A history of racism and segregation in twentieth-century Houston and beyond. Through the 1950s and beyond, the Supreme Court issued decisions that appeared to provide immediate civil rights protections to racial minorities as it relegated Jim Crow to the past. For black Houstonians who had been hoping and actively fighting for what they called a “raceless democracy,” these postwar decades were often seen as decades of promise. In Houston and the Permanence of Segregation, David Ponton argues that these were instead “decades of capture”: times in which people were captured and constrained by gender and race, by faith in the law, by antiblack violence, and even by the narrative structures of conventional histories. Bringing the insights of Black studies and Afropessimism to the field of urban history, Ponton explores how gender roles constrained thought in black freedom movements, how the “rule of law” compelled black Houstonians to view injustice as a sign of progress, and how antiblack terror undermined Houston’s narrative of itself as a “heavenly” place. Today, Houston is one of the most racially diverse cities in the United States, and at the same time it remains one of the most starkly segregated. Ponton’s study demonstrates how and why segregation has become a permanent feature in our cities and offers powerful tools for imagining the world otherwise.
You may not know the name Robert E. Howard, but you probably know his work. His most famous creation, Conan the Barbarian, is an icon of popular culture. In hundreds of tales detailing the exploits of Conan, King Kull, and others, Howard helped to invent the sword and sorcery genre. Todd B. Vick delves into newly available archives and probes Howard’s relationships, particularly with schoolteacher Novalyne Price, to bring a fresh, objective perspective to Howard's life. Like his many characters, Howard was an enigma and an outsider. He spent his formative years visiting the four corners of Texas, experiences that left a mark on his stories. He was intensely devoted to his mother, whom he nursed in her final days, and whose impending death contributed to his suicide in 1936 when he was just thirty years old. Renegades and Rogues is an unequivocal journalistic account that situates Howard within the broader context of pulp literature. More than a realistic fantasist, he wrote westerns and horror stories as well, and engaged in avid correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft and other pulp writers of his day. Vick investigates Howard’s twelve-year writing career, analyzes the influences that underlay his celebrated characters, and assesses the afterlife of Conan, the figure in whom Howard's fervent imagination achieved its most durable expression.
2020 — Ruth Benedict Prize – Association for Queer Anthropology, American Anthropological Association 2020 — Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize – National Women’s Studies Association 2020 — Honorable Mention, Sara A. Whaley Book Prize 2021 — Best Book in Social Sciences – Mexico Section, Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Sex, drugs, religion, and love are potent combinations in la zona, a regulated prostitution zone in the city of Reynosa, across the border from Hidalgo, Texas. During the years 2008 and 2009, a time of intense drug violence, Sarah Luna met and built relationships with two kinds of migrants, women who moved from rural Mexico to Reynosa to become sex workers and American missionaries who moved from the United States to forge a fellowship with those workers. Luna examines the entanglements, both intimate and financial, that define their lives. Using the concept of obligar, she delves into the connections that tie sex workers to their families, their clients, their pimps, the missionaries, and the drug dealers—and to the guilt, power, and comfort of faith. Love in the Drug War scrutinizes not only la zona and the people who work to survive there, but also Reynosa itself—including the influences of the United States—adding nuance and new understanding to the current Mexico-US border crisis.
Winner, 2017 Missouri Conference on History Book Award In 1936, Lloyd Gaines’s application to the University of Missouri law school was denied based on his race. Gaines and the NAACP challenged the university’s decision. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) was the first in a long line of decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court regarding race, higher education, and equal opportunity. The court case drew national headlines, and the NAACP moved Gaines to Chicago after he received death threats. Before he could attend law school, he vanished. This is the first book to focus entirely on the Gaines case and the vital role played by the NAACP and its lawyers—including Charles Houston, known as “the man who killed Jim Crow”—who advanced a concerted strategy to produce political change. Horner and Endersby also discuss the African American newspaper journalists and editors who mobilized popular support for the NAACP’s strategy. This book uncovers an important step toward the broad acceptance of racial segregation as inherently unequal. This is the inaugural volume in the series Studies in Constitutional Democracy, edited by Justin Dyer and Jeffrey Pasley of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy.
