xThe Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America by Nicholas Lemann (Roaring 20's-WWII, Ethnicity & Race, Politics)

The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America 

by Nicholas Lemann 

Roaring 20's-WWII
Ethnicity & Race
Politics

Thesis:

As Chicago, New York and other cities saw their black populations expand exponentially, migrants were forced to deal with poor working conditions and competition for living space, as well as widespread racism and prejudice. During the Great Migration, African Americans began to build a new place for themselves in public life, actively confronting economic, political and social challenges and creating a new black urban culture that would exert enormous influence in the decades to come.

 

Specific examples/evidence that supports the thesis:

 

Summary:

This book covers the Great Black Migration mostly from 1940's onward. The author takes specific examples of people moving from Mississippi to Chicago to exhibit the larger phenomenon.  The stories demonstrate how racism and racial tensions become paramount issues in the North as well as the South. The author found that officials in the North were slow to respond to mounting tensions.

After reconstruction, share cropping became the new system to continue free African American labor on plantations in the South. Instead of direct slavery, share croppers worked an entire season for the plantation owner, agreeing to get paid once the harvest occurred. In the mean time, they borrowed money for goods/food to survive and once the crop was sold the plantation owner would settle up. However, most often, the share cropper got virtually nothing or found they owed more than they made.

The plight of the sharecroppers increased due to technology in harvesting cotton, as well as a boll weevil epidemic that caused massive crop damage in 1898. In the 1920's-1940's the Hobson Plantation in Mississippi experimented with mechanized cotton growing and harvesting equipment. Eventually this developed into a fully mechanized system to grow and harvest which made the need for labor and share cropping dissipate.

With less job opportunities in the rural south and so many share croppers struggling to get by and the rise of industrialization in the North, many African Americans began to make their way north.  
This extended the issues of racism and segregation on a large scale to the Northern half of the United States. 
Cities began to section off parts of the city for exclusively black Americans to live.

What does this tell us about Ethnicity & Race in the Roaring 20’s-WWII?

 Lemann places much of the blame for black urban poverty and social pathology on both the oppressive racism of the South, which handicapped black migrants from birth, and on the exclusionary racism of the North, which tried to bar blacks from jobs, neighborhoods, and schools. He believes that the destitution of Northern blacks in the ghetto in the 1980's and 90's is a result of a long history of struggle in the sharecropper system and then the racially segregated North where oppurtunities for advancement quickly dried up. The welfare state became the crutch and a staple of urban black survival.

What does this tell us about Politics in the Roaring 20’s-WWII?

Lehmann discovered a pattern of black dependence on the welfare state while doing an article for a magazine. To investigate this further he interviewed families going back to the Great Black Migration. He discovered that sharecropping instilled a since of dependency because they were not payed a wage until after harvest meaning they took loans from the land owners for everything they needed to survive. Coming to the North they found jobs were difficult to find, and fair treatment and wages were non-existant. Black were still segregated to their own parts of town and authorities did little to fight against the illegal segregation and discrimination occuring in the North. As situations worstened many black migrants had no choice but to rely on the welfare state, a pattern which has continued today.

What parts of the book can be applied to lectures?

General Thoughts:

Excerpts from Book Reviews: 

 "From his account one could easily get the impression that the mechanical cotton picker alone was responsible for the migration, and that it all began in 1940. Yes, the picker was important and so were the 1940s, but the migration had been going on for decades, and there were many causes. Marcus Garvey, who had thousands of Black followers in northern cities in the 1920s, is not mentioned. The words "boll weevil" do not appear. Nor was the Community Action Program all there was to the War on Poverty."

My Highlighted Passages: 

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis (Post War Era, Military & Foreign Policy)

The Cold War: A New History

by John Lewis Gaddis

Post War Era
Military & Foreign Policy

Thesis:

The Cold War changed what war meant and how wars would be fought for the world as a whole. The author hopes to correct the current misunderstanding that the Cold War was a war where dangers were not real and the threat of Soviet Union was exaggerated. In fact, the threat was very real and the world narrowly escaped detrimental destruction.

Specific examples/evidence that supports the thesis:

Summary:

The author first describes how capitalism and socialism were positioned in conflict with one another immediately following WWII. The US found itself in a powerful position after the war, with a relatively uneffected homeland and population. At the same time, Russia had suffered vastly during the war but had come out victorious, without Russia and the Eastern front, the allies could not have won on the European front. While Stalin accepted assistance to rebuild after the war, he was also preparing his people for the next war, he thought was inevitable as tensions between capitalist nations built back up after this war. 

