Columbia University Press

The following post is by Jeffrey B. Perry, author of Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918. You can also read his previous post “Who Was Hubert Harrison?”.

Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 is the first volume of my two-volume biography of a brilliant and influential early-twentieth-century Black intellectual and activist whose life and work has much to offer twenty-first century readers.

During the 1960s, like millions of other people, I was deeply affected by the movements for social change in the United States inspired by the civil rights struggle. As a student (at both Princeton and Harvard) in that period, I was afforded opportunity to study, to research, and to interact with scholars. My ancestral roots, as far back as identifiable, are entirely among working people. These factors, and many related experiences, have led me toward a life in which I have tried to mix worker- and community-based organizing (I worked in the trade union movement for over thirty years) with historical research and writing. My major preoccupation has been with the successes and failures of efforts at social change in the United States. In that context, I have focused on the role of white supremacy in undermining efforts at social change and on the importance of struggle against white supremacy to social change.

I was influenced toward serious study of matters of race and class in America through personal experiences and through the insightful and seminal work of an independent scholar and close personal friend, the late Theodore William Allen (author of the two-volume work The Invention of the White Race). Allen’s writings on the role of white supremacy in U.S. history and on the centrality of the struggle against white supremacy to efforts at social change have attracted increased, and well deserved, attention. Familiarity with Allen’s life and work disposed me to be receptive to the life and work of Harrison, another independent, anti-white-supremacist, working-class intellectual.

Read the rest of this entry »

This post’s headline is taken from a quote by Sarah Burd-Sharps’s in a Boston Globe editorial on the health care challenges facing Barack Obama’s incoming administration.

Burd-Sharps is the co-author of The Measure of America: American Human Development Report 2008-2009, which documents “how the roughly $5.2 billion we spend every day on healthcare yields a pitiable return on investment. For example, US life expectancy ranks below that of Chile, Costa Rica, and nearly every European and Nordic country. The US infant mortality rate is on par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia, and Poland. Within the United States, stark health inequities persist along socioeconomic and racial/ethnic lines.” The editorial also points out, based on information in The Measure of America, “Every rich nation in the world except ours [The United States] has figured out how to provide health coverage to virtually every citizen - and at far lower cost per capita.”

For more on The Measure of America, here’s a video based on findings from the book:

How much of a foodie are you? Test your knowledge of New York City cuisine, both past and present, with a quiz based on the newly published Gastropolis: Food and New York City.

If you end up starving for more after tallying up your score you can join Gastropolis editors and contributors this Wednesday, November 18th, 7:00pm at Book Culture, in a delicious discussion of New York City’s rich food heritage.

Are you a Big Apple or a Stale Bagel? Take the quiz below to find out!

1. During the early nineteenth century in New York City, one of the most difficult beverages to have was?
a) Drinking water
b) Milk
c) Beer
d) Liquor

2. In the late 1700s, this food was one of the most popular things to eat in the city. It was one of the few foods consumed by both the upper and lower classes, and most establishments sold all you could eat for 6 cents.
a) Apples
b) Gruel
c) Oysters
d) Cranberries

3. What food started in a German immigrant’s restaurant in New York City but today has become a worldwide symbol of American cuisine?
a) Hot dogs
b) Hamburgers
c) Apple pie
d) Corn-dogs

4. Which of the following countries are represented in New York City’s “Chinatowns”?
a) Thailand
b) Pakistan
c) Bangladesh
d) All of the above

5. Which famous New York restaurant was (and remains) the most expensive restaurant ever built?
a) Le Pavillon
b) Atlas
c) The Four Seasons
d) Le Cirque

6. The largest market in New York City, and the world, is located in?
a) Manhattan
b) Brooklyn
c) Queens
d) Bronx

7. The iconic New York drink, the egg cream, was popularized by which immigrant culture?
a) French
b) German
c) Jewish
d) Italian

8. The round shape of a bagel was originally meant to resemble the shape of what?
a) Flattened egg
b) King’s crown
c) Riding stirrup
d) Donut

9. The average size of supermarkets across the nation is 48,000 square feet, but what is the average size in New York City?
a) 4,000 square feet
b) 10,000 square feet
c) 60,000 square feet
d) 100,000 square feet

10. The United States Food Bank estimates that approximately _________________ of New York City’s Residents are at risk of going hungry.
a) 500,000
b) 1 million
c) 1.5 million
d) 2 million

For the answers…. Read the rest of this entry »

Join author Frances Dunwell for an inspiring lecture about the transformative role of the Hudson River in American history and culture — how its unique geography, scenic beauty, and culture of entrepreneurship have influenced the shaping of Manhattan, given rise to the Empire State, and impacted the trajectory of world trade and global politics. Beginning with the age of Dutch exploration and concluding with the environmental cleanup initiatives that set a national precedent for conservation, Dunwell will present a portrait of the river that is as varied as its own landscape.

