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This book uncovers the history of the Colored Orphan Asylum, founded in New York City in 1836 as the nation's first orphanage for African American children — a remarkable institution that is still in the forefront aiding children. Although no longer an orphanage, in its current incarnation as Harlem-Dowling West Side Center for Children and Family Services it maintains the principles of the women who organized it nearly 200 years ago. The agency weathered three wars, two major financial panics, a devastating fire during the 1863 Draft Riots, several epidemics, waves of racial prejudice, and severe financial difficulties to care for orphaned, neglected, and delinquent children. Eventually financial support would come from some of New York's finest families, including the Jays, Murrays, Roosevelts, Macys, and Astors. While the white female managers and their male advisers were dedicated to uplifting these black children, the evangelical, mainly Quaker founding managers also exhibited the extreme paternalistic views endemic at the time, accepting the advice or support of the African American community only grudgingly. It was frank criticism in 1913 from W.E.B. Du Bois that highlighted the conflict between the orphanage and the community it served, and it was not until 1939 that it hired the first black trustee. More than 15,000 children were raised in the orphanage, and throughout its history letters and visits have revealed that hundreds if not thousands of old boys and girls looked back with admiration and respect at the home that nurtured them throughout their formative years.

Rundown, vermin-infested buildings; rigid, slow-to-react bureaucratic systems; children from broken homes and declining communities. How can a teacher succeed? How does a student not only survive but also come to thrive? It can happen, and this book tells the heroic stories of the author's students during her 33-year tenure as a Bronx high school teacher. In 1995, her students began a pen-pal exchange with South African teenagers who, under apartheid, had been denied an education. Almost uniformly, the South Africans asked, “Is the Bronx as bad as they say?” This dedicated teacher promised those students and all future ones that she would write a book to help change the stereotypical image of Bronx students and show that, in spite of overwhelming obstacles, they are outstanding young people, capable of the highest achievements. She walks the reader through the decrepit school building, describing the deplorable physical conditions that students and faculty navigate daily. Then, in eight chapters eight amazing young people are introduced, a small sample of the more than 14,000 students the writer has felt honored to teach. She describes her own Bronx roots and the powerful influences that made her such a determined teacher. Finally, the veteran teacher sounds the alarm to stop the corruption and degradation of public education in the guise of what are euphemistically labeled reforms. She also expresses optimism that public education and our democracy can still be saved, urgently calling on all to become involved and help save our schools.

Often called Lee's greatest triumph, the battle of Chancellorsville decimated the Union Eleventh Corps, composed of large numbers of German-speaking volunteers. Poorly deployed, the unit was routed by “Stonewall” Jackson and became the scapegoat for the Northern defeat, blamed by many on the “flight” of German immigrant troops. The impact on America's large German community was devastating. But there is much more to the story than that. Drawing for the first time on German-language newspapers, soldiers' letters, memoirs, and regimental records, this book reconstructs the battle and its aftermath from the German–American perspective, military and civilian. It offers a fascinating window into a misunderstood past, one where the German soldiers' valor has been either minimized or dismissed as cowardly. It critically analyzes the performance of the German regiments and documents the impact of nativism on Anglo–American and German–American reactions—and on German self-perceptions as patriots and Americans. For German–Americans, the ghost of Chancellorsville lingered long, and the book traces its effects not only on ethnic identity, but also on the dynamics of inclusion and assimilation in American life.

Since the 1960s, most U.S. history has been written as if the civil rights movement were primarily or entirely a Southern history. This book joins a growing body of scholarship that demonstrates the importance of the Northern history of the movement. The contributors make clear that civil rights in New York City were contested in many ways, beginning long before the 1960s, and across many groups with a surprisingly wide range of political perspectives. This book provides a sample of the rich historical record of the fight for racial justice in the city that was home to the nation's largest population of African Americans in mid-twentieth century America. The ten contributions brought together here address varying aspects of New York's civil rights struggle, including the role of labor, community organizing campaigns, the pivotal actions of prominent national leaders, the movement for integrated housing, the fight for racial equality in public higher education, and the part played by a revolutionary group that challenged structural, societal inequality. The author examines the Harlem Bus Boycott of 1941, the New York City's Teachers' Union fight for racial equality, Ella Baker's work with the NAACP, and a direct action campaign by Brooklyn CORE. Integrating Rochdale Village in South Jamaica, the largest middle-class housing cooperative in New York, brought together an unusual coalition of leftists, liberal Democrats, moderate Republicans, pragmatic government officials, and business executives.

This book tells a story of white children and their families in the most militant Southern state in the United States (the state where the Civil War erupted). Drawing on a rich array of sources, many of them formerly untapped, the book shows how the War transformed the domestic world of the white South. Households were devastated by disease, death, and deprivation. Young people took up arms like adults, often with tragic results. Thousands of fathers and brothers died in battle; many returned home with grave physical and psychological wounds. Widows and orphans often had to fend for themselves. From the first volley at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor to the end of Reconstruction, the book explores the extraordinary impact of war and defeat on the South Carolina home front. It covers a broad spectrum, from the effect of “boy soldiers” on the ideals of childhood and child rearing to changes in education, marriage customs, and community as well as family life. The book surveys the children's literature of the era and explores the changing dimensions of Confederate patriarchal society. By studying the implications of the War and its legacy in cultural memory, it unveils the conflicting perspectives of South Carolina children, white and black, during modern times.

