A post by Louis A. DeCaro Jr., author of Fire From the Midst of You: The Religious Life of John Brown. Visit his John Brown blog at http://abolitionist-john-brown.blogspot.com/

Although U.S. history buffs will readily remind us that 2009 is the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, not a few will also recall that this year is the sesquicentennial of abolitionist John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and subsequent hanging by the State of Virginia on December 2. Of course Brown is a controversial figure–at least from the standpoint of many white people. Historically, African Americans have seen Brown fundamentally as a positive figure in history. (Indeed, 2009 is also the centennial of W. E. B. DuBois’s renowned biography of Brown, which remains a perennial favorite despite an abundance of errors in detail.) My own book on Brown, “Fire from the Midst of You”: A Religious Life of John Brown (NYU Press, 2002), which was the first biography of the abolitionist in the 21st century, considers Brown’s intimate friendships and alliances with the black community pre-dating the Harper’s Ferry raid by a decade. In other words, black leaders knew Brown as an ally a good many years before most whites knew of him as an anti-slavery figure.

From a biographer’s standpoint, the 20th century largely belonged to Brown’s detractors. Largely informed by the slave masters’ version of the raid as well as the evasive political approach toward Brown typified by Lincoln’s Republican Party, white society inherited a cynical view of Brown as a well-meaning extremist and fanatic. Although this cynicism was counterbalanced for a time by pro-Brown sympathies among influential abolitionist spokesmen, the well of sympathy for Brown dried up toward the end of the 19th century as white society increasingly distanced itself from the concerns of the formerly enslaved African American. Anti-Brown writers in the North and South published exposes and screeds portraying him as a murderer and brigand, and by the mid-20th century historians like Allan Nevins confidently characterized Brown as insane. This negative view was further encouraged by the popular 1940 movie, “Santa Fe Trail,” the screenplay of which was written by a Virginia native who believed the Civil War was avoidable and that Brown was a deluded fanatic and murderer who helped force the nation in the wrong direction of civil war. As I point out in my book, the black community long recognized the popular bias against Brown prevailing among whites. In 1964, Malcolm X put it most succinctly when he alluded to the same movie, saying that whites had made Brown look like a “nut.”
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Lázaro Lima, author of The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory, offers a look at the particular type of racism on the rise with Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court.

Writing in the New York Times Frank Rich observed not too long that “Gay people… aren’t the surefire scapegoats they once were. Hence the rise of a jucier target: Hispanics. They are the new gays, the foremost political piñata.” Rich’s observation took on literalist meaning this week when Creators Syndicate’s Chip Bok depicted Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor hanging from a rope and strung up like a piñata along with a Mariachi sombrero-wearing President Obama handing out bats to Republican Congressmen.

Recall, for example, how the “lynching” that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said he indignantly “suffered” when Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings years ago drew ire for obvious though ironic reasons. After all, the conservative Thomas, who wouldn’t have been able to marry his Anglo American wife in the state of Virginia, where he lived, until Loving vs. Virginia (1968) made it legal for Blacks to marry whites, used the proverbial race card when all through his career he had eschewed the “racisim” inherent to affirmative action policies that, for him, discriminated against whites. So suddenly, from his race-free worldview, he was being lynched by, not inconsequentially, a black woman.

Fast-forward to our present and now Sotomayor, of Puerto Rican descent, and hanging, ahem, presumably from a tree, is a stand-in for all Latinos in the U.S. as a recent cover of Time Magazine suggested. Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens by birth, are somehow like Mariachi-sombrero wearing and presumably piñata loving Mexicans in the public imagination though the they are routinely discriminated against with a fervor and hate that makes politicians spend billions on paper-walls to keep “them” out though they’ve been “in” the U.S. for longer than current political and historical memory can account for. Political piñatas indeed. And thus the problem with representative personhood for “Latinos” as it is understood in the public imagination.
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A review of Across Generations: Immigrant Families in America by Nancy Foner in The Indypendent.

A 10-year-old daughter of an African immigrant falls during school recess in Washington, D.C., scraping her knee. School classmates run over to help — the girl’s knee is bleeding from the fall — but the teacher immediately interjects, “Don’t touch her, she is from Africa, you might get AIDS!”

Raised by his grandparents in El Salvador, Eduardo resents his parents’ decision to move to the United States without him. Working three jobs, his mother says she only wanted the best for him. Eduardo asks, “What do you think is worse, to share poverty here with my half-siblings and mother and father, or not having learned how to love them because I never saw them?”

These accounts are just a taste of the plethora of stories in Across Generations: Immigrant Families in America, a collection of essays that unearth the generational and cultural tensions that divide immigrant families and the ties that bring them together. Editor Nancy Foner, together with 10 scholars (nine sociologists and one anthropologist), delves into this largely unexplored world, reminding us that there is more to immigrants than the one-dimensional image of the “hard worker” portrayed by mainstream culture. The book explores the immigrant family within a transnational context, analyzing the heavy impact of geo-political and societal forces.

