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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.

In late summer 1940, as war spread across Europe and as the nation pulled itself out of the Great Depression, an anticommunist hysteria convulsed New York City. Targeting the city’s municipal colleges and public schools, the state legislature’s Rapp-Coudert investigation dragged hundreds of suspects before public and private tribunals to root out a perceived communist conspiracy to hijack the city’s teachers unions, subvert public education, and indoctrinate the nation’s youth. This book recounts the history of this witch-hunt, which lasted from August 1940 to March 1942. Anticipating McCarthyism and making it possible, the episode would have repercussions for decades to come. In recapturing this moment in the history of pre-war anticommunism, Bad Faith challenges assumptions about the origins of McCarthyism, the liberal political tradition, and the role of anticommunism in modern American life. With roots in the city’s political culture, Rapp-Coudert enjoyed the support of not only conservatives but also key liberal reformers and intellectuals who, well before the Cold War raised threats to national security, joined in accusing communists of “bad faith” and branded them enemies of American democracy. Exploring fundamental schisms between liberals and communists, Bad Faith uncovers a dark, “counter-subversive” side of liberalism, which involved charges of misrepresentation, lying, and deception, and led many liberals to argue that the communist left should be excluded from American educational institutions and political life.

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 is the first full account in more than 20 years of two significant, but relatively understudied, laws passed during the Civil War. The Confiscation Acts (1861–62) were designed to sanction slave holding states by authorizing the Federal Government to seize rebel properties (including land and other assets held in Northern and border states) and grant freedom to slaves who fought with or worked for the Confederate military. Abraham Lincoln objected to the Acts for fear they might push border states, particularly Missouri and Kentucky, into secession. The Acts were eventually rendered moot by the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment. The author examines the political contexts of the Acts, especially the debates in Congress, and demonstrates how the failure of the Confiscation Acts during the war presaged the political and structural shortcomings of Reconstruction after the war.

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.

This collection of essays shows how the constitutional aspects of the Civil War were part of American politics for a long time before and after the conflict by examining developments from the founding era to the Progressive era. The contributors, both political theorists and historians, consider constitutional issues leading to the Civil War, the crucial role of Abraham Lincoln's statesmanship, and how the constitutional aspects of the War and Reconstruction endured in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The authors range widely: from George Washington's conception of the Union and his fears for its future to Martin Van Buren's state-centered, anti-secessionist federalism; from Lincoln's approach to citizenship for African-Americans to Woodrow Wilson's attempt to appropriate Lincoln for the goals of Progressivism. Each topic involves the constitutional causes or consequences of the War, and the authors emphasize how constitutional ideas shape political activity and are not merely derived from other processes. This shared approach shows that constitutional principles are in this sense “configurative” of political life. Accordingly, the chapters place important figures, disputes, and judicial decisions within the broader context of the constitutional system. The aim is to explain how ideas and institutions, independently and in dialogue with the courts, have oriented political action and shaped events over time. This approach is particularly appropriate to the subject matter because the constitutional conflicts resulting in the Civil War roiled just under the surface of American politics since the founding, and reverberated for generations after the fighting ceased.

This collection of ten essays explores the contested meanings of patriotismin the Civil War North. The words “loyalty” and “duty” vibrated across Northern society but what did they mean? How were they to be demonstrated? The central goal of this study is to scrutinize how notions of loyalty were debated and defined under the pressures of a long and destructive war. The chapters within eavesdrop on conversations about loyalty in many contexts within Northern society. Some of those settings offer a familiar frame of reference, surveying the newspapers, pamphlets, letters, and speeches that evidence partisan definitions of loyalty. These scholars, however, strain to hear those voices not just in the statehouses and capital buildings but in the churches, colleges, workshops, city streets, military camps, and even bedrooms of ordinary northern people. What emerges is not a unified consensus on loyal actions and values but a patchwork of experiences in which the meaning of loyalty was often stretched and strained for differing and sometimes conflicting purposes.