November 17, 2008, 6:00 PM
Municipal Art Society, Urban Center Books, 457 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10022

Purchase tickets online here.

November 18, 2008, 7:00 PM
Newburgh Public Library, 124 Grand Street, Newburgh, NY, 12550

free and open to the public

The following essay is by Houston A. Baker, Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt University and author the recently published Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era.

“A week of rest and reflection has sobered me up almost completely. I am confident enough now to predict that a critical American conversation on race will never come by way of the President Barack Obama White House. I base my prediction on temporality: i.e., the past is prelude. Obama’s tepid and problematic pronouncements from the National Constitution Center during the general campaign revealed a hyper-sharp cautiousness and subtle evasiveness when addressing race: its origins, injuries, and continuing denials of social justice and human rights to black folk.”—Houston Baker

Nashville, TN: November 11, 2008.  On election night, 2008, busy schedules and autumn good luck brought together at Nashville’s heralded Midtown Café my wife and I, in company with President Hazel O’Leary of Fisk University and Provost Richard McCarty of Vanderbilt University. The provost had been trying to schedule a dinner for weeks. Finally it came together on election night, and a marvelous dinner it was. Working with our best manners to still jitters of worst expectations, and struggling quietly to maintain the decorum to check our collective desire to rush to the nearest television screen, we shared experiences.  What was most striking about the first part of our evening was its crisp amiability. We are roughly on par in age; we are well-paid academics; we are ably situated in a southern city filled with high hopes for the future.

Yet, we were all aware of the stakes.  Polling sites in Appalachia, white midwestern suburbs, and black zones of impoverishment would color our future.  In the course of our conversation, President O’Leary invoked the era of Civil Rights in Nashville: Diane Nash, James Lawson, Nikki Giovanni and so many other black dissidents, racially and violently humiliated on southern streets, yet singing: “We Shall Overcome.”

I thought of my older brother, John Thomas Baker, who threw himself into the Nashville struggle during his freshman year at Fisk like he had been born and bred in the briar patch of black liberation collectivism.  I told stories at our election night dinner of my long haul from Little Africa (a Louisville, KY, ghetto where I spent a significant portion of my youth) to a Vanderbilt Distinguished University Professorship.

I met my wife Charlotte Pierce-Baker, who hailed from Jim Crow precincts of Washington, D.C., at Howard University. It was 1961, and things in the U.S. were definitely on “racial lock down.”  My wife is now full professor and interim Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt.

Our Provost compared his experiences at the University of Virginia with ours, as he praised the role of a courageous cohort of white Nashville faculty who made Vanderbilt the first southern, traditionally all-white university to integrate officially its student body.

Then we went home. Full. Nervous. Expectant.

It was as though we had diligently and politely “stated the theme”—the only one—for November 4, 2008.  Stated it with trepidation, anxiety, and, of course, as a conjuration against disastrous returns.

Truthfully?

Much of our nervous, humorous, and historical conversation that night—with its racial recall and hilarious storytelling—seemed, at least to me, to have little connection to what I have thought, and continue to think of the guiding premises of President-Elect Barack Obama’s relationship to race in America. There was, I thought, an unspoken disconnect between his address to race and ours. Nothing in the former senator’s primary or general campaigns has convinced me that he has, or will ever, come forward and declare unequivocally his commitment to addressing urgent matters of Black Majority interests. He has always appeared to me as a man dapped out as what one black Los Angeles blogger terms:  “A Magic Negro Politician.”  President-Elect Obama’s life is, and has been, marked by social and family burdens, to be sure. But his life, by any account, has also always been “beautiful.” Shaped, for example, by the type of sharp, aesthetic oxymoron represented by a mother on food stamps, while her son Barack enjoyed a private school education.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow night  Thursday, November 13 at 7 pm at the The Strand Bookstore, Jerelle Kraus will discuss her new book All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside the New York Times Op-Ed Page.

