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THE HISTORY OF RACE and African Americans in Coles County Illinois in the antebellum years has largely focused on two events: the Matson trial of 1847 and the Charleston Lincoln-Douglas [...]

This essay explores the trope of the wilderness in the slave spirituals, arguing that it functions to recreate symbolically the natural landscape into which slaves regularly took refuge in order to elude white surveillance. Drawing on a variety of sources, it considers the unique surveillance culture in the antebellum South, its effect on the everyday lives of the slaves, and the ways in which the slaves used their natural surroundings to avoid it. It then uses a close analysis of the song 'Go in the Wilderness' as a point of departure for a broader discussion of the way the wilderness becomes central both thematically and structurally, to the spirituals as a whole., If you want to find Jesus, go in de wilderness, Go in de wilderness, go in de wilderness --Unknown author, 'Go in the Wilderness' In the late summer of 1831, [...]

IN JANUARY 1942, CONSTANCE RUMBOUGH, SOUTHERN SECRETARY for the national Fellowship of Reconciliation, visited the Louisville branch of the nation's oldest, largest pacifist organization. Since its founding the year before, [...]

Some African-American studies professors are praising Georgetown University undergraduate students for passing a referendum to assess students a semesterly fee to fund reparations for descendants of nearly 300 slaves sold [...]

New Philadelphia is located in western Illinois about 25 miles east of the Mississippi River, and developed as a small multiracial and rural community from 1836 onward. It is the earliest known town in the United States to have been planned and legally founded by a free African American. Remnants of this town, which was founded by Frank McWorter, survived into the 20th century. From 2004 to 2006, a collaborative research project and summer field schools in archaeology, supported by the National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, helped to explore several lots throughout the town site that once belonged to residents of both European American and African American descent. Analysis of landscapes, archaeology, and the documentary record has helped to develop a more comprehensive picture of life in a rural frontier community and past dynamics of class, gender, ethnicity, and racism.

CONVENTIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS NARRATIVES TAKE IT AS ACCEPTED WISDOM that the Black Power movement undermined struggles for racial justice: the authors differ more in the degree of condemnation than in [...]

The twenty-eighth annual black Elks' convention culminated in a parade that marched up Fifth Avenue from Sixty-first Street to 110th Street, where it crossed west and headed up Lenox. It [...]

The problems faced by the African Americans in North America are highlighted in the article. The 1966 free DC movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King addressed the challenges in civilization of these people.

Abstract Before the Civil War, what is now Ontario was the main destination of passengers on the fabled 'Underground Railroad.' Relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the Black [...]

The domestic impact of the Second World War reached into every corner of the United States but American urban homefront histories do not give that impression. The homefront achievements during the war were breathtaking but it has largely been reduced to the tale of an especially narrow group of participants and if historians do not tell the story of both sides, there is the possible risk of turning the good war bad.

One key battleground in the Revolutionary War of 1776 was the Hudson River Valley, located in the British colony of eastern New York. The valley was a microcosm of other [...]

An exhibition African-American Vernacular Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection was held at the International Center of Photography from December 9, 2005 to February 26, 2006. Among the 66 works displayed were the studio portraits of African-American slaves, performers, and community leaders, snapshots at home and play, and photographic documents of education reform in these communities.

The publication of P. Sterling Stuckey's 1968 essay, 'Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery,' marked a defining moment in research of African American cultural history by [...]

Prevalent ideas of history privilege printed text over orality, thereby marginalizing oral-based cultures and societies, and this is challenging for scholars of African-American history. The advent of hypertext technology allows acoustical cultures to tell their histories alongside those based on print, and the implications of hypertext is to alter the linear and theleological study of the past by reviving a traditional acoustical approach in which no one conversation, discipline or ideology dominates the other.

New insight's into the importance of real estate markets in the development of racial segregation in the early twentieth-century Chicago is discussed. Chicago's 'color line' was due to the help of many people like salesmen, owners, entrepreneurs, developers and neighborhood associations who campaigned to link tightly the value of properties and neighborhoods to racial identity.

