: Japanese goods were remaking American consumer life and injecting contemporary globalization into U.S. commerce and culture. What impact did the flood of billions of Japanese things have on the ways Americans produced, consumed, and thought about their place in the world? From autoworkers to anime fans, Consuming Japan introduces new unorthodox actors into foreign-relations history, demonstrating how the flow of all things Japanese contributed to the globalizing of America in the late twentieth century.