Black Public History in Chicago

Black Public History in Chicago
Author: Ian Rocksborough-Smith
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2018-04-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252050339
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In civil-rights-era Chicago, a dedicated group of black activists, educators, and organizations employed black public history as more than cultural activism. Their work and vision energized a movement that promoted political progress in the crucial time between World War II and the onset of the Cold War. Ian Rocksborough-Smith’s meticulous research and adept storytelling provide the first in-depth look at how these committed individuals leveraged Chicago’s black public history. Their goal: to engage with the struggle for racial equality. Rocksborough-Smith shows teachers working to advance curriculum reform in public schools, while well-known activists Margaret and Charles Burroughs pushed for greater recognition of black history by founding the DuSable Museum of African American History. Organizations like the Afro-American Heritage Association, meanwhile, used black public history work to connect radical politics and nationalism. Together, these people and their projects advanced important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labor that paralleled the shifting terrain of mid-twentieth-century civil rights.

The Changing Face of Public History

The Changing Face of Public History
Author: Catherine M. Lewis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780875806020
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Spurred first by the civil rights debates of the 1960s and 1970s, then by the culture wars of the following decades, the Chicago Historical Society (CHS) increasingly sought to give visitors and patrons a voice in retelling the city's history. In response to debates over the authority to interpret the past, CHS engaged in community outreach and sponsored multicultural exhibits and programs. Yet, in this analysis of the society's evolving relationship with its diverse constituencies, Catherine M. Lewis finds that prevailing assumptions about the museum as a commemorative site dedicated to civic pride undermined CHS's bold attempts to create a public forum. Based on more than 250 interviews with staff at CHS and museums around the country, as well as research into formerly inaccessible public and private papers, The Changing Face of Public History offers a behind-the-scenes look at the ways in which one of the most innovative museums in the United States has continually grappled with issues confronting not only museum professionals but all those concerned about the role history plays in the lives of American citizens.

Black Chicago's First Century

Black Chicago's First Century
Author: Christopher Robert Reed
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 602
Release: 2005-07-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0826264603
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In Black Chicago’s First Century, Christopher Robert Reed provides the first comprehensive study of an African American population in a nineteenth-century northern city beyond the eastern seaboard. Reed’s study covers the first one hundred years of African American settlement and achievements in the Windy City, encompassing a range of activities and events that span the antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction periods. The author takes us from a time when black Chicago provided both workers and soldiers for the Union cause to the ensuing decades that saw the rise and development of a stratified class structure and growth in employment, politics, and culture. Just as the city was transformed in its first century of existence, so were its black inhabitants. Methodologically relying on the federal pension records of Civil War soldiers at the National Archives, as well as previously neglected photographic evidence, manuscripts, contemporary newspapers, and secondary sources, Reed captures the lives of Chicago’s vast army of ordinary black men and women. He places black Chicagoans within the context of northern urban history, providing a better understanding of the similarities and differences among them. We learn of the conditions African Americans faced before and after Emancipation. We learn how the black community changed and developed over time: we learn how these people endured—how they educated their children, how they worked, organized, and played. Black Chicago’s First Century is a balanced and coherent work. Anyone with an interest in urban history or African American studies will find much value in this book.

Selling the Race

Selling the Race
Author: Adam Green
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226306410
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Black Chicagoans were at the centre of a national movement in the 1940s and '50s, when African Americans across the country first started to see themselves as part of a single culture. Green argues that this period engendered a unique cultural and commercial consciousness, fostering ideas of racial identity that remain influential.

The Negro in Illinois

The Negro in Illinois
Author: Brian Dolinar
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2013-07-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252094956
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A major document of African American participation in the struggles of the Depression, The Negro in Illinois was produced by a special division of the Illinois Writers' Project, one of President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration programs. The Federal Writers' Project helped to sustain "New Negro" artists during the 1930s and gave them a newfound social consciousness that is reflected in their writing. Headed by Harlem Renaissance poet Arna Bontemps and white proletarian writer Jack Conroy, The Negro in Illinois employed major black writers living in Chicago during the 1930s, including Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Katherine Dunham, Fenton Johnson, Frank Yerby, and Richard Durham. The authors chronicled the African American experience in Illinois from the beginnings of slavery to Lincoln's emancipation and the Great Migration, with individual chapters discussing various aspects of public and domestic life, recreation, politics, religion, literature, and performing arts. After the project was canceled in 1942, most of the writings went unpublished for more than half a century--until now. Working closely with archivist Michael Flug to select and organize the book, editor Brian Dolinar compiled The Negro in Illinois from papers at the Vivian G. Harsh Collection of Afro-American History and Literature at the Carter G. Woodson Library in Chicago. Dolinar provides an informative introduction and epilogue which explain the origins of the project and place it in the context of the Black Chicago Renaissance. Making available an invaluable perspective on African American life, this volume represents a publication of immense historical and literary importance.