Reconciliation apologies such as Representative Tony Hall's proposed congressional apology for slavery and his own apology at a reconciliation conference in Benin, West Africa raise questions about the means and standards by which representative apologies for historic group offenses may prove satisfactory. This essay explores such questions in light of John Hatch's theory of reconciliation and an analysis of Hall's apology in the context of the Benin conference. In conversation with the work of Erik Doxtader, Mark McPhail, Aaron Gresson, and Nicholas Tavuchis, the essay clarifies ways in which a public reconciliation apology differs from traditional apologia and the unique challenges confronting public discourse for racial reconciliation in the US. Keywords: Apologia; Apology; Coherence; Dialogic; Race Relations; Reconciliation, Resolved by the House of Representatives that the Congress apologizes to African-Americans whose ancestors suffered as slaves under the Constitution and the laws of the United States until 1865. ('Apologizing [...]

Robert F. William's rise in 1959 and his advocacy of armed self-defense fundamentally transformed African American political action in the US and produced a movement that forever changed American-African American social relations in America. Williams' resort to editorials in the Crusader and radio broadcasts to educate African communities across the country about the principles of self-defense and to fight against injustice contributed to the decline in anti-African American racial violence in the US.

This study employs regression analysis to explore population and sex differences in the pattern of age-associated bone loss, as reflected by histomorphometric variables that are measures of intracortical and endocortical bone remodeling. A comparison of an African American sample from the Washington Park Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri, and a European American rib sample composed of cadavers, autopsies, and forensic cases from Missouri reveals the existence of complex age-associated patterns for differences in measures of intracortical remodeling and cortical area. Females from the two samples express similar bone dimensions and dynamics. The African American females appear to lose more bone than their male counterparts, but this difference is absent in the European American sample. When age-associated patterns are considered, it is in the younger cohorts that African Americans exhibit greater relative cortical area than European Americans, but this is reversed in the older ages, when the latter group manifests greater bone mass. The European American males consistently differ in the slopes and intercepts for the variables compared to the other groups, and differences are highly significant with African American females, with the former group maintaining bone mass while the latter exhibit a more rapid bone loss. Achieving larger relative cortical area due to smaller endosteal area, coupled with better bone quality due to lower intracortical porosity early in life, may be a mechanism by which African Americans, especially females, maintain adequate bone mass in older ages, which buffers them from bone loss and related fragility fractures despite higher rates of intracortical remodeling and endosteal expansion later in life. These results suggest that both genetic and environmental factors are responsible for the differences in bone remodeling and bone mass observed between these samples. KEY WORDS bone loss; histomorphometry; remodeling; African American; European American

This article examines the discursive and material presence of the 'rural' in the 'urban,' relating it to the historical and contemporary production of African American culture and identity. By using the case of the Great Migration, it discusses how African Americans negotiated and shaped their urban surroundings and formed individual and collective identities by drawing on their rural, southern histories. It then suggests the relevance of these broad historical processes to contemporary analyses and interventions in the urban environment of Baltimore, Maryland. This article challenges assumptions that obscure the agency of urban residents in the formation of identity and the establishment of community. It demonstrates ways in which the historical movement from rural South to urban North was accompanied by a range of cultural resources that have been adapted, discarded, or reconstructed. Key Words: Great Migration, Baltimore, African Americans, rural-urban, environment

The Jubilee Singers belonged to Fisk University as well as to the American Missionary Association (AMA), which founded Fisk University in 1866, to the recently freed slaves, for whom the Jubilee Singers represented a future of possibilities. Analysis of the clauses of a Jubilee Singer's contract reveals the many ways their lives were legislated, putting several issues into relief such as the singers' relationship with management, their interpersonal relations, and their struggle to become autonomous individuals under strenuous circumstances.