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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.

The women of the Socialist/Communist Unione Donne Italiane and the lay Catholic Centro Italiano Femminile are the protagonists in this study that examines the relationship between national Italian women’s associations and international women’s movements from 1943, when the associations became active, to 1968, when another generation of activists led women’s movements in a new direction. It shows that Italian women were active political participants during the tumultuous decades of the Cold War by considering their reach and impact in relation to Italian bipolarism and world events. The book pays particular attention to the UDI’s work with the largest international postwar women’s organization, the pro-Soviet Women’s International Democratic Federation, and the CIF’s relationship with the global Catholic organization, the World Movement of Mothers, to better understand the ways in which the Cold War affected both national and international agendas for women’s rights. The Italian case is particularly significant in placing women’s movements in a broader context because it exemplifies many of the political and ideological dichotomies that characterized this period. With the Christian Democrats at the helm of the Italian government and the powerful opposition of the Communists, the Italian women’s associations developed and utilized creative negotiation strategies to advance their visions of womanhood in a new era. They applied similar practices in their international work.

Just outside downtown Newark, New Jersey, sits an abbey and school. For more than 150 years Benedictine monks have lived, worked, and prayed on High Street, a once-grand thoroughfare that became Newark's Skid Row and a focal point of the 1967 riots. St. Benedict's today has become a model of a successful inner-city school, with 95% of its graduates—mainly African American and Latino boys—going on to college. This book tells how the monks of St. Benedict's transformed their venerable yet outdated school to become a thriving part of the community that helped save a faltering city. In the 1960s, after a trinity of woes—massive deindustrialization, high-speed suburbanization, and racial violence—caused an exodus from Newark, St. Benedict's struggled to remain open. Enrollment in general dwindled, and fewer students enrolled from the surrounding community. The monks watched the violence of the 1967 riots from the school's rooftop along High Street. In the riot's aftermath more families fled what some called “the worst city in America.” The school closed in 1972, in what seemed to be just another funeral for an urban Catholic school. A few monks, inspired by the Benedictine virtues of stability and adaptability, reopened St. Benedict's only one year later with a bare-bones staff. Their new mission was to bring to young African American and Latino males the same opportunities that German and Irish immigrants had had 150 years before. More than thirty years later, St. Benedict's is one of the most unusual schools in the country. Its remarkable success shows that American education can bridge the achievement gap between white and black, as well as that between rich and poor.

This book chronicles the extraordinary life of Ed Rohs, a bright, mischievous boy who was raised in five institutions of the Catholic orphanage system in postwar Brooklyn, New York, from infancy in 1946 until he was discharged as an adult in 1965. In 1946 Edward Rohs was left by his unwed parents at the Angel Guardian Home to be raised by the Sisters of Mercy. The Sisters hoped that the parents would return for him. In time they married and had other children, but they never came back for him. And they never signed the legal papers so he could be adopted by another family. Rohs was one of thousands of baby boomers taken in by Catholic institutions during the tumultuous post-WWII years: out-of-wedlock infants, children whose fathers had died in the war, and children of parents in crisis. Ed gives a brief history of each institution before describing that world. After discharge he has a difficult time adjusting, but he slowly assimilates into “normal” life and determinedly rises above his origins, achieving an advanced degree and career success, working for years in child welfare and as volunteer strength coach for the Fordham University basketball team. He hides his upbringing out of shame and fear of others' pity. But as he begins to reflect on his own story and to talk to the people who raised him, Ed begins to see a larger story intertwined with his own.

