"Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps is the first major study to consider Black women's activism in rural Arkansas. The text explores Arkansas's rural history to foreground Black women's navigation of racial and gender politics as a means to uplift African Americans, develop opportunities for social mobility, and subvert the formidable structures of white supremacy during the Jim Crow years"--
The first major study to consider Black women’s activism in rural Arkansas, Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps foregrounds activists’ quest to improve Black communities through language and foodways as well as politics and community organizing. In reexamining these efforts, Cherisse Jones-Branch lifts many important figures out of obscurity, positioning them squarely within Arkansas’s agrarian history. The Black women activists highlighted here include home demonstration agents employed by the Arkansas Agricultural Cooperative Extension Service and Jeanes Supervising Industrial Teachers, all of whom possessed an acute understanding of the difficulties that African Americans faced in rural spaces. Examining these activists through a historical lens, Jones-Branch reveals how educated, middle-class Black women worked with their less-educated rural sisters to create all-female spaces where they confronted economic, educational, public health, political, and theological concerns free from white regulation and interference. Centered on the period between 1914 and 1965, Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps brings long-overdue attention to an important chapter in Arkansas history, spotlighting a group of Black women activists who uplifted their communities while subverting the formidable structures of white supremacy.
Tracing the development of the field of southern women’s history over the past half century, Sisterly Networks shows how pioneering feminists laid the foundation for a strong community of sister scholars and delves into the work of an organization central to this movement, the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH). Launched in 1970, the SAWH provided programming, mentoring, fundraising, and outreach efforts to support women historians working to challenge the academic establishment. In this book, leading scholars reflect on their own careers in southern history and their experiences as women historians amid this pathbreaking expansion and revitalization of the field. Their stories demonstrate how women created new archival collections, expanded historical categories to include gender and sexuality, reimagined the roles and significance of historical women, wrote pioneering monographs, and mentored future generations of African American women and other minorities who entered the academy and contributed to public discourse. Providing a lively roundtable discussion of the state of the field, contributors comment on present and future work environments and current challenges in higher education and academic publishing. They offer profound and provocative insights on the ways scholars can change the future through radically rewriting the gender biases of recorded history. Contributors: Catherine Clinton | Michele Gillespie | Glenda E. Gilmore | Cherisse Jones-Branch | Melissa Walker A volume in the series Frontiers of the American South, edited by William A. Link
Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas brings together the work of leading experts to cast a powerful light on the rich and diverse history of Arkansas’s racial and ethic relations. The essays span from slavery to the civil rights era and cover a diverse range of topics including the frontier experience of slavery; the African American experience of emancipation and after; African American migration patterns; the rise of sundown towns; white violence and its continuing legacy; women’s activism and home demon¬stration agents; African American religious figures from the better know Elias Camp (E. C.) Morris to the lesser-known Richard Nathaniel Hogan; the Mexican-American Bracero program; Latina/o and Asian American refugee experiences; and contemporary views of Latina/o immigration in Arkansas. Informing debates about race and ethnicity in Arkansas, the South, and the nation, the book provides both a primer to the history of race and ethnicity in Arkansas and a prospective map for better understanding racial and ethnic relations in the United States.
Provides a solid foundation for understanding American agricultural history and offers new directions for research A Companion to American Agricultural History addresses the key aspects of America’s complex agricultural past from 8,000 BCE to the first decades of the twenty-first century. Bringing together more than thirty original essays by both established and emerging scholars, this innovative volume presents a succinct and accessible overview of American agricultural history while delivering a state-of-the-art assessment of modern scholarship on a diversity of subjects, themes, and issues. The essays provide readers with starting points for their exploration of American agricultural history—whether in general or in regards to a specific topic—and highlights the many ways the agricultural history of America is of integral importance to the wider American experience. Individual essays trace the origin and development of agricultural politics and policies, examine changes in science, technology, and government regulations, offer analytical suggestions for new research areas, discuss matters of ethnicity and gender in American agriculture, and more. This Companion: Introduces readers to a uniquely wide range of topics within the study of American agricultural history Provides a narrative summary and a critical examination of field-defining works Introduces specific topics within American agricultural history such as agrarian reform, agribusiness, and agricultural power and production Discusses the impacts of American agriculture on different groups including Native Americans, African Americans, and European, Asian, and Latinx immigrants Views the agricultural history of America through new interdisciplinary lenses of race, class, and the environment Explores depictions of American agriculture in film, popular music, literature, and art A Companion to American Agricultural History is an essential resource for introductory students and general readers seeking a concise overview of the subject, and for graduate students and scholars wanting to learn about a particular aspect of American agricultural history.
