University of Nebraska Press

This Week in History: June 2-6, 2008

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:  June 2-6, 2008

Ok, bloggers this is a big week. First off it’s “This Week in History” (requisite applause here…),  second as of yesterday Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination making him the first Black nominee, and thirdly it’s…. the first week of June? Well, I may have peaked at Obama, but all the same this could end up being a great week, lets go ahead and see….

June 2, 1692: Bridget Bishop is the first person to go to trial in the Salem Witch Trials in Salem Massachusetts.  She is found guilty and was then hanged on June 10.

Atrocities on Trial, by Patricia Heberer and Jurgen Matthaus  is a great new book taking a sharp look at criminal trials throughout history, including the infamous Nuremberg trials. Any person with an interest in the history of law and what constitutes a war crime should check it out.

June 3, 2008: President Barack Obama officially accepted the nomination for the Democratic Party. This makes him the first African American to do so, and regardless of political party I think this is something we can all celebrate.

For another book on  progressive movements in the political arena, please check out Mayor Helen Boosalis, by Beth Boosalis Davis. This inspiring story is about the first woman to become Mayor of Lincoln, Nebraska.

June 4, 1919: Congress approves the 19th amendment which guarantees suffrage to women everywhere.

Women may have been granted suffrage, but the plight of young girls is still in the works.
To see how this is playing out in some native communities and what is being done first hand; check out Empowerment of North American Indian Girls by Carol A. Markstrom.

June 5, 1851: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic Uncle Toms Cabin, starts its 10 month run in the National Era, an abolitionist newspaper.

For a first hand look at how this amazing struggle would continue, please read Marvin V. Arnett's book,  Pieces from Life’s Crazy Quilt, about growing up in Detroit during the heart  of the civil rights movement.

June 6, 1986: A 52 year old man in Auburn Washington dies after taking an Excedrin laced with cyanide.

Speaking of poison…..A Strange and Formidable Weapon, by Marion Girard, is about the advent of poison gas during World War I. The use of this gas would have affects on all aspects of British society, those foreseen and unforeseen.

Well, bloggers thanks for joining us for another installment of TWIH, see you again Tuesday for a little trivia!

An Integrated Intimacy

by Anna-Lisa Cox

The extraordinary story of Covert, Michigan’s radical integration and racial equality has long fascinated me, and, like any author, I could not help but be changed by my years of research into its history.  Yet, my experience with the contemporary community of Covert has also profoundly affected me. 

I still remember visiting Covert many years ago to conduct an oral history interview.  I was to meet with the elderly descendants of some of the first black pioneers to settle in Covert.  I was in graduate school at the time, and had just finished taking a seminar on the practice and theory of oral history, and I really wanted to make sure that I got everything just right.  When I arrived I was very conscious that I was a white stranger in the home of a black family who had generously given me an opportunity to ask them intimate questions about their ancestors.  I was already nervous by the time I had to set up the recording equipment, and in that process made things even worse.  Soon the machines were rebelling, and I could feel myself starting to blush, and then was mortified to see my hands start shaking.  All of a sudden I felt a firm hand on my shoulder -- it was one of my interviewees.  The elderly gentleman smiled at me and said, “Girl, relax!  I’ve got cousins who are whiter than you!”  He started to laugh and I joined him.  After the interview I mulled over what he had said.  Intellectually I knew that Covert had been an integrated community, where whites and blacks had created a socially, economically, politically and physically integrated community a century before the Civil Rights movement.  Finally, however, I truly understood that this was a community where race was not just about theories; it was about intimacy – about family.

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Anna-Lisa Cox is the award-winning author of A Stronger Kinship: One Town's Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith.  You can learn more by listening to an NPR story on Covert, Michigan and Cox's research.

Lee Lowenfish at SABR

Lee Lowenfish, author of Branch Rickey: Baseball's Ferocious Gentleman, attended Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) conference last week.  Lorin Duckman was able to capture some photos of Lee at the UNP booth.

The SABR 37 Convention was held July 26 through the 29th, 2007 in St. Louis, MO.  You can learn more about SABR on their website and their many publications.

