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A history of independent African American settlements in Texas during the Jim Crow era, featuring historical and contemporary photographs. In the decades following the Civil War, nearly a quarter of African Americans achieved a remarkable victory—they got their own land. While other ex-slaves and many poor whites became trapped in the exploitative sharecropping system, these independence-seeking individuals settled on pockets of unclaimed land that had been deemed too poor for farming and turned them into successful family farms. In these self-sufficient rural communities, often known as “freedom colonies,” African Americans created a refuge from the discrimination and violence that ro...
This work concentrates upon families with a strong connection to Virginia and Kentucky, most of which are traced forward from the eighteenth, if not the seventeenth, century. The compiler makes ample use of published sources some extent original records, and the recollections of the oldest living members of a number of the families covered. Finally. The essays reflect a balanced mixture of genealogy and biography, which makes for interesting reading and a substantial number of linkages between as many as six generations of family members.
Guss, Felix, and Jim Upshaw founded the community of County Line in the 1870s in northwest Nacogdoches County, in deep East Texas. As with hundreds of other relatively autonomous black communities created at that time, the Upshaws sought a safe place to raise their children and create a livelihood during Reconstruction and Jim Crow Texas. In the late 1980s photographer Richard Orton visited County Line for the first time and became aware of a world he did not know existed as a white man. He went down the rabbit hole, so to speak, and met some remarkable people there who changed his life. The more than 50 duotone photographs and text convey the contemporary experience of growing up in a "free...
An original contribution to fashion studies, Fashion in American Life challenges existing approaches to fashion in America by considering who 'makes' fashion-when, where, and how. Avoiding the usual emphasis on the 'history of fashion' which perpetuates the myth of fashion designers, and New York, as the originators of American fashion, this exploration of the everyday allows us to see American fashion as a form of agency, self-identification, creative engagement, and politics. Moving away from the well-trodden accounts of fashion designers and the dominance of New York, much of the fashion uncovered has been under-represented in previous accounts. Through contemporary and historical researc...
Suffering Fools chronicles the events - professional and personal - in the life of Grover Johnson, a school superintendent in a small town. As the head of the school system, Grover must deal with a wide range of professional situations and some of them are quite involved. He also is faced with a number of professional and family problems that that lead to complications. Add a murder mystery to this mix and the reader will discover that there is often more than meets the eye in a small town.