Conclusion. An Indivisible Legacy: Iowa and the Conscience of Democracy - Michael D. Hill -- About the Contributors -- Notes -- Index

The Chosen We elevates the oral histories of 105 accomplished, college-educated Black women who earned success despite experiencing reprehensible racist and sexist barriers. The central argument is that these women succeeded in and beyond college by developing a Chosen We—a community with one another. The book builds on their words and insights to offer a powerful rethinking of educational success that moves away from individualistic and competitive models and instead imagines success as a result of recognizing what people owe to one another. It also uncovers the importance of the type of institutions that students attend for higher education, comparing Black women's experiences not only by region and era but also by whether they attended a predominantly White institution (PWI) or a historically Black college or university (HBCU). The Chosen We features theoretical and methodological exemplars for how to conduct research across lines of difference. The Black women's oral histories shared here manifest the wisdom from which many groups in the United States might benefit—that liberation is only found through community.

Providing chronologies of important events, historical narratives from the first settlement to the present, and biographies of major figures, this work offers readers an unseen look at the history of racism from the perspective of individual states. From the initial impact of European settlement on indigenous populations to the racial divides caused by immigration and police shootings in the 21st century, each American state has imposed some form of racial restriction on its residents. The United States proclaims a belief in freedom and justice for all, but members of various minority racial groups have often faced a different reality, as seen in such examples as the forcible dispossession of indigenous peoples during the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow laws' crushing discrimination of blacks, and the manifest unfairness of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Including the District of Columbia, the 51 entries in these two volumes cover the state-specific histories of all of the major minority and immigrant groups in the United States, including African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. Every state has had a unique experience in attempting to build a community comprising multiple racial groups, and the chronologies, narratives, and biographies that compose the entries in this collection explore the consequences of racism from states' perspectives, revealing distinct new insights into their respective racial histories.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the second-most assigned American novel since 1945 and is one of the most enduring. It is studied by many thousands of high school and college students every year and has been since the 1950s. His landmark essays, with their blend of personal history and cultural theory, have been extraordinarily influential. Ralph Ellison in Context includes authoritative chapters summing up longstanding conversations, while offering groundbreaking essays on a variety of topics not yet covered in the copious critical and biographical literature. It provides fresh perspectives on some of the most important people and places in Ellison's life, and explores where his work and biography cross paths with some of the pressing topics of his time. It includes chapters on Ellison's literary influences and offers a definitive overview of his early writings. It also provides an overview of Ellison's reception and reputation from his death in 1994 through 2020.

American Literature in Transition, 1970–1980 examines the literary developments of the twentieth-century's gaudiest decade. For a quarter century, filmmakers, musicians, and historians have returned to the era to explore the legacy of Watergate, stagflation, and Saturday Night Fever, uncovering the unique confluence of political and economic phenomena that make the period such a baffling time. Literary historians have never shown much interest in the era, however - a remarkable omission considering writers as diverse as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Marilyn French, Adrienne Rich, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Alice Walker, and Octavia E. Butler were active. Over the course of twenty-one essays, contributors explore a range of controversial themes these writers tackled, from 1960s' nostalgia to feminism and the redefinition of masculinity to sexual liberation and rock 'n' roll. Other essays address New Journalism, the rise of blockbuster culture, memoir and self-help, and crime fiction - all demonstrating that the Me Decade was nothing short of mesmerizing.

Modern poetry, at least according to the current consensus, is difficult and often depressing. But as Humor in Modern American Poetry shows, modern poetry is full of humorous moments, from comic verse published in popular magazines to the absurd juxtapositions of The Cantos. The essays in this collection show that humor is as essential to the serious work of William Carlos Williams as it is to the light verse of Phyllis McGinley. For the writers in this volume, the point of humor is not to provide “comic relief,” a brief counterpoint to the poem's more serious themes; humor is central to the poems' projects. These poets use humor to claim their own poetic authority; to re-define literary tradition; to show what audience they are writing for; to make political attacks; and, perhaps most surprisingly, to promote sympathy among their readers. The essays in this book include single-author studies, discussions of literary circles, and theories of form. Taken together, they help to begin a new conversation about modernist poetry, one that treats its lighthearted moments not as decorative but as substantive. Humor defines groups and marks social boundaries, but it also leads us to transgress those boundaries; it forges ties between the writer and the reader, blurs the line between public and private, and becomes a spur to self-awareness.

A Forgotten Migration tells the little-known story of "segregation scholarships" awarded by states in the US South to Black students seeking graduate education in the pre–Brown v. Board of Education era. Under the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, decades earlier, southern states could provide graduate opportunities for African Americans by creating separate but equal graduate programs at tax-supported Black colleges or by admitting Black students to historically white institutions. Most did neither and instead paid to send Black students out of state for graduate education. Crystal R. Sanders examines Black graduate students who relocated to the North, Midwest, and West to continue their education with segregation scholarships, revealing the many challenges they faced along the way. Students that entered out-of-state programs endured long and tedious travel, financial hardship, racial discrimination, isolation, and homesickness. With the passage of Brown in 1954, segregation scholarships began to wane, but the integration of graduate programs at southern public universities was slow. In telling this story, Sanders demonstrates how white efforts to preserve segregation led to the underfunding of public Black colleges, furthering racial inequality in American higher education.