A View into the Culture of Basketball

heck out this audio/visual representation of the book Under the Boards: The Cultural Revolution in Basketball.  The book is by author Jeffrey Lane, and you can visit his website here.  The video was created by Emily Henretta.  Enjoy!

On reading memoirs

've read very few memoirs in my not-so-short lifetime (Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Wharton’s A Backward Glance, I can’t think of any others, but I’m sure there are more I’ve read) because, as a rule, I stay as far away from nonfiction as possible. But I recently read a book called Pieces from Life’s Crazy Quilt by a woman named Marvin V. Arnett. A woman named Marvin? She explains that it is a namesake of a beautiful friend of her mother’s, another woman named Marvin.

The memoir traces Arnett’s life during her elementary school years, circa the Depression. It gives a perspective into a black community salted with other races (for instance, Polish immigrants and descendants play roles in Arnett’s life) in Detroit during this era.  And there is a sense of community that is lost today in Detroit-sized cities; I bet one would be hard pressed to find a community like Arnett’s, where everyone knew everyone and took care of everyone.

Interview with Author Michael Downs

ive young, African-American men promised their lives to their troubled city, Hartford, Connecticut.  They make a pledge to return with college degrees and a willingness to live and work in their hometown.  Michael Downs tell their stories--how they kept or broke their  promise to Hartford--in his book House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City.  On March 8, 2007, editor Brianne Burrowes with University Relations at the University of Montana spoke with Michael Downs about House of Good Hope and the universality of sacrifice and leaving home in and outside of African-American communities.

BR: What was it that made you want to write about these boys? Was it an idea that you always had since you first met them when you heard them make this pact or did it come later on in your career?

MD: It came later on. What happened is that I left Hartford, which is detailed in the book. And leaving Hartford was more difficult for me than I thought, especially because I was leaving my grandparents there. And there were some relatives in the area, but shortly after I left they left too. And then my grandparents were all alone. I began to wonder if leaving had been the right decision even though it was good for me personally. I wondered how other people would make that decision and then how other people would live with themselves having made such a decision. And that reminded me of these five guys who had made this promise.

BR: Had you kept in touch them?

MD: No. But I knew that after college they’d be confronted with the reality of their promise. Their promise would focus the questions I was asking because they would, now having become educated, have to make an active decision to keep their promise and go back or recognize that though there was a degree of wisdom to their promise, there was also naïveté. Maybe they would decide to break the promise, but their stories, mixed as they might be, would allow me to explore the questions that were troubling me. I wasn’t looking for an answer. I was just looking to explore.

BR: Was it difficult for these boys to allow you to write this story about their lives? I mean, it’s very personal.

MD: You know when I contacted them all, when I told them all what I had planned and that it would be a long process, that I would call them at odd times and ask them questions that would surprise them, and I would come visit them and I would ask to spend a day or so with them at a time, and I would want to talk to friends of theirs and relatives and the whole thing -- what most of them said was, this is an important story to tell. You know? It matters for Hartford. It matters for other cities that are like Hartford. It matters for other people who like us who were once kids in these places. And because it mattered, and because I was still interested, and perhaps because I had been interested when they were in high school, they seemed to decide that I was an okay person to tell the story.

BR: And that they could trust you.

Songs of the Nuer

by Terese Svoboda

n honor of National Poetry Month, I would like to celebrate the poetry of Nebraska’s newest arrivals, the Nuer. When I lived with the Nuer in the Sudan in the seventies, collecting and translating their songs, I was surprised to find myself in a landscape very much like western Nebraska, surrounded by cattle. Now, so many decades later, I’m truly astonished that in the wake of the terrible fighting in the Sudan, many Nuers have moved to Nebraska, primarily to Omaha, but there is also a community within a hundred miles of Ogallala, where I was born. Their generosity to me in Africa where we had nothing but song, cattle and land was very inspiring. Song is their most developed art form. Their land has few natural resources  to encourage more concrete forms of artistic expression: no stone to sculpt, no metal to cast, and very little wood. Because the Nuer migrate every six months, or as the Nile flooding dictates, it is extremely difficult for them to transport anything extraneous to daily life. Song records their history, puts their children to sleep, attracts lovers, seals agreements, spreads the news. The role of song for the Nuer is so powerful that if a man sings well enough he may move up his wedding date, and it is sometimes used as evidence in a judicial hearing.  Every Nuer I met in the seventies knew hours of memorized song. But I made my visit during a brief truce in the fighting that began in 1956 when the British left the country badly divided. So many years of war--nearly fifty--may have silenced them.