Taking readers into the rural hinterlands of the rapidly urbanizing societies of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, the essays in Women in Agriculture tell the stories of a cadre of professional women who worked as agricultural researchers, producers, marketers, educators, and community organizers, and acted to bridge the growing rift between those who grew food and those who only consumed it.
Following in the tradition of the Southern Women series, Arkansas Women highlights prominent Arkansas women, exploring women’s experiences across time and space from the state’s earliest frontier years to the late twentieth century. In doing so, this collection of fifteen biographical essays productively complicates Arkansas history by providing a multidimensional focus on women, with a particular appreciation for how gendered issues influenced the historical moment in which they lived. Diverse in nature, Arkansas Women contains stories about women on the Arkansas frontier, including the narratives of indigenous women and their interactions with European men and of bondwomen of African descent who were forcibly moved to Arkansas from the seaboard South to labor on cotton plantations. There are also essays about twentieth-century women who were agents of change in their communities, such as Hilda Kahlert Cornish and the Arkansas birth control movement, Adolphine Fletcher Terry’s antisegregationist social activism, and Sue Cowan Morris’s Little Rock classroom teachers’ salary equalization suit. Collectively, these inspirational essays work to acknowledge women’s accomplishments and to further discussions about their contributions to Arkansas’s rich cultural heritage. Contributors: Michael Dougan on Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard Lewis Gary T. Edwards on Amanda Trulock Dianna Fraley on Adolphine Fletcher Terry Sarah Wilkerson Freeman on Senator Hattie Caraway Rebecca Howard on Women of the Ozarks in the Civil War Elizabeth Jacoway on Daisy Lee Gatson Bates Kelly Houston Jones on Bondwomen on Arkansas’s Cotton Frontier John Kirk on Sue Cowan Morris Marianne Leung on Hilda Kahlert Cornish Rachel Reynolds Luster on Mary Celestia Parler Loretta N. McGregor on Dr. Mamie Katherine Phipps Clark Michael Pierce on Freda Hogan Debra A. Reid on Mary L. Ray Yulonda Eadie Sano on Edith Mae Irby Jones Sonia Toudji on Women in Early Frontier Arkansas
Although it occurred nearly a century ago, the Elaine Massacre of 1919 remains the subject of intense inquiry as historians try to answer a multitude of questions, such as why authorities in the Arkansas Delta used such overwhelming violence to put down a farmers’ union, exactly how many people were killed in the massacre, and how the event shaped the following century. We cannot fully understand what happened at Elaine without examining the one hundred years leading up to the massacre. An analysis of the years from 1819, when Arkansas officially became an American territory, to 1919 provides the historical foundation for understanding one of the bloodiest manifestations of racial violence in U.S. history. During the antebellum years, slaveholders grew paranoid about possible “insurrections,” and after the Civil War and Emancipation, these fears lingered and led to numerous atrocities long before Elaine. At the same time, African Americans—particularly fieldworkers—worked to organize themselves to resist oppression, setting the stage for the farmers’ union that was the target for mob and military wrath during the Elaine Massacre. These essays provide the larger history necessary for understanding what happened at Elaine in 1919—and thus provide a window into the current state of Arkansas and the nation at large. Contributors include Richard Buckelew, Nancy Snell Griffith, Matthew Hild, Adrienne Jones, Kelly Houston Jones, Cherisse Jones-Branch, Brian K. Mitchell, William H. Pruden III, and Steven Teske.
Interpreting Science in Museums and Historic Sites stresses the untapped potential of historical artifacts to inform our understanding of scientific topics. It argues that science gains ground when contextualized in museums and historic sites.
The War at Home brings together some of the state’s leading historians to examine the connections between Arkansas and World War I. These essays explore how historical entities and important events such as Camp Pike, the Little Rock Picric Acid Plant, and the Elaine Race Massacre were related to the conflict as they investigate the issues of gender, race, and public health. This collection sheds new light on the ways that Arkansas participated in the war as well as the ways the war affected Arkansas then and still does today.
