Leon Fink

When Community Comes Home to Roost: The Southern Milltown as Lost Cause

This article examines the experience of the Cooleemee Historical Association in North Carolina. It notes the many successes of this community history project, while examining the intellectual and professional trajectories of its principal sponsors, Jim and Lynn Rumley. The article argues that the project also became politicized and distorted, particularly in terms of issues of race relations and relationships between community and the outside world, ultimately projecting a highly selective historical memory.

A grande fuga: como um campo sobreviveu a tempos difíceis

The article presents a balance of the American historiography on workers. After detecting moments of crisis within this field of research, it points out recovery and vitality paths, with new themes and approaches.

The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (review)

black women’s issues. Black women often criticized the tendency of black men to see interracial intimacy as a civil rights issue, instead insisting that who one dated and married was a private matter. At times, the black press sought to include black women in the politics of intimacy by publicizing marriages between white men and black women. But this was really a politics about male freedom and the recuperation of black male’s sexuality, and there was little space for black women in it. The celebration of black men’s interracial relationships ignored the fact that many black women had been victims of sexual violence at the hands of white men. Indeed, throughout the book Lubin argues that representations of interracial intimacy that do not bring forward this history of racial violence are inherently problematic. His final chapter praises the fiction of William Gardner Smith, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes for understanding the limitations of the politics of interracial intimacy and for using the issue to discuss the legacy of racial and sexual violence during slavery. The argument that contested understandings of the private and public spheres were at the heart of the debate about interracial intimacy is used to tie together chapters that otherwise seem somewhat disconnected. Romance and Rights combines both the strengths and weaknesses of cultural studies. On the one hand, it is an interdisciplinary work that very usefully brings “high” literature, popular literature, films, politics, and law into conversation with each other. On the other hand, it often focuses solely on interracial intimacy as a “trope,” ignoring both the people who made the decisions about representing the subject (comic books writers, for example), and those who actually crossed the color line. But this study offers important insights into the nature of postwar racial politics and should be of interest to students of American race relations in the 1940s and 1950s.