NYU Press is pleased to announce the receipt of a planning grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a collaborative university press electronic book project. The grant, to be administered by NYU Press on behalf of collaborating presses at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and Rutgers University, will fund multifaceted research into the feasibility of developing a consortium of university presses to deliver e-books to libraries on a shared platform. The participating presses will select and hire one or more consultants who will survey librarians about their evolving needs for digitally available scholarship, and appraise technology vendors, purchasing models and partnerships, and delivery platforms.

The initiative will differ from existing e-book ventures in that it will be run by and for scholarly publishers, with a primary focus on the needs of university presses and their library customers. Other notable features of the consortium include:

• A large number of university presses, a minimum of ten in the first year, but with a plan for significantly larger scale, adding five to ten in each successive year over a five-year period
• The presses that would launch this project would represent a mix of sizes
• The goal would be to launch with a minimum of 10,000 e-books, both backlist and frontlist, with a plan for annual additions
• Initial focus on the library market with the possible expansion to students for classroom use, and, depending on the consultant’s recommendation, later to individual consumers
• Multiple delivery models and purchase/subscription options, giving libraries the flexibilities they seek, including selection by subject area, year of publication, and patron-driven features
• Possible bundling with print or print-on-demand editions should the libraries find this useful as we make the transition from print books to e-books

For university presses, this is the ideal time to launch a new e-book initiative. The need is clear, and no vendor has emerged to fill it to the satisfaction of the academic publishing or library communities. The consortium envisioned by the four partner presses is an ambitious but practical way for scholarly publishers to address the changing landscape for the dissemination of scholarship.

The co-principal investigators for the grant are Steve Maikowski, Director of NYU Press, and Marlie Wasserman, Director of Rutgers University Press.

A cool shout out to Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, with excerpts.

*Prof Henry Jenkins, your paradigm is wanted on line one:

“Rock musicians are penning operas (Damon Albarn, Rufus Wainwright), performing with orchestras (Metallica, Elbow) and learning the lute (Sting). Theatre companies such as Punchdrunk are staging strange shows that feel more like exhibitions, or dismembered film sets, than plays. Film actors are learning to dance (Juliette Binoche); choreographers are acting (Akram Khan). In between judging TV talent shows, pop impresario Simon Cowell is hothousing classical acts (the Armani-clad quartet Il Divo and their pre-teen equivalents, Angelis). In fact, “classical crossover” is now so big, the US magazine Billboard has given the category its own chart.

Andrew Ross’s Nice Work If You Can Get It appears in the Briefly Noted section of this week’s New Yorker (June 29th).

According to Ross, job insecurity became commonplace long before the current financial debacle. As economies shifted from industry to information, the benefits and securities of the Keynesian era quietly gave way to a workforce of temps, freelancers, adjuncts, and migrants. Ross finds that city fathers are more interested in Olympic bids and stadium projects than in sustainable employment, while corporations spend more on “social responsibility” public-relations campaigns than on addressing worker complaints, and activists are too focussed on narrow concerns to find common cause with natural allies.

A little fun from the CharlotteLaw Library…

Bobbie Studwell’s READ poster featuring The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Ageby Daniel J. Solove

I chose this book for the READ poster because many of us do not realize that the digital dossiers we create every day when we apply for new credit, shop on-line, or use our cell phones encroach on privacy in very significant ways. I believe that The Digital Person is a must read for law students and professors because of the timely information it supplies about spyware, web bugs, data mining, the USA-Patriot Act, and many other types of privacy assaults.

Hasia Diner, author of We Remember with Reverence and Love, has a great interview in the latest issue of Forward Magazine.

Jeri Zeder: How are people receiving your message that the “myth of silence” is just that, a myth?

Hasia Diner: It flies in the face of what they know… they often will say, “But I don’t remember it that way.” I think certain narratives about the past get planted in the public consciousness, and people in essence re-remember their own experiences in light of what seems to be the dominant motif.

J.Z.: As a historical matter, what do you think made scholars and other writers perpetuate the myth and actually believe it?

H.D.: The real answer is, that’s a subject that relates to American Jewish history following the period covered in my book; it requires further scholarship. But from my point of view, the myth of silence began in the late 1960s and was pioneered by young Jews involved in a thoroughgoing critique of American culture generally, and American Jewish culture in particular. Many of them went on to become academics, rabbis and community leaders, and repeated the same message in their public writings. What they said remained part of the historical record and was used as evidence by later historians.

NYU Press is pleased to announce the launch of an initial group of 65 books on Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book device. This first group includes both newly published books and backlist classics. Among the books now available on the Kindle are Phil Zuckerman’s Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment, Andrew Ross’s Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, and Nicholas Rasmussen’s On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine. To see the list of available books, click here.

In the coming months, NYU Press will make many more books, both old and new, available on the Kindle and other e-book reading devices.

It is with great sadness the NYU Press notes the passing of one of our authors, Luke Cole, who was killed on Friday, June 6, 2009 in a car accident in Uganda. With co-author Shelia Foster, Luke wrote the now classic From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (Critical America Series) for NYU Press in 2001. The book is now considered a classic on environmental justice and racism and has long been a staple book for environmental studies classics. A graduate from Harvard Law School, Luke was also the founder of the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment, based in San Francisco and represented many low-income communities and workers in their fight against environmental hazards.

We mourn his loss.

–Ilene Kalish, Executive Editor, NYU Press

More on Luke at Daily Kos