This is the story of Allen Jones and his odyssey from the streets of the Bronx to a life as a professional athlete and banker in Europe, but it is also provides a unique vantage point on the history of the Bronx and sheds new light on a neglected period in American urban history. The author grew up in a public housing project in the South Bronx at a time — the 1950s — when that neighborhood was a place of optimism and hope for upwardly mobile Black and Latino families. Brought up in a two-parent household, with many neighborhood mentors, he led an almost charmed life as a budding basketball star until his teen years, when his once peaceful neighborhood was torn by job losses, white flight, and a crippling drug epidemic. Drawn into the heroin trade, first as a user, then as a dealer, he spent four months on Rikers Island, where he experienced a crisis of conscience and a determination to turn his life around. Sent to a New England prep school upon his release, he used his basketball skills and street smarts to forge a life outside the Bronx, first as a college athlete in the South, then as a professional basketball player, radio personality, and banker in Europe. This book brings Bronx streets and housing projects to life as places of possibility as well as tragedy, where racism and economic hardship never completely suppressed the resilient spirit of its residents.

The book is about youth fighting for freedom and a state's retaliation. It is about the young not consenting to the kind of adulthood on offer under a particular political dispensation. It is about the character of revolt under conditions of tight surveillance. It is about negative forms of governance of children and about the violence of the state. It is about government-sanctioned cruelty. It is about the labour of youth in the work of war and about their reach for ethics despite experiences of pain and betrayal. It is, in part, about the attempts by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (henceforth, the Commission or the TRC) to document the past and its shortcomings in recording the role of the young and in securing a fair dispensation for them. Finally, it is a description of the relationships between young men of Zwelethemba, a suburb of Worcester in the Western Cape, who were brought together as local leaders during the struggle, who led the fight together, and who, in retrospect, examined it microscopically once it had ended. It represents an anthropology that takes on the intimacies of warfare. I set out to do an ethnographic study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an institution. My focus was on learning more about the part the young had played in securing the end of oppression. I sought to discover from the Commission's deliberations more about young activists’ commitment over time, their political consciousness, their development, their ethics, their actions and the consequences of their involvement. I was interested in the character of urban conflict and the relationships between commanders and foot soldiers (or leaders and protesters) and whether those ties held up over time and whether they were forged around rhetoric, contact, action, accountability, or responsibility. I was interested in a particular layer of leadership among the young - those recognized within communities as local leaders. I anticipated that the Commission would document the activities of those who, while still at school, had begun to protest against their oppressors and who, through processes of self-selection and induction, had become leaders. My ambition in this ethnography was to account for the fullness of some young men's experiences in standing against the apartheid state to the extent that that is possible and that I am able to achieve it within the loose confines of the discipline of anthropology. After the first few months of acting like a peripatetic groupie of the Commission, it became clear to me that its deliberations were not plumbing the experiences of young activists and that there was more to be learned through a different kind of ethnographic exploration. Therefore, I worked in Zwelethemba with fourteen young men who had stood against the state during the struggle for liberation. I sought to depict their fight as they described it in retrospect. The scene was a request to remember. The invitation to remember in conjunction with others was an invitation to each of the men to examine his life. In the process of our meetings, the men seemed to be engaged in a retrieval of the condition of being wounded, so that a certain balance of reason and emotion could be achieved in the service of remembering. Thereafter, I studied both the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the community of black African activists in Zwelethemba: the former a multi-sited project and the latter firmly situated in a single community. The South African Government gave the young who joined the struggle inside the country no quarter; indeed, they targeted them (in this book, I write about children and youth identified by the apartheid system as African although those who joined the fight and who fell under other categories defined according to set notions of racial difference were met with the same wrath). The Government's Security Forces meted out cruel treatment to them; incarcerated even the very young under dreadful conditions; and used torture frequently, over long periods of time. Many of the local leaders among the young were imprisoned again and again and ill treated even before any formal charges or court appearances were made. All of this is well known. However, little is known about the efforts the young made to sustain the momentum of the fight or about the stretches of time during which many were active; what they endured on an everyday basis; the nature of the battlefield; how much they depended on relationships with families, peers and community members; how their commitment was tried; what the stakes were of success and failure; and what was achieved in terms of growth and what paid in terms of harm. These matters are examined in the book.