Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss. As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own. Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied—and often outweighed—these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.

Features remarkable portraits of African Americans before and after Emancipation, including images of young African American soldiers in Civil War-era military uniform.

"Picture Freedom provides a unique and nuanced interpretation of nineteenth-century African American life and culture. Focusing on visuality, print culture, and an examination of the parlor, Cobb has fashioned a book like none other, convincingly demonstrating how whites and blacks reimagined racial identity and belonging in the early republic."--Erica Armstrong Dunbar, author of A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City

The colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition by famed sociologist and black rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a view into the lives of black Americans, conveying a literal and figurative representation of "the color line." From advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery, these prophetic infographics —beautiful in design and powerful in content—make visible a wide spectrum of black experience. W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits collects the complete set of graphics in full color for the first time, making their insights and innovations available to a contemporary imagination. As Maria Popova wrote, these data portraits shaped how "Du Bois himself thought about sociology, informing the ideas with which he set the world ablaze three years later in The Souls of Black Folk."

2021 Special Edition of the American Educational History Journal (The official journal of the Organization of Educational Historians) The American Educational History Journal is a peer-reviewed, national research journal devoted to the examination of educational topics using perspectives from a variety of disciplines. For more information about the Organization of Educational Historians (OEH) and its annual conference, visit the OEH web site at the web address: www.edhistorians.org. This Special Edition of the American Educational History Journal entitled, Snapshots of Educational History: Portraits of the 21st Century Pandemic, is the first special issue in the history of AEHJ. The word, “unprecedented” has literally been used thousands of times during 2020 by news outlets, in our work environments, and in our daily lives. And indeed, the global pandemic has killed over 600,000 in the United States alone at the time of this writing. The public health crisis shut down everything as we knew it. Captives of sheltering-in-place, scores of incidents displaying horrific police brutality against people of color streamed live on airwaves north, south, east, and west, begetting civil unrest across the country. These are circumstances unlike any we have experienced in our lifetimes. As historians, it is critical that we document this time of crisis so that generations to come can bear witness to this time of turmoil and tragedy. With these ideas in mind, the American Educational History Journal sought to hear from historians and other scholars about this unique and devastating time in our country’s history. The Journal honors the traditions of oral history and narrative storytelling as a means to gather the voices of those whose lives have been touched by the COVID-19 crisis, literally everyone around the globe. This special issue deviates a bit from traditional AEHJ requirements in that we specifically invited narratives, not be full-blown historical research studies. The point of this special issue is for authors themselves to serve as the archival material that will benefit future scholars interested in understanding what it meant to live through this health catastrophe while doing the work of educators. We believe we owe it to the historians of the future to share our voices in real time.

An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers’ Day, when migrant laborers—Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth—united in resistance on the first “Day Without Immigrants.” As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of “America First” rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas. Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights. 2018 Winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award

Blending a vivid narrative with more than 150 images of artwork, Painter offers a history--from before slavery to today's hip-hop culture--written for a new generation.

Surveys the evolution of daily life in America in the last century, collecting 650 images from the archives of LIFE magazine that visually record significant changes along such themes as parenting, machines, entertainment, fashion, homes, jobs, and shopping.