Sighting Public History

Sighting Public History
Author: Graham Lazar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2019
Genre:
ISBN:
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Sighting Public History is an effort to see Chicago, a city which I have always called home, and to see it with fresh eyes. The project takes as its focus sites of black public history: locations in the built environment where history is put to work in the public realm. It is an effort to re-educate one’s self using the visual grammar of the city. The project uses the concept of sights — authored photographs, maps and written reflections — to offer a subjective view of public history at work in Chicago’s historically black South and West Sides. Where and how are histories of the black experience put to work here? How do public parks and boulevards, streetscapes and thresholds of private homes, and collections and exhibitions of storied black cultural organizations compose an urban constellation of black public history? How does this constellation perform a powerful pedagogic function by teaching individuals and communities about the history of race in the city — including the systemic injustices borne by Chicago’s black communities, and the way these communities have responded through politics, art, cultural programming, and community organizing? Ultimately, Sighting Public History asks, what kinds of history do Chicago’s black communities carry, and how are these histories carried?

The Wall of Respect

The Wall of Respect
Author: Abdul Alkalimat
Publisher: Second to None: Chicago Storie
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780810135932
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With vivid images and words, The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago tells the story of the mural on Chicago's South Side whose creation and evolution was at the heart of the Black Arts Movement in the United States.

Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone)

Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone)
Author: Sam Wineburg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2018-09-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 022635735X
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A look at how to teach history in the age of easily accessible—but not always reliable—information. Let’s start with two truths about our era that are so inescapable as to have become clichés: We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percent of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious. With the Internet at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), professor Sam Wineburg has the answers, beginning with this: We can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-question snoozefest. If we want to educate citizens who can separate fact from fake, we have to equip them with new tools. Historical thinking, Wineburg shows, has nothing to do with the ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that cultivates reasoned skepticism and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg lays out a mine-filled landscape, but one that with care, attention, and awareness, we can learn to navigate. The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands. Praise for Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) “If every K-12 teacher of history and social studies read just three chapters of this book—”Crazy for History,” “Changing History . . . One Classroom at a Time,” and “Why Google Can’t Save Us” —the ensuing transformation of our populace would save our democracy.” —James W. Lowen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Teaching What Really Happened “A sobering and urgent report from the leading expert on how American history is taught in the nation’s schools. . . . A bracing, edifying, and vital book.” —Jill Lepore, New Yorker staff writer and author of These Truths “Wineburg is a true innovator who has thought more deeply about the relevance of history to the Internet—and vice versa—than any other scholar I know. Anyone interested in the uses and abuses of history today has a duty to read this book.” —Niall Ferguson, senior fellow, Hoover Institution, and author of The Ascent of Money and Civilization

From Storefront to Monument

From Storefront to Monument
Author: Andrea A. Burns
Publisher: Public History in Historical P
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781625340351
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Today well over two hundred museums focusing on African American history and culture can be found throughout the United States and Canada. Many of these institutions trace their roots to the 1960s and 1970s, when the struggle for racial equality inspired a movement within the black community to make the history and culture of African America more "public." This book tells the story of four of these groundbreaking museums: the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago (founded in 1961); the International Afro-American Museum in Detroit (1965); the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, D.C. (1967); and the African American Museum of Philadelphia (1976). Andrea A. Burns shows how the founders of these institutions, many of whom had ties to the Black Power movement, sought to provide African Americans with a meaningful alternative to the misrepresentation or utter neglect of black history found in standard textbooks and most public history sites. Through the recovery and interpretation of artifacts, documents, and stories drawn from African American experience, they encouraged the embrace of a distinctly black identity and promoted new methods of interaction between the museum and the local community. Over time, the black museum movement induced mainstream institutions to integrate African American history and culture into their own exhibits and educational programs. This often controversial process has culminated in the creation of a National Museum of African American History and Culture, now scheduled to open in the nation's capital in 2015.

A Political Education

A Political Education
Author: Elizabeth Todd-Breland
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2018-10-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1469646595
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In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.