What follows is a song composed by the wife of a government official in Malakal who had fought as a guerilla fighter near the Ethiopian border. It reminds me very much of Pound’s “translation” of the Chinese poet, Li Po, “The River-Merchant's Wife.”

Road to the Congo

Yes, Jules sleeps but trouble
makes him toss and turn.
I wait for him across the border.
I’ve never seen Ethiopia but I know
he’ll be where there’s gunfire.

Bul Dieng, the village was torn apart
as if by weaverbirds.
Yes, Biel went to Khartoum,
Cuany went to Mading Buol.

We are all travel-weary.
We leave for Kator, for the town of Juba.
Let me say that on the road to the Congo
even the little girls of Riawang
answer us with a honk.

Yesterday, Tuyel, someone brought over his photo.
“Dieng, don’t blow on the fire inside the house—
you are blinding me. Let me see.
Jiok Lual, who is this stranger?
My heart is filled with longing.”

It will be a year before he returns, Gabriel.
Col Bewjiok, I stay by the bridge
to answer his greeting.
Writing just puts me further from him.

Sung by Nyagak Pinien

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Poet and novelist Terese Svoboda published Tin God with the University of Nebraska Press.  More Nuer songs can be found in her book Cleaned the Crocodile's Teeth, Nuer Song.

Read poet Cortney Davis' post for National Poetry month

Read poet and translator Nina Shevchuk-Murray's post for National Poetry month. 

It's Been Sixty Years and One Day

On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson was signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking baseball's color line.

Branch Rickey: Baseball's Ferocious Gentleman
By Lee Lowenfish

Branch Rickey, the Dodgers' manager at the time, was brave enough to sign Robinson.

Blackout:
The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson's First Spring Training
By Chris Lamb

A Year earlier, Robinson trained in segregated Florida while he was a prospect for the team Montreal Royals.

Extra Bases:
Reflections on Jackie Robinson, Race, and Baseball History
By Jules Tygiel

"[T]he essays about Jackie Robinson and Jim Crow baseball, Tygiel's specialities, are small gems that are worth the price of this relatively inexpensive paperback."--Library Journal.

Out of the Shadows:
African American Baseball from the
Cuban Giants to Jackie Robinson
Edited and with an introduction by Bill Kirwin

An selection of essays from NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture regarding African Americans in baseball from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

Begag Reviewed in The Nation

The April 9 issue of The Nation includes a piece by Richard Wolin discussing the Muslim population in Europe, titled "Veiled Intolerance."   Ethnicity and Equality: France in the Balance by Azouz Begag is among the five titles discussed in this essay.

"The political and ideological challenges of reconciling republicanism with the demands of diversity are well illustrated by Azouz Begag's fine study, Ethnicity and Equality: France in the Balance. "

From Africa

From Africa: New Francophone Stories
Edited by Adele King

"These stories ultimately cover a much broader literary terrain than just Africa, and tap universal themes in refreshing ways. . . . This is a challenging and innovative selection, and public libraries would do well to consider it."—Booklist (starred review).

This gathering of gifted writers tenders modern versions of myths; nostalgia for childhood in Africa; relations between the sexes in contemporary Africa; continuing political problems; and the life of the African diaspora in France—all related in new and familiar ways, in innovative and traditional forms.

Conversations with Maryse Condé
By Françoise Pfaff

Françoise Pfaff met Maryse Condé in 1981, when she first interviewed her. Their friendship grew quickly. In 1991 the two women continued recording conversations about Condé’s geographical sojourns and literary paths, her personality, and her thoughts.

Maryse Condé is the recipient of the French literary awards Le Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme and Le Prix de l’Académie Française. She currently teaches at Columbia University and her most recent works include Tree of Life and Crossing the Mangrove.