This book addresses the issues in an empirical fashion after examining different sociological and geographic perspectives. It provides a basic understanding of the multi-faceted nature of racial inequalities in urban America, both in a broad context and in separate analyses of housing.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 launched a vast, global diaspora, with many Iranians establishing new lives in the United States. In the four decades since, the diaspora has expanded to include not only those who emigrated immediately after the revolution but also their American-born children, more recent immigrants, and people who married into Iranian families, all of whom carry their own stories of trauma, triumph, adversity, and belonging that reflect varied and nuanced perspectives on what it means to be Iranian or Iranian American. The essays in My Shadow Is My Skin are these stories. This collection brings together thirty-two authors, both established and emerging, whose writing captures the diversity of diasporic experiences. Reflecting on the Iranian American experience over the past forty years and shedding new light on themes of identity, duality, and alienation in twenty-first-century America, the authors present personal narratives of immigration, sexuality, marginalization, marriage, and religion that offer an antidote to the news media’s often superficial portrayals of Iran and the people who have a connection to it. My Shadow Is My Skin pulls back the curtain on a community that rarely gets to tell its own story.
Changing Perspectives charts the pivotal period in Houston’s history when Jewish and Black leadership eventually came together to work for positive change. This is a story of two communities, both of which struggled to claim the rights and privileges they desired. Previous scholars of Southern Jewish history have argued that Black-Jewish relations did not exist in the South. However, during the 1930s to the 1980s, Jews and Blacks in Houston interacted in diverse and oftentimes surprising ways. For example, Houston’s Jewish leaders and eventually Black political leaders forged a connection that blossomed into the creation of the Mickey Leland Kibbutzim Internship in Israel for disadvantaged Black youth. Initially Houston Jewish leadership battled with their devotion to liberalism and sympathy with oppressed Blacks and their desire to acculturate. The distance between Houston’s Jews and Blacks diminished after changing demographics, the end of segregation, city redistricting, and the emergence of Black political power. Simultaneously, Israel’s victory during the Six-Day War caused the city’s Jews to embrace their Jewish identity and form an unexpected bond with Black political leaders over the cause of Zionism. Allison Schottenstein shows that Black-Jewish relations did exist during the Long Civil Rights Movement in Houston. Indeed, Houston played a significant role in the scope of Southern Jewish history and in expanding our understanding of Black-Jewish relations in the United States.
A historic Houston barrio provides an illuminating lens on neighborhood reputation. Neighborhoods have the power to form significant parts of our worlds and identities. A neighborhood’s reputation, however, doesn’t always match up to how residents see themselves or wish to be seen. The distance between residents’ desires and their environment can profoundly shape neighborhood life. In A Good Reputation, sociologists Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga delve into the development and transformation of the reputation of Northside, a predominantly Latinx barrio in Houston. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with residents, developers, and other neighborhood stakeholders, the authors show that people’s perceptions of their neighborhoods are essential to understanding urban inequality and poverty. Korver-Glenn and Mayorga’s empirically detailed account of disputes over neighborhood reputation helps readers understand the complexity of high-poverty urban neighborhoods, demonstrating that gentrification is a more complicated and irregular process than existing accounts of urban inequality would suggest. Offering insightful theoretical analysis and compelling narrative threads from understudied communities, A Good Reputation will yield insights for scholars of race and ethnicity, urban planning, and beyond.
"Rexroth's most notable work, Iowa, is a series of dream-like and poetic images.Each seemingly candid and liquid composition includes a soft focus and vignette, characteristic qualities of Diana camera images. [...] The Iowa series subconsciously expresses Rexroth's childhood memories of visiting family in Iowa. Growing up in the suburbs of Arlington, Virginia, she was captivated by the exotic summer landscapes of Iowa. Although the influence of her memories is present, Rexroth refers to Iowa as a hallucinatory state of mind rather than a concrete geographic location of personal sentiment. She describes Iowa as 'conceived of as a kind of psychic journey from one emotional mood to the next-- a maturation process. It all happens in a place which is very exotic.' In the introduction to the book, Mark L. Power describes this work as 'Sunny Iowa was transformed by memory into a dark Iowa with "a real feeling of melancholy." [...]"