The nuclear weapons used by the US were in large measure meant to force cooperation of the Soviets during peace negotiations for WWII. In this way, they were effective. However, the USSR also had spies and a nuclear program of their own.  

What does this tell us about Military and Foreign Policy in the Post War Era?

What parts of the book can be applied to lectures?

This book is an excellent over view of the events and forces involved in the Cold War Era. This is the author's field of research and the subject he most often teaches. This is his abbreviated version of history and it was very helpful.

General Thoughts:

Excerpts from Book Reviews: 

My Highlighted Passages: 

Stalin’s was a very different vision: a settlement that would secure his own and his country’s security while simultaneously encouraging the rivalries among capitalists that he believed would bring about a new war. Capitalist fratricide, in turn, would ensure the eventual Soviet domination of Europe. 451

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Despite their revolutionary character those bombs were built under an old and familiar set of assumptions: that if they worked, they would be used. Few of the thousands of people employed in the wartime Manhattan Project saw their jobs as differing from the design and production of conventional weapons. Atomic bombs were meant to be dropped, as soon as they were ready, on whatever enemy targets yet remained. 835

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Technology might have changed, but the human habit of escalating violence had not. 839

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

And Truman himself had left it to the Army Air Force to determine when and where the first atomic weapons would be dropped: the names “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” were no more familiar to him, before the bombs fell, than they were to anyone else.10 859

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

After that happened, though, Truman demanded a sharp break from past practice. He insisted that a civilian agency, not the military, control access to atomic bombs and their further development. 861

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

But Truman did have one unique qualification for demanding a return to Clausewitz: after August, 1945, he had the ability, by issuing a single order, to bring about more death and destruction than any other individual in history had ever been able to accomplish. That stark fact caused this ordinary man to do an extraordinary thing. He reversed a pattern in human behavior so ancient that its origins lay shrouded in the mists of time: that when weapons are developed, they will be used. 881

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

But he also tried to be nice about it: at one point, while bullying an American visitor, Hubert Humphrey, he paused to ask where his guest was from. When Humphrey pointed out Minneapolis on the map, Khrushchev circled it with a big blue pencil. “That’s so I don’t forget to order them to spare the city when the rockets fly,” he explained amiably.43 1122

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Wilson’s vision, at least, had been revived: the contest of ideas that he and Lenin had begun during World War I would continue now within the emerging 1500

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Cold War. That became apparent in three important speeches, given within thirteen months of one another in 1946–47. 1501

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Stalin made the first one in Moscow on February 9, 1946, and in it he went back to basics. He restated Marx’s condemnation of capitalism for distributing wealth unevenly. He reiterated Lenin’s claim that, as a result, capitalists were likely to go to war with one another. He drew from this the conclusion that peace could come only when communism had triumphed throughout the world. 1502

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Winston Churchill, recently turned out of office, gave the second speech in the improbable setting of Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, with President Truman sitting at his side. 1508

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of ancient states of central and eastern Europe. . . . [A]ll these famous cities and the populations around them . . . are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence, but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow. 1511

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Truman himself gave the third speech a year later, on March 12, 1947, in which he asked Congress for aid to Greece and Turkey and announced the Truman Doctrine, with its implied American commitment to assist victims of aggression and intimidation throughout the world. 1518

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

His ideological justification for these measures was Wilsonian: the world was now divided between “two ways of life”—not communism versus capitalism, but democracy versus 1519

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

authoritarianism, a distinction that allowed him to link this new American involvement in European affairs with the ones that had preceded it in 1917 and in 1941. 1521

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

United States, after World War II, assumed peacetime responsibilities beyond its hemisphere. Stalin’s challenge had helped to bring that about. 1531

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

He did so with a view to preserving communism: reform could only take place by acknowledging error. “I was obliged to tell the truth about the past,” he later recalled, “whatever the risks to me.”37 But the system he was trying to preserve had itself been based, since the time of Marx and Engels, on the claim to be error-free. That was what it meant to have discovered the engine that drove history forward. A movement based on science had little place for confession, contrition, and the possibility of redemption. The problems Khrushchev created for himself and for the international communist movement, therefore, began almost from the moment he finished speaking. One was simple shock. Communists were not used to having mistakes admitted at the top, and certainly not on this scale. It was, as Secretary of State Dulles commented at the time, “the most damning indictment of despotism ever made by a despot.”38 The Polish party leader, Boleslaw Bierut, had a heart attack when he read Khrushchev’s speech, and promptly died. 1681

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

He ordered farmers throughout China to abandon their crops, build furnaces in their backyards, throw in their own furniture as fuel, melt down their agricultural implements—and produce steel. The result of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” was the greatest single human calamity of the 20th century. Stalin’s campaign to collectivize agriculture had caused between 5 and 7 million people to starve to death during the early 1930s. Mao now sextupled that record, producing a famine that between 1958 and 1961 took the lives of over 30 million people, by far the worst on record anywhere ever.46 1749

Top of Form

xThe Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois (Progressive Era and WW1, Ethnicity and Race)

The Souls of Black Folk

by W.E.B. Du Bois

Progressive Era and WW1

Ethnicity and Race

Thesis:

"The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." DuBois believes the U.S. still has a great deal of work to do, to correct the problems of incomplete reconstruction and integration of African Americans into society after emancipation. 

