Jacqueline Jones

A panoramic portrait of the city of Savannah before, during, and after the Civil War--a poignant story of the African American freedom struggle in this prosperous southern riverport, set against a backdrop of military conflict and political turmoil. Jacqueline Jones, prizewinning author of the groundbreaking Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, has written a masterpiece of time and place, transporting readers to the boisterous streets of this fascinating city.Drawing on military records, diaries, letters, newspapers, and memoirs, Jones brings Savannah to life in all its diversity, weaving together the stories of individual men and women, bankers and dockworkers, planters and field hands, enslaved laborers and free people of color. The book captures in vivid detail the determination of former slaves to integrate themselves into the nation's body politic and to control their own families, workplaces, churches, and schools. She explains how white elites, forestalling democracy and equality, created novel political and economic strategies to maintain their stranglehold on the machinery of power, and often found unexpected allies in northern missionaries and military officials.Jones brilliantly describes life in the Georgia lowcountry--what it was like to be a slave toiling in the disease-ridden rice swamps; the strivings of black entrepreneurs, slaves and free blacks alike; and the bizarre intricacies of the slave-master relationship. Here are the stories of Thomas Simms, an enslaved brickmason who escapes to Boston only to be captured by white authorities; Charles Jones Jr., the scion of a prominent planter family, who remains convinced that Savannah is invincible even as the city's defenses fall one after the other in the winter of 1861; his mother, Mary Jones, whose journal records her horror as the only world she knows vanishes before her; Nancy Johnson, an enslaved woman who loses her family's stores of food and precious household belongings to rampaging Union troops; Aaron A. Bradley, a fugitive slave turned attorney and provocateur who defies whites in the courtroom, on the streets, and in the rice fields; and the Reverend Tunis G. Campbell, who travels from the North to establish self-sufficient black colonies on the Georgia coast.Deeply researched and beautifully written, Saving Savannah is a powerful account of slavery's long reach and the way the war transformed this southern city forever.From the Hardcover edition.

"Jacqueline Jones's Creek Walking is the story of a little girl growing up in Christiana, Delaware, in the 1950s, and the story of an American crossroads transformed over time. Wedged between two dramatically different extended families, she tries to make sense of the social signifiers that crosscut even this tiny village in New Castle County - differences between blacks and whites, men and women, Presbyterians and Methodists, migrants from Appalachia and migrants from New England, and members of the business class and working class.". "Jones's account tells a larger story about the folkways of the Protestant middle class in postwar America. To her, ordinary everyday life was infused with high drama. Sunday afternoon family gatherings, school days, and church services all manifested the social dynamics of a compact little community that seemed resistant to "progress," variously defined. Yet the determination of Christiana's black residents to integrate the local school is revealing of political tensions in small-town, mid-twentieth-century America."--BOOK JACKET.

American Work travels through 350 years of history to tell the epic, often tragic story of success and failure on the uneven playing fields of American labor. Here is the story of how virtually every significant social transformation in American history (from bound to free labor, from farm work to factory work, from a blue-collar to a white-collar economy) rolled back the hard-won advances of African Americans who had managed to gain footholds in various jobs and industries. It is not a story of simple ideological "racism," but of politics and economics interacting to determine - and determine differently in different times and places - what kind of work was "suitable" to which groups. Jacqueline Jones shows how racially divided workplaces developed, and how efforts to gain or preserve group advantages in certain jobs helped to foster racial hatred and contradictory stereotypes. Ultimately, she reveals in an unmistakable light how systematic forms of discrimination have denied whole groups of Americans the opportunity to compete for jobs, training, and promotions on an equal footing.

"Goddess of Anarchy is the biography of the formidable radical activist, writer, and orator Lucy Parsons (1853-1942), also known as Lucia Eldine Gonzalez Parsons, whose long life was entwined with the major radical labor struggles of her turbulent era. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851, Parsons became the wife of Confederate veteran and anarchist organizer Albert R. Parsons, who was unjustly imprisoned and eventually hanged in 1887 for his alleged role in the Haymarket bombing in Chicago. After Albert's imprisonment and death, Parsons forged her own career as orator and labor agitator, editor, free-speech activist, essayist, fiction writer, publisher, and political commentator. A fearless advocate of First Amendment rights, a founding member of the Socialist Party of America in 1900, and a cofounder of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, Parsons was one of only a handful of women and the only African American of her era to speak regularly to large crowds throughout the nation. Parsons was a thoughtful critic of Gilded Age America, but also well-known for her rhetorical provocations. She worked closely with, or bitterly against, other labor agitators of her day, including Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman, with whom she had a feud about the sexual liberation of women. And yet Lucy Parsons' life was shrouded in contradictions, marked by a series of traumas and personal tragedies. Historian Jacqueline Jones presents here a nuanced portrait of Parsons, reckoning with all of her paradoxes--her consistent advocacy of violence, her made-up Hispanic-Indian identity, and her refusal to acknowledge her African descent and the plight of African-Americans"--

In this work, the author, a social historian traces the lives of six African Americans from the colonial era to the late 20th century, using their stories to illustrate the complex ways in which racial ideologies in this country have changed since the first Africans arrived on the nation's shores hundreds of years ago. The very idea of "blackness," she shows, has changed fundamentally over this period. She also shows that race does not exist, and the very factor we think of as determining it, a person's heritage or skin color, are mere pretexts for the brutalization of powerless people by the powerful. This book explodes the fiction of "race" that has shaped four centuries of American history. -- From book jacket.

This second annual volume from the Organization of American Historians, containing the best American history articles published between the summers of 2005 and 2006, provides a quick and comprehensiveoverview ofthe topwork and the current intellectual trendsin the field of American history. With contributions froma diverse group of historians, thiscollection appealsboth to scholars and to lovers of history alike.

An historical study of the roles of Black women examines the weight of racial prejudice and sexual discrimination on the dual responsibilities of Black women as bread winners and guardians of family and community stability.