last entry for this blog

This is the last entry for this blog. I have been toying for a year with whether to move all of my entries from several blogs to one space and I think this is the moment when I should go for it. I will blog from my "catalogue" blog under Wordpress. I think that I have a better sense of my readership when I use that site. Also, my entries seem to move to the various search engines faster. Thank you for the chance to share my work and that of my students with you here. PS I am posted here on a public transit platform in Chicago. A graduate school friend and I were saying goodbye and taking photos of one another from different platforms. She is now in her native Hungary and I miss her so much. Our interaction pushed my thinking on how people from very different backgrounds are forced to inhabit space for a short duration on transportation networks like subways. We are separated and not for reasons my students often discuss in my The Nineteenth Century City and Gender Race and Urban Space courses. We will doubtless discuss the same at some point in my new course, Bebop to Hip Hop: Young America and Music. Here's to more conversation in the new year. A short storyscape of my time on the CTA platform is below. It is followed by my favorite CTA (that would be the group) song. I couldn't resist.

spring semester and a new course are upon us

Spring course advising is upon us. I am excited about a new course, Bebop to Hip Hop: Young America and Music. Since the early 1990s, many artists have "sampled" music created since World War II - especially music from the late 1960s-early 1970s. The students will explore the social and political issues that influenced music created during this window, and even earlier or later. Among their questions, "How do we find meaning in the beatnik, counterculture, Civil Rights movements and rising conservative politics as the century marched to a close? And what was on the minds of young people, even the musicians themselves, along the way?" Using sheet music from a University of Alabama archive as well as recordings accessed via Youtube and assigned readings students will write a substantial and tightly focused research paper. The two required texts for this undergraduate course are Hettie Jones' memoir and a book of poems by Tupac Shakur. I will also teach Gender, Race and the Urban Space, a graduate course for the second time. I have modified the readings a bit to invite students to focus more closely on a particular category of analysis. Indeed, in this course race, gender and space will always be in front of us, but sometimes it is worth it to home in one of these categories more than the others. Both courses overlap with my next research project, which explores racial and spatial politics in greater Miami from the late nineteenth century to the present day. I am deeply interested in how bodies marked "Other," among them ones of African descent, encounter the urban space even as cities nationally are slowly emptying of lower income residents on the heels of gentrification. This dynamic is occurring alongside of this country's ongoing diversification. According to PewResearch predictions, white Americans will comprise less than 50 percent of the United States' population by 2050. In the neighborhoods in which I grew up, South and Central American immigrants are familiar faces, possibly redefining the word "ghetto" in the minds of many. Which factors figured into cities unveiling this phenomenon? Are there correspondences in any other part of the world? Are they happening with the same intensity as ones here in the States? I am also curious about new movements that have appeared since the 1980s? Are urban people restless, and if so, which ones and for what reasons. How do anger and joy show up in music? I look forward to answering such questions with the students. This will be especially exciting because the courses will be offered around the time I will finally see a music documentary on which I started working on with a Detroit-based crew in 1995 to the marketplace. See the trailer below. And below it: old cut on heavy rotation inspiring my ongoing interest in the urban space.

on being idle in a modern world

"Ole Miss Maybell" illustration appeared in my first book.

Last night, I had a chance to walk down memory lane. Several drawings from my first book, Cuttin' the Rug Under the Moonlit Sky: Stories and Drawings About a Bunch of Women Named Mae (Doubleday, 1997) were presented at a Black History Month exhibit in the University of Alabama's Ferguson Art Gallery. The event was cosponsored by UA's Crossroads.

The exhibit also included the unveiling of a collage made up of images donated by members of the UA community and created by UA microbiology graduate student Steven Scaglione (and vinyl record covers telling the story of black music as curated by Dr. John Beeler of the Department of History).

One of the Maes presented is offered here. When I wrote this book 20 years ago, I did not yet know how to historicize how one might see a homeless woman of color on an urban street. Last night, I read the poem accompanying this drawing with Dr. Trudier Harris of the English Department. The idea was to invite others to acknowledge that people under casual surveillance have their own interior narrative about those around them. In other words, restoring some humanity to them requires us to acknowledge this reality. This effort poses tensions with this week's readings in my Gender, Race and Urban Space course and Antebellum America undergraduate course. In both classes, we encounter the work of Frances Trollope, an Englishwoman who published a book in 1832 on the "domestic manners" of Americans. Trollope spent a great deal of time belittling the landscape and the people in a still young nation. Indeed, in even noticing the industry in Cincinnati, the so-called Queen City of the West, she did as much in the context of noticing there were few beggars on the street. How strange to see no one  not working. Those Americans! Work, work, work.

I mentioned to a colleague that I had not yet realized as much earlier, but Trollope's observations gives us reason to pause to wonder about why she didn't even see African American beggars even though many free people of color were out of work. There was job competition with white "natives" who passed "Black Laws" as early as 1804 to limit black settlement. Newly arriving Irish immigrants were also threatened by black residents and sought to limit their access to jobs in Cincinnati and other urban areas.

I am aware that people of African descent in antebellum Cincinnati often policed their own - or attempted to police their own community -  in their efforts to be accepted  in this racially hostile northern city, which sat on the border of the "South."  More black and mixed Cincinnatians belonged to temperance groups than white Cincinnatians. That said, I doubt there were no black beggars. I'd have to give it some more thought, but without question Trollope saw much, but was likely picky about what she chose to divulge. Indeed, while she seemed critical of the growing market economy in America and Americans' desire for money (and lack of refinement no matter how much money they had), she does not easily interrogate her own wish to make a profit in this country. Indeed, she came here to open a bazaar, or a department store, in the Queen City. She failed. This book was one response to her desire to not be penniless.

But back to Ole Miss Maybell, I offer below poem that accompanies the illustration titled "Ole Miss Maybell." The words and drawing (which were among many in my journal and initially not intended to be shared) are inspired by an actual woman who lived in Detroit when I resided in the area in the late 1990s:

Hey y'all
look here.
Here come Ole Miss Maybell,
pushing that dumb cart down the street.
"I know what they sayin',
what they sayin' 'bout me.
Figure I don't know how to do nuthin'
but push this ole cart down the street.
Been 'round many a day,
been to the river and seen many a thing.
Some figure I might as well be dead,
since all I do is push this ole cart down the street.
Don't know nuthin' 'bout where I been,
don't know nuthin' 'bout me.
All they see is these ribbons in my hair
and me pushin' this ole cart down the street."
What-ch'all figure Miss Maybell got in that ole cart?
I be trying to look, but cain't never see.
She always got that pretty purple blanket thrown 'cross it so,
tryin' to make like she got something to see.

"And she does," I say, quoting Dr. Harris.

If only we'd really see the Miss Maybells of the world, individuals who don't fit into our expectations about idleness (I now think of James Scott's Weapons of the Weak and Amy Dru Stanley's book on contracts). People are expected to work and carry their weight in society - especially in an increasingly capitalistic world. I look forward to having conversations with my students about this issue and others this week and the remainder of the semester.

Harriet Tubman as city dweller

After her initial escape in 1849 from Maryland, her home state, Harriet Tubman arrived  in Philadelphia, the fourth largest city in the United States. Although the accounts of her life do not make much of it, an urbanizing America likely helped shaped the meaning of freedom for her. The isolation many city-dwellers felt certainly figured into her psyche. She realized immediately how much she missed her family and how much she felt alone, saying, "There was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land." She decided to return to slave territory and help free her family and numerous others. 


"A Woman Called Moses," one imagined work starring Cicely Tyson, invites us to think about the multi-layered meaning of freedom for Tubman - especially when ones sees Tubman  in Philadelphia 1:36:57 into this 1978 made for television movie. The ending scene, which takes place on a train, a form of transportation that contributed to the rise of an urbanizing and industrializing America, does the same.

Thank you, Harriet (a.k.a. Minty), for your courage. Happy Black History Month. And in the spirit of being inclusive, Happy Black History Year.

my first history book uncovers an unlikely antebellum urban story

I am writing on this blog less because this course was an undergraduate course titled "Black Urban Culture" that  morphed into a graduate course called "Gender, Race and the Urban Space."

Whereas I once used this space as a way to conduct "flip" teaching (or get students to start learning before they entered the classroom), this process happens differently in a graduate class. Discussions now begin on an electronic "in-house" discussion board called Blackboard. I do not know if it will always be this way.

Although I am not blogging as often on this site, I do want to take the time to share something related to the theme if often address: black urban life. My book Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Black and White Intimacies in Antebellum America is now available for pre-order on bookseller websites like Amazon.

The book, which will be published by Northern Illinois University Press this June, uncovers the ways in which (always have to get the requisite "ways  in which" academic speak in there) women and children of color migrated outside slave territory before the Civil War with the assistance of an unlikely body - southern white men. Ohio and Cincinnati in particular was filled with newly freed black and mixed race women and children owing partly to its place on the Mississippi-Ohio river network.

Ultimately, relying greatly on correspondence from African American women and children and legal documents as well as published contemporary writings, the book demonstrates that while white men can hardly be excused from their participation in oppressing people of color during the antebellum period, they unveil themselves as being uncomplicated as most human beings when they made decisions to demonstrate some measure of concern for certain enslaved women and the children they had with them. The book is yet another that shows the struggle of unmarried mothers of color in cities, but, again, white men are a  part of the conversation in anticipated and unanticipated ways. In providing black or mixed race women and children with the means to leave often rural spaces, white men were inserting them knowingly or unknowingly into emerging urban life in America. This is significant as far too often we do not often see people of African descent in chronicles of rising of industry and urbanization in the United States. Instead, we hear a great deal about such inventions as steamboats and when we hear of white-black interaction, it often involves race riots such as the kind that indeed took place in Cincinnati and other cities like Philadelphia and New York before the Civil War.

The explosion of literature on urban history, one of the fastest growing fields of African American history, is widening the lens on black urban life during the nineteenth century. I look forward to sharing what I've discovered about the experiences of black women and children in antebellum and postbellum Cincinnati and elsewhere. Yes, given the racial hostility in Cincinnati, that city often served as a staging ground for some new migrants who eventually moved on to places as varied as Colorado, Kansas, Washington state, northern Mexico and some even returned to the South.

I also look forward to finding new ways to publicly present in-class discussions on the urban experiences of people of African descent. I have entertained the idea of ending this blog and my The Nineteenth Century City course blog and addressing my students and others via only my teaching and technology site. That site was created because technology - as in films, videos and music clips -  is so important to how I teach and even conduct research (film and theatre were prongs in my first graduate degree).

One day at a time on it all. In the meantime, back to teaching - and celebrating the coming release of my first historical monograph. Great way to start the new year.