The ASALH Website is a project of the ASALH Publication Committee, Daryl Michael Scott, Chair. Direct comments to phughes@asalh.net Phone: 202-865-0053 Fax: 202-265-7920 The Association for the Study of African American Life and History C.B.Powell Building, Suite C-142 525 Bryant Street, NW Washington, DC 20059 Page revised 11/10/2008 |
| NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS |
| In May 2007, Dr. Peggy Brooks-Bertram and Dr. Barbara Seals Nevergold of the University at Buffalo and members of ASALH, completed their fourth volume in the Uncrowned Queens: African American Women Community Builders series. The fourth volume, Uncrowned Queens: African American Women Community Builders, Oklahoma 1907-2007 was completed for the Centennial Celebration of the State of Oklahoma. The book features more than one hundred biographies and photos of Oklahoma's African American women from the first Land Runs to the present. The cover of the book features Drusilla Dunjee Houston, author, journalist, educator; the mother of historian John Hope Franklin, Eddie Faye Gates historian of the Tulsa Race Riots and other women who were pioneers in pre-territorial Oklahoma and who made enormous contributions to the building of the State of Oklahoma. The book is available through Uncrowned Queens Publishing at www.uncrownedqueens.com. |
| Dr. Peggy Brooks-Bertram has recovered and published one of the lost manuscripts of Drusilla Dunjee Houston. The manuscript is the second in the Wonderful Ethiopians series, begun in 1926, and has been lost for at least eight decades. It is titled Origin of Civilization from the Cushites. She will be presenting the book to the Dunjee Family Reunion on August 3, 2007 in Richmond, Virginia. Dr. Brooks-Bertram has been researching the life of Houston for more than a decade and is completing a biography on Dunjee Houston to be published by the University of Oklahoma Press. |
| If you would like to post your own announcement, please email phughes@asalh.net. Postings will stay on the Community Board for 180 days (or until the event has passed) and are subject to editing. |


| American Radio Works has begun broadcasting a radio documentary called An Imperfect Revolution: Voices from the Desegregation Era. The hour-long program features the personal stories of several Charlotte , N.C. residents who crossed racial lines in public schools as they were desegregated between the 1950s and the '80s. In addition to the audio portion of the documentary, there will be a web component available at the American Radio Works site after September 13th. On this site, we’ll soon be launching a moderated area where we hope people across the country will share their own stories of school desegregation. Would you be willing to alert staff, readers, or contributors to The Journal of African American History of this project? We hope that their stories will help people better understand how this momentous change unfolded in students’ lives, their schools, and their communities. Click Here to Tell American Radio Works About Your Experience. |
| African Athena: Black Athena 20 Years On... Call for Papers 6-8 November 2008, University of Warwick, United Kingdom African Athena was Bernal's original title for Black Athena, his "infamous" work that has confronted the modern academy with some of the most challenging questions it has faced over the last twenty years. This interdisciplinary conference seeks neither to demonize nor lionize Bernal's book, but to open dialogue on the issues it has posed: can a myth of Afrocentrism ever be a useful narrative in contemporary culture? How do Africanizing and classicizing cultures interface and interpenetrate in the arts and lives of Africans, Europeans, Caribbeans and Americans? Does Black Athena offer new possibilities for comparison between African and Jewish diasporas, cultures and struggles? How do we deal with the difficult collusion of essentialist and poststructuralist discourses in "postcolonial" thought? These issues are only a point of departure. Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Professors Martin Bernal, Paul Gilroy, Stephen Howe, Partha Mitter, Valentin Y. Mudimbe, Patrice Rankine and Robert J.C. Young. This is a Call for Papers from scholars of African Studies, Black British Studies, African American Studies, of South Asia, of the Middle East, of classicists, philologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and any intellectual beyond these borders. Send proposals of up to 500 words by March 31 2008 to Dr. Daniel Orrells, Department of Classics, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK. Email: D.Orrells@warwick.ac.uk Click here for Complete Details |
| An African American Philosophy of Medicine (Conquering Books, Charlotte) by Frederick Newsome, MD, MSc received the 2007 John Henrik Clarke Award for Literature (nonfiction) at the 16th Annual 2007 Summer Independent Black Writers Conference held at Southampton County, Virginia. The author, a faculty member of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and Harlem Hospital Center of New York, is a life member of the ASALH. Contact author for book orders: fvn1@columbia.edu or 212-939-1411. ($15.00 plus $2.50 S/H). |
| Encyclopedia of African American History Call for Contributions Contributors are still needed for The Encyclopedia of African American History, co-edited by Professors Leslie Alexander and Walter Rucker and published by ABL-CLIO, Inc. Scheduled to appear in 2008, this three-volume encyclopedia will be part of an ongoing series on American ethnic history. Aimed at general audiences and college students, this project will include more than 700 alphabetically arranged entries divided into five major chronological and thematic sections. In addition, we also have an editorial board of distinguished scholars in the field of African American History. For a listing of the remaining entries, visit our website at http://home.earthlink.net/~drwrucker/eaah/. If you are interested in contributing to this project, please send a brief C.V. and a list of preferred entries to: eaah@earthlink.net. Completed entries will have deadlines ranging from May 1 to September 15, 2008. As is usually the case with reference works, compensation is limited to a very modest honorarium or a copy of the published encyclopedia, depending on the length of entries. |