Specific examples/evidence that supports the thesis:

Summary:
Co-Founder of the NAACP in 1909, Du Bois was the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard. He published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 to discuss the failures and shortcomings of post emancipation reconstruction/integration. 

What does this tell us about Race and Ethnicity in the Progressive Era?

The Progressive Era is generally viewed as the 1890's to the 1920's, a time when the rapid industrialization of the U.S. left many citizens concerned with social reform and politics. Written in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk is a representative piece that demonstrates the movement towards social equality for American blacks trying to integrate with society since emancipation. DuBois describes the current state of the black man in society in the early 20th century. Through his own observations and travels, DuBois found that black people were not truly receiving what was promised to them (education, fair wages, justice, and protection under the law). DuBois, a highly educated man saw education and political involvement as the key to correcting the wrongs of slavery's past. 

What parts of the book can be applied to lectures?
DuBois, like Douglas, was there. His accounts are a primary source that paints a picture of what was going on in the early 20th century. DuBois was also a historian and he analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of reconstruction policy.  

General Thoughts:

Excerpts from Book Reviews: 

My Highlighted Passages: 

"Henceforth, the destiny of the race could be conceived as leading neither to assimilation nor separatism but to proud, enduring hyphenation."

xProgressivism: A Very Short Introduction By Walter T. K. Nugent (Progressive Era-WWI, Politics)

Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction

By Walter T. K. Nugent

Progressive Era-WWI

Politics

Thesis:
The reforms made during the Progressive era are still present today. This was a new time for America in which the people felt that social welfare should come before individual gains.

Specific examples/evidence that supports the thesis:

Summary:

What does this tell us about Politics in the Progressive Era-WWI?

During this time because of the west and the South, the more agrarian population had more political power. With this power they wanted fight against the corporate monopolies. They made legal changes.
Progressives also felt they should protect people from themselves in whatever way possible, this is what led to prohibition from 1920-1933, this is currently viewed as an attack on personal freedom and the government overstepping its constitutional limits. 

What parts of the book can be applied to lectures?

General Thoughts:

Excerpts from Book Reviews: 

My Highlighted Passages:

Very soon these would take shape in federal legislation including the four Progressive-era constitutional amendments (the income tax, direct election of U.S. senators, woman suffrage, and prohibition).Read

xThe Tragedy of America Diplomacy By William Apple Williams (Progressive Era-WW1, Military & Foreign Policy)

The Tragedy of America Diplomacy

By William Apple Williams

Progressive Era-WW1

Military & Foreign Policy

Thesis:

US diplomacy and foreign policy during the Progressive Era-WWI pretended benevolence meanwhile expanded power and dominion over lesser countries to secure US economic and political interests abroad.

Specific examples/evidence that supports the thesis:

Summary:
The preface describes how the book was received as it was a novel approach to diplomatic history. Williams asserts that American foreign policy became driven by economic considerations and around securing American corporate investments and markets abroad. While America proclaimed to be anti-imperialist the policy of intervening in affairs of other countries either financially, politically, or militarily was in fact a new form of imperialism securing our interests and hegemony abroad.

The introduction uses Cuba as an example of how the US had contradictory policies toward Cuba, at first saying that our involvement was to stabilize and lead ultimately toward a self-sufficient, self governing Cuba but really the US wanted to keep Cuba as a market for American goods and put a government in place that would take direction from the US and do what suited US interests. i.e. Keeping Cuba a one crop  country (sugar).

What does this tell us about Military & Foreign Policy in the Progressive Era-WWI?

The US wanted to appear as a non-imperialist nation and yet still expand reach and influence. The foreign policy propaganda promoted a benevolent intrusion in lesser countries to help them stabilize and self rule but the real actions taken do not fall in line with this at all.

What parts of the book can be applied to lectures?

