In this superb volume, James C. Cobb provides the first truly comprehensive history of the South since World War II, brilliantly capturing an era of dramatic change, both in the South and in its relationship with the rest of the nation. Here is a panoramic narrative that flows seamlessly from the Dixiecrats to the "southern strategy," to the South's domination of today's GOP, and from the national ascendance of southern culture and music, to a globalized Dixie's allure for foreign factories and a flood of immigrants, to the roles of women and an increasingly visible gay population in contemporary southern life. The heart of the book illuminates the struggle for Civil Rights. Jim Crow still towered over the South in 1945, but Cobb shows that Pearl Harbor unloosed forces that would bring its ultimate demise. Growing black political clout outside the South and the contradiction of fighting racist totalitarianism abroad while tolerating it at home set the stage for returning black veterans to spearhead the NAACP's postwar assault on the South's racial system. This assault sparked not only vocal white resistance but mounting violence that culminated in the murder of young Emmett Till in 1955. Energized rather than intimidated, however, blacks in Montgomery staged the famous bus boycott, bringing the Rev. Martin Luther King to the fore and paving the way for the dramatic protests and confrontations that finally brought profound racial changes as well as two-party politics to the South. As he did in the prize-winning The Most Southern Place on Earth and Away Down South, Cobb writes with wit and grace, showing a thorough grasp of his native region. Exhaustively researched and brimming with original insights, The South and America Since World War II is indeed the definitive history of the postwar South and its changing role in national life.

The saga of the Freedom Rides is an improbable, almost unbelievable story. In the course of six months in 1961, four hundred and fifty Freedom Riders expanded the realm of the possible in American politics, redefining the limits of dissent and setting the stage for the civil rights movement. In this new version of his encyclopedic Freedom Riders, Raymond Arsenault offers a significantly condensed and tautly written account. With characters and plot lines rivaling those of the most imaginative fiction, this is a tale of heroic sacrifice and unexpected triumph. Arsenault recounts how a group of volunteers--blacks and whites--came together to travel from Washington DC through the Deep South, defying Jim Crow laws in buses and terminals and putting their lives on the line for racial justice. News photographers captured the violence in Montgomery, shocking the nation and sparking a crisis in the Kennedy administration. Here are the key players - their fears and courage, their determination and second thoughts, and the agonizing choices they faced as they took on Jim Crow - and triumphed. Winner of the Owsley Prize Publication is timed to coincide with the airing of the American Experience miniseries documenting the Freedom Rides.

Color in the Classroom is the first historical analysis of how schools and teachers have powerfully influenced the social construction of race in America. Between the turn of the twentieth century and the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the way that American schools taught about "race" changed dramatically. This transformation was engineered by the nation's most prominent activists, including Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead during World War II. Inspired by scientific racism in Nazi Germany, anthropologists decided that the best way to fight racial prejudice was to teach what they saw as the "truth" about race in the one institution that had the power to do the most good--American schools. Anthropologists created lesson plans, lectures, courses, and pamphlets designed to revise what they called "the 'race' concept" in American education. They believed that if teachers presented race in scientific and egalitarian terms, that American citizens would become less racist. Although nearly forgotten today, this educational reform movement represents an important component of early civil rights activism that emerged alongside the domestic and global tensions of World War II. Drawing on hundreds of first-hand accounts written by teachers nationwide, Zoe Burkholder traces the influence of this anthropological activism on the way that teachers understood, spoke, and taught about race on an everyday basis for more than fifty years. She explains how and why teachers readily translated certain aspects of anthropological theory, such as the division of race into three main categories, while they struggled to make sense of more complex models of cultural diversity and structural inequality. As they translated anthropological theories about race into practice, teachers crafted an educational discourse on race that differed significantly from the definition of race produced by scientists at mid-century. This compelling book will be of special interest to historians of race, civil rights, and education, as well as to anthropologists and educators interested in the role of schools as racializing institutions in America.

