"The essays collected in this book represent the best of our present understanding of the African-American migration which began in the early twentieth century." —Southern Historian "As an overview of a field in transition, this is a valuable and deeply thought-provoking anthology." —Pennsylvania History " . . . provocative and informative . . . " —Louisiana History "The papers themselves are uniformly strong, and read together cast interesting light upon one another." —Georgia Historical Quarterly " . . . well-written and insightful essays . . . " —Journal of American History "This well-researched and well-documented collection represents the latest scholarship on the black migration." —Illinois Historical Journal " . . . an impressive balance of theory and historical content . . . " —Indiana Magazine of History Legions of black Americans left the South to migrate to the jobs of the North, from the meat-packing plants of Chicago to the shipyards of Richmond, California. These essays analyze the role of African Americans in shaping their own geographical movement, emphasizing the role of black kin, friend, and communal network. Contributors include Darlene Clark Hine, Peter Gottlieb, James R. Grossman, Earl Lewis, Shirley Ann Moore, and Joe William Trotter, Jr.

To Place Our Deeds traces the development of the African American community in Richmond, California, a city on the San Francisco Bay. This readable, extremely well-researched social history, based on numerous oral histories, newspapers, and archival collections, is the first to examine the historical development of one black working-class community over a fifty-year period. Offering a gritty and engaging view of daily life in Richmond, Shirley Ann Wilson Moore examines the process and effect of migration, the rise of a black urban industrial workforce, and the dynamics of community development. She describes the culture that migrants brought with them—including music, food, religion, and sports—and shows how these traditions were adapted to new circumstances. Working-class African Americans in Richmond used their cultural venues—especially the city's legendary blues clubs—as staging grounds from which to challenge the racial status quo, with a steadfast determination not to be "Jim Crowed" in the Golden State. As this important work shows, working-class African Americans often stood at the forefront of the struggle for equality and were linked to larger political, social, and cultural currents that transformed the nation in the postwar period.

The War in American Culture explores the role of World War II in the transformation of American social, cultural, and political life. World War II posed a crisis for American culture: to defeat the enemy, Americans had to unite across the class, racial and ethnic boundaries that had long divided them. Exploring government censorship of war photography, the revision of immigration laws, Hollywood moviemaking, swing music, and popular magazines, these essays reveal the creation of a new national identity that was pluralistic, but also controlled and sanitized. Concentrating on the home front and the impact of the war on the lives of ordinary Americans, the contributors give us a rich portrayal of family life, sexuality, cultural images, and working-class life in addition to detailed consideration of African Americans, Latinos, and women who lived through the unsettling and rapidly altered circumstances of wartime America.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

Reconstructs the history of black women’s participation in western settlement “A stellar collection of essays by talented authors who explore fascinating topics.”—Journal of American Ethnic History African American Women Confront the West, 1600–2000 is the first major historical anthology on the topic. The editors argue that African American women in the West played active, though sometimes unacknowledged, roles in shaping the political, ideological, and social currents that have influenced the United States over the past three centuries. Contributors to this volume explore African American women’s life experiences in the West, their influences on the experiences of the region’s diverse peoples, and their legacy in rural and urban communities from Montana to Texas and from California to Kansas. The essayists explore what it has meant to be an African American woman, from the era of Spanish colonial rule in eighteenth-century New Mexico to the black power era of the 1960s and 1970s.