Recreation without Humiliation is the first comprehensive study of Black amusement venues established by Black Americans for Black Americans. Mary Stanton’s extensive research on African American amusement parks in America explores not only segregation, class, and social barriers but also the notion of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ as an inalienable right for all races and classes of people. Inspired by summers spent on Coney Island, where Stanton became curious about the existence of African American amusement parks in America, Stanton’s research uncovered more than fifty such venues, most of which operated during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were parks, theaters, juke joints, country clubs, summer colonies, baseball diamonds, and arenas. Although these venues provided much needed recreational services to an underserved Black population, many were threatened by whites, and some destroyed by them. Through her study of these sites of recreation, Stanton illuminates the history of African Americans who strove to create and maintain safe and satisfying entertainment despite segregation. In her research, Stanton also found class divisions among Black American entertainment venues. At the pinnacle of Black society in this era were the upper class, who could afford exclusive Black summer cottages and country clubs. General entertainment for Black working-class families consisted of dancing and drinking in juke joints or patronizing small amusement parks, playgrounds, movie theaters, church-sponsored functions, and Black county fairs. African Americans in the twentieth century, especially in the South, transformed segregation into what historian Earl Lewis calls “congregation.” Congregation implies choice, and this congregation “provided space and support for establishing new amusements, entertainments, music, and dance” without interference or oppression.

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century.

A history of race relations in Florida focuses on the resort area founded by Florida's first Black millionaire

"Originally a dissertation, The Emergence of Black Political Power in Evanston: the Public Career of Edwin B. Jourdain, Jr., 1931/1947, submitted to the Northwestern University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of education [in 1973]"--Title page verso.

In the Jim Crow era, along with black churches, schools, and newspapers, African Americans also had their own history. Making Black History focuses on the engine behind the early black history movement, Carter G. Woodson and his Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). Author Jeffrey Aaron Snyder shows how the study and celebration of black history became an increasingly important part of African American life over the course of the early to mid-twentieth century. It was the glue that held African Americans together as “a people,” a weapon to fight racism, and a roadmap to a brighter future. Making Black History takes an expansive view of the historical enterprise, covering not just the production of black history but also its circulation, reception, and performance. Woodson, the only professional historian whose parents had been born into slavery, attracted a strong network of devoted members to the ASNLH, including professional and lay historians, teachers, students, “race” leaders, journalists, and artists. They all grappled with a set of interrelated questions: Who and what is “Negro”? What is the relationship of black history to American history? And what are the purposes of history? Tracking the different answers to these questions, Snyder recovers a rich public discourse about black history that took shape in journals, monographs, and textbooks and sprang to life in the pages of the black press, the classrooms of black schools, and annual celebrations of Negro History Week. By lining up the Negro history movement’s trajectory with the wider arc of African American history, Snyder changes our understanding of such signal aspects of twentieth-century black life as segregated schools, the Harlem Renaissance, and the emerging modern civil rights movement.

The twentieth could easily be Utah’s most interesting, complex century, yet popular ideas of what is history seem mired in the nineteenth. One reason may be the lack of readily available writing on more recent Utah history. This collection of essays shifts historical focus forward to the twentieth, which began and ended with questions of Utah’s fit with the rest of the nation. In between was an extended period of getting acquainted in an uneasy but necessary marriage, which was complicated by the push of economic development and pull of traditional culture, demand for natural resources from a fragile and scenic environment, and questions of who governs and how, who gets a vote, and who controls what is done on and to the contested public lands. Outside trade and a tourist economy increasingly challenged and fed an insular society. Activists left and right declaimed constitutional liberties while Utah’s Native Americans become the last enfranchised in the nation. Proud contributions to national wars contrasted with denial of deep dependence on federal money; the skepticism of provocative writers, with boosters eager for growth; and reflexive patriotism somehow bonded to ingrained distrust of federal government.

Race has long shaped shopping experiences for many Americans. Retail exchanges and establishments have made headlines as flashpoints for conflict not only between blacks and whites, but also between whites, Mexicans, Asian Americans, and a wide variety of other ethnic groups, who have at times found themselves unwelcome at white-owned businesses. Race and Retail documents the extent to which retail establishments, both past and present, have often catered to specific ethnic and racial groups. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the original essays collected here explore selling and buying practices of nonwhite populations around the world and the barriers that shape these habits, such as racial discrimination, food deserts, and gentrification. The contributors highlight more contemporary issues by raising questions about how race informs business owners’ ideas about consumer demand, resulting in substandard quality and higher prices for minorities than in predominantly white neighborhoods. In a wide-ranging exploration of the subject, they also address revitalization and gentrification in South Korean and Latino neighborhoods in California, Arab and Turkish coffeehouses and hookah lounges in South Paterson, New Jersey, and tourist capoeira consumption in Brazil. Race and Retail illuminates the complex play of forces at work in racialized retail markets and the everyday impact of those forces on minority consumers. The essays demonstrate how past practice remains in force in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.