Bridges of Reform uncovers the early years of civil rights and the sophisticated ways it played out on the West Coast, a situation that radically differed from civil rights in the South and North. In this book, Shana Bernstein uses World War II and Cold War Los Angeles as a locus of civil rights activity and explores its roots in multiracial organizing. There, activists built multiracial collaborations, bringing together the Mexican-, Jewish-, African-, and Japanese-American populations. Later national civil rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings, as well as ethnic-specific community movements, emerged in part from these interracial efforts in Los Angeles. Detailed archival research reveals that significant domestic activism for racial equality persisted during the Cold War in the form of multiracial, anti-communist civil rights collaboration. The United States' global interests during World War II encouraged activists of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds to join forces. The Cold War facilitated further coalition-building and the pursuit of ongoing racial equality goals as activists sought protection and legitimacy from each other in this conservative era. From a city that incubated civil rights activism, Bernstein broadly connects West Coast activism with the domestic home front, the wars in Europe and Asia, and the onset of the Cold War, creating a unique study of comparative race, ethnicity, and civil rights.

Women have always been historians. Whether in schoolrooms or kitchens, state houses or church pulpits, women functioned as teachers of history and historical interpreters, offering narrations of the past to criticize existent narratives and inspire new ones. Within African-American communities, women began to write histories in the years after the American Revolution. Distributed through churches, seminaries, public schools, and auxiliary societies, their stories of the past translated ancient Africa, slavery, and ongoing American social reform to populist audiences North and South. In the United States, black women have labored to sustain the cogency of their race and their families through the promotion of education, Christian and historical, for themselves and for their families. This book surveys the creative ways in which African American women harnessed the power of print to share their historical revisions with a broader public. These speeches, textbooks, poems, and polemics did more than just recount the past. They also protested their present status in the United States, using history to write a new story for the future of African America.

The advocates of woman suffrage and black suffrage came to a bitter falling-out in the midst of Reconstruction, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment for granting black men the right to vote but not women. How did these two causes, so long allied, come to this? In a lively narrative of insider politics, betrayal, deception, and personal conflict, Fighting Chance offers fresh answers to this question and reveals that racism was not the only cause, but that the outcome also depended heavily on money and political maneuver. Historian Faye Dudden shows that Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, believing they had a fighting chance to win woman suffrage after the Civil War, tried but failed to exploit windows of political opportunity, especially in Kansas. When they became most desperate, they succeeded only in selling out their long-held commitment to black rights and their invaluable friendship and alliance with Frederick Douglass. Based on extensive research, Fighting Chance is a major contribution to women's history and to 19th-century political history.

C.L.R. James was a leading figure in the independence movement in the West Indies and the black and working-class movements in both Britain and the US. As a major contributor to Marxist and revolutionary theory, his project was to discover, document and elaborate the aspects of working-class activity that constitute the revolution in today's world. In this essential volume in the study of James' work, Noel Ignatiev provides an extensive introduction to James' life and thought, before presenting two critical works which illustrate the breadth and depth of his work.

Gary Younge is not your typical foreign correspondent. Yet, in three years working for the Guardian newspaper in New York, Younge has acquired a translantic reputation as one of the most thoughtful commentators on contemporary America. In these pages we take the stage with an extravagantly attired drag queen in John Ashcrofts's hometown, join the dinner table of a fundamentalist Republican who has just lost his son in the Iraq war, and ride a bus with a group of illegal immigrants on a latter-day Freedom Ride to Washington, D.C.

In the 1940s, at the height of segregation, Charles Preston became the unlikely newest worker at a black owned-and-operated newspaper. Preston, a white man and, unbeknownst to most of his colleagues, member of the Communist Party, quickly came face to face with issues of race and injustice that would profoundly impact his life and change the way he understood society in the United States. This fictionalized account of his experience tells readers what it was like to be the only white worker, and a communist at that, at a black newspaper, while unflinchingly depicting the racism that was so common and accepted in the 1950s.