Dante put Muhammad in one of the lowest circles of Hell. At the same time, the medieval Christian poet placed several Islamic philosophers much more honorably in Limbo. Furthermore, it has long been suggested that for much of the basic framework of the Divine Comedy Dante was indebted toapocryphal traditions about a “night journey” taken by Muhammad. Dante scholars have increasingly returned to the question of Islam to explore the often surprising encounters among religious traditions that the Middle Ages afforded. This collection of essays works through what was known of the Qur’an and of Islamic philosophy and science in Dante's day and explores the bases for Dante's images of Muhammad and Ali. It further compels us to look at key instances of engagement among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

During the Civil War, there were throughout the Union explosions of resistance to the war–from the deadly Draft Riots in New York City to other, less well-known outbreaks. In this book, the author explores one of these least known inner civil wars, the widespread, sometimes violent opposition in the Appalachian lumber country of Pennsylvania. Sparsely settled, these mountains were home to divided communities that provided a safe-haven for opponents of the war. The dissent of mountain folk reflected their own marginality in the face of rapidly increasing exploitation of timber resources by big firms, as well as partisan debates over loyalty. One of the few studies of the northern Appalachians, this book draws revealing parallels to the War in the southern mountains, exploring the roots of rural protest in frontier development, the market economy, military policy, partisan debate, and everyday resistance. The author also sheds new light on the party politics of rural resistance, rejecting easy depictions of war-opponents as traitors and malcontents for a more nuanced and complicated study of the class, economic upheaval, and localism.

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.

Catholic theologians have developed the relatively new term inculturation to discuss the old problem of adapting the church universal to specific local cultures. Europeans needed a thousand years to inculturate Christianity from its Judaic roots. Africans' efforts to make the church their own followed a similar process but in less than a century. This book provides an examination of the Catholic church's pastoral mission in Zimbabwe or of African Christians' efforts to inculturate the church. Ranging over the century after Jesuit missionaries first settled in what is now Zimbabwe, this book reveals two simultaneous and intersecting processes: the Africanization of the Catholic Church by African Christians and the discourse of inculturation promulgated by the Church. With great attention to detail, it places the history of African Christianity within the broader context of the history of religion in Africa. This work aims to contribute to current debates about the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe and throughout Africa.

In the Election of 1872 the conflict between President U. S. Grant and Horace Greeley has been typically understood as a battle for the soul of the ruling Republican Party. This book argues forcefully that the campaign was more than a narrow struggle between Party elites and a class-based radical reform movement. The election, it demonstrates, had broad consequences: in their opposition to widespread Federal corruption, Greeley Republicans unintentionally doomed Reconstruction of any kind, even as they lost the election. Based on close readings of newspapers, party documents, and other primary sources, the book confronts one of the major questions in American political history: How, and why, did Reconstruction come to an end? Its focus on the unintended consequences of liberal republican politics is a provocative contribution to this important debate.

This study examines the ways in which black Richmonders, black Mobilians and their white allies created, developed and sustained a system of African American schools following the Civil War. As partners and circumstances changed over the twenty-five year period, Green argues that urban African Americans never lost sight of their vision of citizenship in their struggle for educational access and legitimacy; and consequently, they successfully enshrined the African American schoolhouse as the fundamental vehicle for distancing themselves from their slave past. The African American schoolhouse embodied black Richmonders’ and black Mobilians’ participation in the redefinition of American citizenship and transformation of the physical landscape wrought by Confederate defeat. Green contends that the end of Freedmen’s Bureau resulted in the expansion and not contraction of African American education. By demanding quality public schools from their new city and state partners, black Richmonders and black Mobilians found additional success through the employment of African American teachers, creation of normal schools, and development of a robust curriculum. Ultimately, Green concludes that their collective inability to resolve school funding challenges resulted in the demise of Educational Reconstruction and the ushering of a new phase of African American education in 1890.

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.

One hundred and forty years after his assassination on April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln towers more than ever above the landscape of American politics. In myth and memory, he is always the Great Emancipator and savior of the Union, second in stature only to George Washington. But was Lincoln always so exalted? Was he, as some historians argue, a poor President, deeply disliked, whose legacy was ennobled only by John Wilkes Booth's bullet? In this fascinating book, a leading historian finally takes the full measure of Lincoln's reputation. Drawing on a remarkable range of primary documents—speeches, newspaper accounts and editorials, private letters, memoirs, and other sources—the book gives us the voices of Lincoln's own time. From North and South, at home and abroad, here are politicians and ordinary people, soldiers and statesmen, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, in a rich chorus of American opinion. The result is a masterly portrait of Lincoln the President in the eyes of his fellow Americans.

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.