The Strand is located at 828 Broadway (between E. 12th and 13th Street).

Jerelle Kraus is the former art director at the New York Times and her new book reveals the inner workings of the Times from the creation of the art for the Op-ed section to the decisions by Howell Raines and other editors to quash certain drawings that were deemed too controversial. All the Art That’s Fit to Print includes many never-before-seen drawings, removed right before press time, as well as published images from the last four decades by artists such as Andy Warhol, David Levine, Jules Pfeiffer, Barbara Kruger, Art Spiegelman, Larry Rivers, and others. You can view images from the book here and here.

One fan of the art from the Op-Ed page was also a frequent target: Richard Nixon. In the book Kraus describes a revealing and somewhat odd 1983 meeting with Richard Nixon at his New York City office. Nixon was a fan of Kraus’s drawing of him and Brezhnev and requested a copy in exchange for a signed copy of his memoir. In describing the meeting, Kraus writes:

Experiencing Nixon behind his unmarked door showed me there was a human creature beneath the ogre for whom I’d felt nothing but disgust, someone profoundly ill at ease with himself and others, a man who wore a suit 24/7 and couldn’t surrender the role of dignitary. I saw his awkwardness as well as his pain, pride, and prickliness.

Here is a picture of their meeting:

The following post is by Jeffrey B. Perry, author of the just-published Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918:

Hubert Harrison (1883-1927) is one of the truly important figures of early twentieth-century America. A brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist, he was described by the historian Joel A. Rogers, in World’s Great Men of Color as “the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time” and “one of America’s greatest minds.” Rogers adds that “No one worked more seriously and indefatigably to enlighten” others and “none of the Afro-American leaders of his time [the era of Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey] had a saner and more effective program.” As Harlem grew into the “international Negro Mecca” and the “center of radical Black thought,” A. Philip Randolph emphasized that Hubert Harrison was “the father of Harlem radicalism.”

The life story of this Black, Caribbean-born, race- and class-conscious, freethinking, working-class intellectual-activist is a story that needs to be told. It offers a missing vision and voice that fill major gaps in the historical record and enable us to significantly reshape our understanding and interpretation of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Most important, perhaps, his life story offers profound insights for thinking about race, class, religion, immigration, war, democracy, and social change in America.

Read the rest of this entry »

H-Amstdy, an online scholarly discussion group and listserv dedicated to American Studies, recently published reviews of two Columbia University Press titles. (You can also save 20% on these titles during our special sale on American Studies titles.)

In a review entitled, “Relgious Road Trip,” Matthew Sutton calls Mark Hulsether’s Relgion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States, “An excellent introduction to the major movements in modern American religion. It draws on the best scholarship in American religion to focus on how particular movements interact and engage with each other and the broader American society.”

For more on the book, you can also read an interview with Mark Hulsether.

In “How to Be a Manly Longhair,” Anna Zuschlag considers Timothy Hodgon’s Manhood in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities, 1965-1983. Hodgon’s book considers the countercultural communities of the Diggers and the Farmers and argues that even as these groups claimed to offer a new type of manhood they also reproduced mainstream society’s assumptions about gender.

Zuschlag writes, “Hodgdon works to deconstruct preconceived notions of a homogeneous counterculture and, as such, presents a … nuanced narrative about cultural radicalism in the sixties and late twentieth-century American manhood.”

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll post more about Siddharth Kara’s just-published, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. First up is a video of Kara discussing the book (see below).

In reviewing Sex Trafficking, Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves and the author of Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, writes “The best book ever written on human trafficking for sexual exploitation. Representing a new period of solid yet humane scholarship, this breakthrough analysis represents a quantum leap in the study of this subject. Simply beyond anything I have seen anywhere.”

Here’s the video:

Jerelle Kraus, author of All the Art’s That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside the New York Times Op-ed Page will discuss her book on the “Ron and Fez Show” tonight from 9 to 11 pm on Sirius XM radio. For more information click here.

The following post is by Devin Stewart, director of Global Policy Innovations, the editor of Policy Innovations, publisher of the Fairer Globalization and Ethical Blogger blogs, and the founding editor of Carnegie Ethics Online.