General Thoughts:

Excerpts from Book Reviews: 

My Highlighted Passages:

Ida, A Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings (Progressive Era-WWI, Ethnicity & Race, Gender & Sexuality)

Ida, A Sword Among Lions 
by Paula J. Giddings

Progressive Era-WWI
Ethnicity & Race
Gender & Sexuality

Thesis:

Ida B. Wells was an incredibly significant Progressive player in the issues of racism and gender equality at the turn of the 20th Century. Her work against African American lynching is of the utmost importance but it is also, often overlooked.

Specific examples/evidence that supports the thesis:

Summary:

This book discusses the life of Ida Wells. Daughter of freed slaves, her life and her story spans from the post Civil War Reconstruction through to the beginning of the Great Depression. 
Ida's life was full of challenges, her parents were killed when she was 16 by an outbreak of Yellow Fever. At that time she quit school to become a teacher and care for her siblings. Ever bitter by the hand she was dealt, Ida became an outspoken woman unafraid of speaking out against perceived wrongs. “Throughout the remainder of her life, she struggled to turn the negative emotions of abandonment into a righteous determination to reform herself and the society that had forsaken her race.”
She moved to Memphis where she made her first public attempt to challenge racist notions. Aboard a train she was asked to move to the "Jim-Crow" car but refused on the argument that it was crowded and people were smoking in there. They forcibly removed her and she sued the rail company. She eventually lost the suit in the Supreme Court of Tennessee. This further emboldened Wells about the injustice inherent in the post-Reconstruction South. 

 
In 1884 she was asked by the conductor of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company to give up her seat on the train to a white man and ordered her into the smoking or "Jim Crow" car, which was already crowded with other passengers. Despite the 1875 Civil Rights Act banning discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or color, in theaters, hotels, transports, and other public accommodations, several railroad companies defied this congressional mandate and racially segregated its passengers. It is important to realize that her defiant act was before Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court decision that established the fallacious doctrine of "separate but equal," which constitutionalized racial segregation.
As a platform to speak frankly about the injustice she co-owned the Free Speech newspaper. When three of her friends were lynched for their competing grocery store taking business from their white neighbors, she was outraged. She began writing articles documenting the illegal violence of lynching so common in the South. Her life was threatened because of her articles. 

What does this tell us about Gender in the Progressive Era-WWI?

As an African American Women in the Jim Crow South before women has the vote, Wells' public role was unique. 

While temperance was not a passion of Wells, she worked in association with WCTU (Women's Christian Temperance Union) to promote women's rights and suffrage.

What does this tell us about Race and Ethnicity in the Progressive Era-WWI?Although the atrocities against African Americans were extensive, there were few spoke out against them. Wells' anti-lynching speaches, articles, and eventually her published work in 1892, "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases" brought to light how extensive the atrocities had become.

What parts of the book can be applied to lectures?

General Thoughts:

Excerpts from Book Reviews: 

My Highlighted Passages: 

The Enigma Woman: The Death Sentence of Nellie May Madison (Women in the West) by Kathleen A. Cairns (Roaring 20's-WWII, Gender & Sexuality)

The Enigma Woman: The Death Sentence of Nellie May Madison (Women in the West) 

by Kathleen A. Cairns

Roaring 20's-WWII
Gender & Sexuality

Thesis:

The roaring twenties changed the public perception of women. While women were allowed more independence and respect they could also be viewed as manipulators making power plays using men as their pawns.

Specific examples/evidence that supports the thesis:

Summary:

What does this tell us about Gender in the Roaring 20’s-WWII?

During this era women were trying to break out of their traditional roles. Finding more independence with jobs and breaking free from the conforms of women living with their parents and then their husbands, always chaperoned. 

In this time women gained more political power from the right to vote and had more public presence. The sphere of women expanded. Noir film, books, and radio shows told stories of women seducing men and manipulating them, often convincing them to murder someone. Women were no longer viewed as the codependent innocent party.
These attitudes contributed to the death sentencing of Nellie May Madison. This women strayed from the expected roles of women and was judged more harshly than may have been in previous time periods.

What parts of the book can be applied to lectures?
Noir and the shift of power towards women plus the social backlash. It would be fun to compare Noir films to films of the previous era to demonstrate how the characterization of women in society had shifted.

General Thoughts:

Excerpts from Book Reviews: 

"In this splendidly crafted narrative of Nellie's life, Cairns explores the West as geography and a place of reinvention, the rise of mass popular culture and its impact upon the individual, Los Angeles as myth and reality, criminal prosecution as a force in social control, the media's ability to elevate or destroy individuals, and intimate abuse as a legal defense to murder. "

"Nellie challenged societal norms by marrying several times, remaining childless, wandering the West, earning a professionally accomplished resume, and by being convicted of murder and sentenced to hang in California."

My Highlighted Passages: