Race and Ethnicity

Degrees of Allegiance
Harassment and Loyalty in Missouri’s German-American Community during World War I
By Petra DeWitt

Degrees of Allegiance updates traditional thinking about the German-American experience during the Great War, taking into account not just the war years but also the history of German settlement and the war’s impact on German-American culture.

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America
Edited by David M. Gordon and Shepard Krech III

Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts. This collection draws from African and North American cases to argue that the forms of knowledge identified as “indigenous” resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during and after colonial encounters.At

The Dred Scott Case
Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law
Edited by David Thomas Konig, Paul Finkelman, and Christopher Alan Bracey

In 1846 two slaves, Dred and Harriet Scott, filed petitions for their freedom in the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri. As the first true civil rights case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Dred Scott v. Sandford raised issues that have not been fully resolved despite three amendments to the Constitution and more than a century and a half of litigation.The

Contours of White Ethnicity
Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America
By Yiorgos Anagnostou

In Contours of White Ethnicity, Yiorgos Anagnostou explores the construction of ethnic history and reveals how and why white ethnics selectively retain, rework, or reject their pasts. Challenging the tendency to portray Americans of European background as a uniform cultural category, the author demonstrates how a generalized view of American white ethnics misses the specific identity issues of particular groups as well as their internal differences.Interdisciplinary

American Pogrom
The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics
By Charles L. Lumpkins

On July 2 and 3, 1917, a mob of white men and women looted and torched the homes and businesses of African Americans in the small industrial city of East St. Louis, Illinois. When the terror ended, the attackers had destroyed property worth millions of dollars, razed several neighborhoods, injured hundreds, and forced at least seven thousand black townspeople to seek refuge across the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri.

Under the Heel of the Dragon
Islam, Racism, Crime, and the Uighur in China
By Blaine Kaltman

The Turkic Muslims known as the Uighur have long faced social and economic disadvantages in China because of their minority status.

Sorcery and Sovereignty
Taxation, Power, and Rebellion in South Africa, 1880–1963
By Sean Redding

Rebellions broke out in many areas of South Africa shortly after the institution of white rule in the late nineteenth century and continued into the next century. However, distrust of the colonial regime reached a new peak in the mid-twentieth century, when revolts erupted across a wide area of rural South Africa. All these uprisings were rooted in grievances over taxes.

Black Poachers, White Hunters
A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya
By Edward I. Steinhart

Black Poachers, White Hunters traces the history of hunting in Kenya in the colonial era, describing the British attempt to impose the practices and values of nineteenth-century European aristocratic hunts followed, ultimately, by claims over African wildlife by conservationists.

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough
Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community
By Mohamed Adhikari

The concept of Colouredness—being neither white nor black—has been pivotal to the brand of racial thinking particular to South African society. The nature of Coloured identity and its heritage of oppression has always been a matter of intense political and ideological contestation.Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community is the first systematic study of Coloured identity, its history, and its relevance to South African national life.

The Black Laws
Race and the Legal Process in Early Ohio
By Stephen Middleton

Beginning in 1803, the Ohio legislature enacted what came to be known as the Black Laws. These laws instituted barriers against blacks entering the state and placed limits on black testimony against whites.

Immigration, Diversity, and Broadcasting in the United States 1990—2001
By Vibert C. Cambridge

The last decade of the twentieth century brought a maturing of the new racial and ethnic communities in the United States and the emergence of diversity and multiculturalism as dominant fields of discourse in legal, educational, and cultural contexts.

Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa
By Timothy H. Parsons

Conceived by General Sir Robert Baden-Powell as a way to reduce class tensions in Edwardian Britain, scouting evolved into an international youth movement. It offered a vision of romantic outdoor life as a cure for disruption caused by industrialization and urbanization. Scouting’s global spread was due to its success in attaching itself to institutions of authority.

The Exile Mission
The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956
By Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann

At midcentury, two distinct Polish immigrant groups—those Polish Americans who were descendants of economic immigrants from the turn of the twentieth century and the Polish political refugees who chose exile after World War II and the communist takeover in Poland—faced an uneasy challenge to reconcile their concepts of responsibility toward the homeland.The new arrivals did not consider themselves simply as immigrants, but rather as members of the special category of political refugees.

Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa
Edited by Bruce Berman, Dickson Eyoh, and Will Kymlicka

The politics of identity and ethnicity will remain a fundamental characteristic of African modernity. For this reason, historians and anthropologists have joined political scientists in a discussion about the ways in which democracy can develop in multicultural societies.

Threatening Others
Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica
By Carlos Sandoval-Garcia

During the last two decades, a decline in public investment has undermined some of the national values and institutions of Costa Rica. The resulting sense of dislocation and loss is usually projected onto Nicaraguan “immigrants.”Threatening Others: Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica explores the representation of the Nicaraguan “other” in the Costa Rican imagery.

Traitors and True Poles
Narrating a Polish-American Identity, 1880–1939
By Karen Majewski

During Poland’s century-long partition and in the interwar period of Poland’s reemergence as a state, Polish writers on both sides of the ocean shared a preoccupation with national identity. Polish-American immigrant writers revealed their persistent, passionate engagement with these issues, as they used their work to define and consolidate an essentially transnational ethnic identity that was both tied to Poland and independent of it.By

Dark Smiles
Race and Desire in George Eliot
By Alicia Carroll

Although George Eliot has long been described as “the novelist of the Midlands,” she often brought the outer reaches of the empire home in her work. Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot studies Eliot’s problematic, career-long interest in representing racial and ethnic Otherness.Placing

Writing a Wider War
Rethinking Gender, Race, and Identity in the South African War, 1899–1902
Edited by Greg Cuthbertson, Albert Grundlingh, and Mary-Lynn Suttie

A century after the South African War (1899-1902), historians are beginning to reevaluate the accepted wisdom regarding the scope of the war, its participants, and its impact. Writing a Wider War charts some of the changing historical constructions of the memorialization of suffering during the war.Writing a Wider War presents a dramatically new interpretation of the role of Boer women in the conflict and profoundly changes how we look at the making of Afrikaner nationalism.

Ethnic Conflict
Religion, Identity, and Politics
Edited by S. A. Giannakos

The outbreak of numerous and simultaneous violent conflicts around the globe in the past decade resulted in immense human suffering and countless lost lives. In part, both results were aided by inactivity or by belated and often misplaced responses by the international community to the embattled groups.

Apartheid’s Genesis
Edited by Philip Bonner, Peter Delius, and Deborah Posel

Apartheid is synonymous in most people’s minds with a virulent form of racial ideology and social engineering. Yet ideologies of racial domination and segregation long preceded apartheid, and cannot by themselves explain the shift in racial domination that apartheid involved.Focusing on the period 1935–1962, this collection explores the dynamics which molded apartheid.

Being Maasai
Ethnicity and Identity In East Africa
Edited by Thomas Spear and Richard Waller

Everyone “knows” the Maasai as proud pastoralists who once dominated the Rift Valley from northern Kenya to central Tanzania.But many people who identity themselves as Maasai, or who speak Maa, are not pastoralist at all, but farmers and hunters. Over time many different people have “become” something else. And what it means to be Maasai has changed radically over the past several centuries and is still changing today.This