Writing History From The Margins

With contributions from leading American and European scholars, this collection of original essays surveys the actors and the modes of writing history from the "margins" of society, focusing specifically on African Americans. Nearly 100 years after The Journal of Negro History was founded, this book assesses the legacy of the African American historians, mostly amateur historians initially, who wrote the history of their community between the 1830s and World War II. Subsequently, the growth of the civil rights movement further changed historical paradigms--and the place of African Americans and that of black writers in publishing and in the historical profession. Through slavery and segregation, self-educated and formally educated Blacks wrote works of history, often in order to inscribe African Americans within the main historical narrative of the nation, with a two-fold objective: to make African Americans proud of their past and to enable them to fight against white prejudice. Over the past decade, historians have turned to the study of these pioneers, but a number of issues remain to be considered. This anthology will contribute to answering several key questions concerning who published these books, and how were they distributed, read, and received. Little has been written concerning what they reveal about the construction of professional history in the nineteenth century when examined in relation to other writings by Euro-Americans working in an academic setting or as independent researchers.

With contributions from leading American and European scholars, this collection of original essays surveys the actors and the modes of writing history from the "margins" of society, focusing specifically on African Americans. Nearly 100 years after The Journal of Negro History was founded, this book assesses the legacy of the African American historians, mostly amateur historians initially, who wrote the history of their community between the 1830s and World War II. Subsequently, the growth of the civil rights movement further changed historical paradigms--and the place of African Americans and that of black writers in publishing and in the historical profession. Through slavery and segregation, self-educated and formally educated Blacks wrote works of history, often in order to inscribe African Americans within the main historical narrative of the nation, with a two-fold objective: to make African Americans proud of their past and to enable them to fight against white prejudice. Over the past decade, historians have turned to the study of these pioneers, but a number of issues remain to be considered. This anthology will contribute to answering several key questions concerning who published these books, and how were they distributed, read, and received. Little has been written concerning what they reveal about the construction of professional history in the nineteenth century when examined in relation to other writings by Euro-Americans working in an academic setting or as independent researchers.

Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname.

The series Histories of Anthropology Annual presents diverse perspectives on the discipline's history within a global context, with a goal of increasing the awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology. Volume 14, Centering the Margins of Anthropology's History, focuses on the conscious recognition of margins and suggests it is time to bring the margins to the center, both in terms of a changing theoretical openness and a supporting body of scholarship--if not to problematize the very dichotomy of center and margins itself. The essays explore two major themes of anthropology's margins. First, anthropologists and historians have long sought out marginalized and forgotten ancestors, arguing for their present-day relevance and offering explanations for the lack of attention to their contributions to theory, analysis, methods, and findings. Second, anthropologists and their historians have explored a range of genres to present their results in provocative and open-ended formats. This volume closes with an experimental essay that offers a dynamic, multifaceted perspective that captures one of the dominant (if sometimes marginalized) voices in history of anthropology. Steven O. Murray's career developed at the institutional margins of several academic disciplines and activist discourses, but his distinctive voice has been, and will remain, at the center of our history.

In texts from the mid-Heian to the early Kamakura periods, certain figures appear to be “marginal” or removed from “centers” of power. But why do we see these figures in this way? This study first seeks to answer this question by examining the details of the marginalizing discourse found in these texts. Who is portraying whom as marginal? For what reason? Is the discourse consistent? The author next considers these texts in terms of the predilection of modern scholarship, both Japanese and Western, to label certain figures "marginal." She then poses the question: Is this predilection a helpful tool or does it inscribe modern biases and misconceptions onto these texts?

A collection of 21 essays by David Bartholomae — one of the composition community’s most prominent members — Writing on the Margins: Essays on Composition and Teaching includes selections that have helped shape the discipline of composition studies. With Bartholomae’s wide-ranging introduction and three retrospective postscripts to set the essays in context, Writing on the Margins serves as a valuable reference — and as a powerful introduction to crucial issues in the field.

The Irish short story tradition occupies a unique space in world literature. Rooted in an ancient oral storytelling culture, the Irish short story has underwent numerous transitions, from 19th century Anglo-Irish writers such as William Carleton through to the 20th century's groundbreaking impact of George Moore's The Untilled Field. George Moore's work inspired the next generation of Irish Catholic writers such as Joyce, Frank O'Connor and Benedict Kiely, who foregrounded the backbone of the ...