In this moving memoir a young man comes of age in an age of violence, brutality, and war. Recounting his experiences during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies, this account brings to life the shocking day-to-day conditions in a Japanese labor camp and provides an intimate look at the collapse of Dutch colonial rule. As a boy growing up on the island of Java, John Stutterheim spent hours exploring his exotic surroundings, taking walks with his younger brother and dachshund along winding jungle roads. His father, a government accountant, would grumble at the pro-German newspaper and from time to time entertain the family with his singing. It was a fairly typical life for a colonial family in the Dutch East Indies, and a peaceful and happy childhood for young John. But at the age of 14 it would all be irrevocably shattered by the Japanese invasion. With the surrender of Java in 1942, John’s father was taken prisoner. For over three years the family would not know if he was alive or dead. Soon thereafter, John, his younger brother, and his mother were imprisoned. A year later he and his brother were moved to a forced labor camp for boys, where they toiled under the fierce sun while disease and starvation slowly took their toll, all the while suspecting they would soon be killed. Throughout all of these travails, John kept a secret diary hidden in his handmade mattress, and his memories now offer a unique perspective on an often overlooked episode of World War II. What emerges is a compelling story of a young man caught up in the machinations of a global war—struggling to survive in the face of horrible brutality, struggling to care for his disease-wracked brother, and struggling to put his family back together. It is a story that must not be forgotten.

Since its inception more than 125 years ago, the Cathedral Choir of St. Patrick's Cathedral has been considered the gold standard of liturgical music—an example of artistic excellence that has garnered worldwide renown. Yet behind this stately facade lies an intriguing mix of New York history, star secrets, and high-level office politics that has made the choir not only a source of prime musical entertainment but also fodder for tabloids and periodicals across the United States. As the city's preeminent Catholic institution, St. Patrick's Cathedral has served one of the most dynamic and diverse communities in the world for well over a century. It has been intimately entwined with the history of New York—a major center of culture in the nation's cultural capital. The Cathedral Choir provides an extraordinary and largely overlooked insight into this history, and in this book's exploration it becomes a microcosm for the larger trends, upheavals, and events that have made up the history of the city, the nation, and even the world. The book also illuminates the choir's important role in New Yorkers' responses to some of the most momentous events of the past one hundred years, from world wars to world's fairs, from the sinking of the Titanic to 9/11, as well as its central role in the rituals and celebrations that have made life in the city more joyful and bearable for millions of people over the decades. While the phrase “church choir” usually evokes the image of a dowdy group of amateurs, the phrase “Choir of St. Patrick's Cathedral” has always meant something quite different.

In this engaging, erudite new book, Robert J. Kaczorowski, Director of the Condon Institute of Legal History, immerses readers in the story of Fordham Law School from the day it opened its doors in 1905 in the midst of massive changes in the United States, in the legal profession, and in legal education. Kaczorowski explores why so many immigrants and their children needed the founding of Catholic law schools in order to enter the legal profession in the first half of the twentieth century. He documents how, in the 1920s and 30s, when the legal profession's elites were actively trying to raise barriers that would exclude immigrants, Dean Wilkinson and the law faculty at Fordham were implementing higher standards while simultaneously striving to make Fordham the best avenue into the legal profession for New York City's immigrants.

Established by Congress in early 1865, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—more commonly known as “the Freedmen's Bureau”—assumed the Herculean task of overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom in the post-Civil War South. Although it was called the Freedmen's Bureau, the agency profoundly affected African-American women. Yet despite voluminous scholarship on the Bureau, until now remarkably little has been written about the relationship between black women and this federal government agency. Neglected as well has been consideration of the role that mid-nineteenth century understandings of gender and gender difference played in shaping the outcome of Bureau policy. As the book clearly demonstrates in this revealing work, by failing to recognize freedwomen as active agents of change and overlooking the gendered assumptions at work in Bureau efforts, scholars have ultimately failed to understand fully the Bureau's relationships with freedwomen, freedmen, and black communities in this pivotal era of American history.

Through the lens of the court case of Luigia Paulovich, a legal appeal filed with Administrative Court of the Council of State against the Prefect of Trieste in 1931, In the Name of Italy: Nation, Family, and Patriotism in a Fascist Court explores the world of Fascist justice, highlighting the interplay of Italian law and Fascist expectations against the backdrop of inherited cultural, political, and gendered beliefs. It sheds light on the nature of Fascist authority demonstrating the fragmentation of power, the constraints of dictatorship, and the limits of popular quiescence. Focusing on the proceedings of the case revealed in local documents and national court records, the compelling narrative of an elderly woman’s challenge to the “italianization” of her surname reveals institutional uncertainty, signs of underlying discontent, and legal opposition to Fascistization in the first decade of Mussolini’s rule. The book shows how Fascist aims to create a “new” society clashed with conservative notions of family, church, and patriotism to affect the legal system and the perceptions and practice of justice. It demonstrates how competing visions of nationalism and italianità in Italy’s Adriatic borderlands, Dalmatia, and Rome persisted in regional cultural and legal particularities that impeded Fascist efforts to promote national standardization and enforce government centralization. The widow’s triumph indicates that while Fascist dictatorship appeared in many guises, dissent adopted many masks.