French intellectual Laurent Cohen-Tanugi visited the Carnegie Council in New York City last month to present his new book The Shape of the World to Come: Charting the Geopolitics of a New Century. In true French philosophical fashion, Laurent presented globalization as a paradoxical phenomenon with conflicting consequences.

The geopolitics of today, with the rise of non-Western powers, such as Russia, China, and India, the “rise of the rest,” is the result of the positive aspects of economic globalization. That is the good news, according to Laurent. The bad news is the potential for conflict, partly as a result of economic globalization. Laurent sees potential enduring conflict between the “Arab-Muslim word and the West,” as well as from rising nationalism and resource competition—or a return to traditional geopolitics.

Laurent takes aim at Thomas Friedman’s description of a flattened world and offers a more complicated view. “Between integration and fragmentation, nationalism and multilateralism, dialogue and clash of civilizations, the shape of the world to come will depend to a great degree on the use the new economic giants make of their power and on the ability of Western democracies to preserve their dynamism, their cohesion, and their influence for the common good.”

Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, November 18th, Michael Fischbach, the author of Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries will be speaking at the 92nd St Y in New York City on the claims of Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews who lost property during their exodus from Arab countries in the years after 1948. Based on archival research, Michael Fischbach analyzes the nature and scope of these claims, as well as why Israel and international Jewish organizations have largely deferred taking strong action to resolve them.

Michael R. Fischbach is a professor of history at Randolph-Macon College. He is the author of Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict; State, Society, and Land in Jordan; and The Peace Process and Palestinian Refugee Claims: Addressing Claims for Property Compensation and Restitution.

You can find out more about the event or buy tickets at: http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?productid=T%2DBL5LB02

For more from Michael Fischbach you can read his essay for the History News Network or read about his recent talk at the United Nations.

Jules Feiffer image from All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside the New York Times Op-Ed Page by Jerelle Kraus. This image originally ran in the New York Times in 2007 and while the caption and its reference to Hillary Clinton is a bit dated, the excitement about Obama certainly still rings true.

“There are several reasons why Japan should look forward to an Obama presidency. First of all, Obama is the first person to become President for whom Asia is not a far away region with which he has little personal experience but is an integral part of his life experience.”—Gerald Curtis

The Weatherhead East Asian Institute has posted a column by Gerald Curtis which argues that Japanese-American relations are bound to improve during an Obama administration.

Curtis who is the author of The Logic of Japanese Politics: Leaders, Institutions, and the Limits of Change and other titles, writes, “As President, Obama will seek to strengthen the US-Japan alliance. Like the Presidents who have preceded him, he will encourage Japan to do more to contribute to regional and global security. But the Bush Administration put too much emphasis on the military dimension of the relationship alone. Obama is truly a President for the 21st century. He understands that security involves military power and much else as well: protecting the environment, stopping global warming, preventing the emergence of pandemic diseases, raising the African continent out of dire poverty, developing new sources of energy and reducing energy consumption.”

You can read the entire column here.

With record turnout predicted in New York City for today’s election, we thought we’d look back at how New York City residents have voted in past elections via The Almanac of New York City.

In the 43 elections from 1836-1904, the Democratic presidential candidate has won 37 times. Indeed, New York City has proven tough for Republican candidates as even Abraham Lincoln lost the city in his two presidential runs. The last Republican candidate to win New York City was Thomas Dewey, who defeated Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1944 election. Richard Nixon came the closest in recent years to breaking the Democratic stranglehold in New York City, narrowly losing to George McGovern in the 1972 election.

Perhaps the most lopsided recent election was Al Gore’s trouncing of George Bush in 2000. Gore won a whopping 1,703,364 votes to Bush’s 398,726. Gore even won Staten Island, the only borough to consistently vote Republican in recent elections. The most votes ever garnered by a presidential candidate was Lyndon Johnson who got 2,183,643 votes in his 1964 race against Barry Goldwater.

The most successful Independent candidate was Henry Wallace who wond 422,355 votes as the Progressive nominee in the 1948 election. In recent years, H. Ross Perot’s 1992 run was the most successful as 141,510 voters expressed their support for the tiny Texan. Surprisingly in a city known for its liberal tendencies, Ralph Nader’s 2000 run earned him only 72,435 compared to George Wallace’s independent  presidential bid which won 121,781.