| CALL FOR PAPERS John Brown Remembered: 150th Anniversary of the Raid on Harpers Ferry. Multi-disciplinary, academic symposium Plenary Speakers: Dr. David Blight, Dr. Spencer Crew, Dr. Paul Finkelman. Content areas: John Brown's plan, John Brown and Frederick Douglass, Events leading up to the raid, Individual raiders, Survivors of the raid, the Secret Six, the trial, Press coverage of the raid, Lincoln's response, Responses in the North and/or the South, Governor Wise, Political responses to the raid. Submissions: 300 word proposals by 15 January 2009. Conference dates: 14-17 October 2009 Location: Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, Harpers Ferry, WV. Contact: Dr. Peggy A. Russo Assistant Professor of English Penn State University 1 Campus Drive Mont Alto, PA 17237 Phone: (717) 749-6231 Email: u7k@psu.edu See web site for further details: http://www.harpersferryhistory.org/johnbrown |
| 2009 Organization of American Historians Huggins-Quarles Award Named for Benjamin Quarles and Nathan Huggins, two outstanding historians of the African American past, the Huggins-Quarles Award is given annually to one or two graduate students of color at the dissertation research stage of their Ph.D. program. To apply for a $1,000 award ($2,000 if only one is awarded), the student should submit a five-page dissertation proposal (which should include a definition of the project, an explanation of the project's significance and contribution to the field, and a description of the most important primary sources), along with a one-page itemized budget explaining travel and research plans. Each application must be accompanied by a letter from the dissertation adviser attesting to the student's status and the ways in which the Huggins-Quarles Award will facilitate the completion of the dissertation project. Please also include email addresses for both the applicant and the adviser, if available. One complete copy of each application (including cover letter, abstract, budget, and reference letter), clearly labeled "2009 Huggins-Quarles Award Entry," must be mailed to each member of the Committee on the Status of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American Historians (ALANA) and ALANA Histories listed below and received by December 1, 2008. The committee will evaluate the applications and announce the award by the 2009 annual meeting of the OAH, to be held in Seattle, Washington, March 26-29. Lionel Kimble Jr. Department of History/Philosophy/Political Science Chicago State University 9501 South King Drive, SCI 116-A Chicago, IL 60628 Amrita Chakrabarti Myers (Committee Chair) Department of History 733 Ballantine Hall Indiana University 1020 East Kirkwood Avenue Bloomington, IN 47405-7103 Lydia R. Otero Cesar Chávez Building, Room 208 University of Arizona PO Box 210023 Tucson, AZ 85721-0023 Adrienne Petty Department of History NAC 5/144 The City College of New York 138th Street and Convent Avenue New York, NY 10031 George J. Sánchez Program in American Studies & Ethnicity University of Southern California 3470 Trousdale Parkway, WPH 303 Los Angeles, CA 90089-4033 |
| CALL FOR PAPERS National Council on Public History 2009 Annual Meeting “Toward Broader Horizons” April 2-5, 2009, Providence, Rhode Island Call Deadline: September 3, 2008 The program committee looks forward to proposals that connect local stories to international issues, capture the role of activism in public history and related disciplines (i.e. public anthropology, folklore, art, economics, and sociology), speak to social justice and environmental politics, commemorate individuals who have brought about change, and, more generally, innovative ideas in the content and practice of museums, historic sites, archives, and other public venues. For more information, including submission guidelines, visit: http://ncph.org/Conferences/2009/tabid/304/Default.aspx |
| CALL FOR PAPERS “The First 100 Years: Documenting the Legacy of the NAACP” University of California Riverside, CA Deadline for Abstract Submission: October 29, 2009 The Journal of African American History (JAAH) is planning a Special Issue on the history and legacy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Over the last 100 years, the NAACP has greatly assisted African Americans and other oppressed groups in their struggles for civil rights, equal treatment, and social justice. Scholars in numerous disciplines have investigated the ways in which the NAACP has worked to end lynching and mob violence and to eliminate legal segregation and the various forms of discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, and education. Many recent studies have focused on the role of the NAACP in the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and its activities on the global stage. This Special Issue of the Journal of African American History seeks scholarly essays documenting the NAACP’s legacy at the local, state, national, and international levels. Essays focusing on the history, achievements, and impact of the organization on the social, political, economic, and conditions for women and various ethnic minority groups are particularly welcome. Among the topics to be considered in this Special Issue of the JAAH are 1) litigation on race, class, and/or gender issues; 2) voting and civil rights mobilization by NAACP branches; 3) relations between branch officers and the NAACP national leaders; 4) ideological conflicts among NAACP leaders; 5) biographical portraits of major NAACP local and national figures; and 6) the NAACP’s responses to Pan-Africanism, the Cold War and U. S. anticommunism, globalization, reparations, and other international issues. Essays should be no more than 35 typed, double-spaced pages (12 pt. font), including endnotes. The JAAH uses the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (Chicago, 2003) for citations. Guidelines for the manuscript submission are available in The Journal of African American History and on the JAAH website: http://www.jaah.org/. Submitted essays will be peer reviewed. Your cover letter should include the title of your essay, name, postal address, email address, phone number, and fax number. Your essay should begin with the title of the essay and should NOT include your name. Click here for detailed information on the call for papers. |