Not surprisingly however, New York City residents are heavily in the Democratic category — 67.2% voters are registered Democrats as compared to 12.2% who are Republicans. It will be interesting to see how the turnout turns out today. While voter participation has slowly creeped up in recent elections — 52.4% in 1996, 53.3% in 2000, and 54.7 in 2004 — nearly half of New York City’s registered voters don’t vote.

Now through December 1, we are offering 20% off selected titles in American Studies. For more details about the sale, including a list of books please click here.

You can also browse the sale titles by different categories: American History and Politics, American Literature and Culture, American Religion, Film and Media, and all categories.

Click here for a list of all our current sales.

“McCain’s apparent hypocrisy when he mouths religious rhetoric is also fascinating. And we could say something similar about Ronald Reagan. Both of the Clintons, and of course also Jimmy Carter, are far more serious and thoughtful about religion than either Reagan or McCain, yet often our common wisdom screens this out.”—Mark Hulsether

The following is an interview with Mark Hulsether, author of Religion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States.

Q: Your book came out at a good time to throw light on the religious politics of the 2008 election. Did you plan it that way?

Mark Hulsether: I wish! This book was a long time coming; it was supposed to be finished for the 2004 election. But it worked out all right; elections with interesting religious-political dynamics come along all the time. It seems like only yesterday when the media frenzy was about conservative Catholic bishops trying to keep John Kerry from taking communion. In 2000 conservative religious folks were still in an uproar about Bill Clinton lying about sex, and George W. Bush was making a hard sell about Jesus saving him from drug abuse problems and ordaining him to be a global leader.

Of course this year’s election had fascinating religious dimensions—especially for anyone who knows the history of bad blood between John McCain and the Christian Right, the forms of Pentecostalism that shaped Sarah Palin’s worldview, intersections between end-times prophecy and conservative stances toward Israel, and many other such things. Barack Obama’s Chicago church is very interesting. Parts of its family tree reach back to the Puritans, parts to the invisible institution under slavery, and parts to Reinhold Niebuhr’s branch of German Calvinism. The “United” in Trinity United Church of Christ has to do with a merger between the main branch of New England Puritans (those who did not become Unitarians) and German Calvinist churches—with a few predominantly black congregations inspired by traditions like Martin Luther King, Jrs.’ sprinkled in.

McCain’s apparent hypocrisy when he mouths religious rhetoric is also fascinating. And we could say something similar about Ronald Reagan. Both of the Clintons, and of course also Jimmy Carter, are far more serious and thoughtful about religion than either Reagan or McCain, yet often our common wisdom screens this out.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Paul Offit appeared on the Today Show to talk about Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure.

For some readers what might be most scary about university press books is the sometimes seemingly inscrutable writing of the authors. However, here at Columbia University Press we have a few legitimate books that make for perfect Halloween reading.

First off is Ueda Akinari’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain, a collection of Japan’s finest and most celebrated examples of literature and the occult which was first published in 1776. The tales subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the period’s fascination with the strange and the grotesque. The tales were also the inspiration for Mizoguchi Kenji’s brilliant 1953 film Ugetsu. In writing about this edition of the book, Japan’s English newspaper, the Daily Yomiuri writes, “Japan scholars and people who just like weird, spooky stuff should enjoy this new edition of Akinari’s classic.”

For those interested in horror films, there are several books that look at the genre, including: Shocking Representation, Historical Trauma, National Cinema and the Modern Horror Film, by Adam Lowenstein;  The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch, by Paul Wells; The American Horror Film: An Introduction, by Reynold Humphries; The Cinema of John Carpenter: The Technique of Terror, edited by Ian Conrich and David Woods; The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead, by Tony Williams; and Deleuze and Horror Film by Anna Powell.

And just for fun and to give you a taste of the atmosphere in Tales of Moonlight and Rain, here is the Japanese trailer for the film Ugetsu:

Since the New York Times’s  City Room blog has devoted a post to The Almanac of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson and Fred Kameny, we’ll wait until next week to post some more facts and figures. (You can view earlier posts about the book here, here, and here.)

The New York Times calls the book, “[A] compendium of fascinating facts and statistics that is a must-have for New Yorkers who think they know their city well.”

The Times also offers a quiz based on facts from the book and if you are really keen on testing your NYC knowledge, you can also take our quiz.