my new book addresses how we become "city people"

My new book arrived this week as I have by now said in virtually every social media site I have - except this one. That lapse is interesting given that so much in this book pivots on how southern white male slaveholders essentially played some role, whether they intended to do as much, in the "urbanization" of freedwomen and children. Certainly antebellum Cincinnati, as shown on a map in the page above, was ground zero for the resettlement of such women and children partly because of its position on the Mississippi-Ohio river waterway. It was easy to get them out of slave territory on this important river network. These were obviously people in whom such men had invested themselves emotionally and financially.

Via letters, business and legal documents, I carefully try to tell this difficult story that brings to light new ways of thinking about "intimacy" across the races. To say "intimate" is to go beyond the obvious and think about how people connect despite obvious power differentials that show up in everyday life. I think the city space is one place we have done this across time.

As the students in this class will learn, ghettoes are something that began to appear after the Civil War as Americans were increasingly separated on the basis of race. While there were communities like the so-called "Little Africa" and "Bucktown" where people of African descent congregated more often that not, they generally lived in clusters alongside of "native" whites as well as the German and Irish immigrants who began arriving as the century matured.

It takes real work to realize that city life as we know it today, even with the kind of gentrification that finds many white Americans returning to urban areas long populated by African Americans, is a historical development. We began to see it in this country between 1830 and 1910, give or take a decade.

That emerging urban life is something that can be studied and seen as something that is still with us. It's an abstraction, historian Gunther Barth tells us, in that it's essentially a way that people with very different backgrounds learn to share the same space and learn to find a "common humanity" despite their differences. Some do as much via sports. In other words, new immigrants learned how to be American by rooting for the baseball team in their town. They learned how to speak English by reading the metropolitan newspaper. They learned to see themselves and others by laughing in vaudeville houses.  Indeed, we learn how to be "city people."

I'll keep driving this point again and again as we use Tuscaloosa and Birmingham as a laboratory. Yes, we will leave the classroom more than once to see this emerging urban phenomenon that has changed, but remains the same via landscape - many buildings in the 1830-1910 window still stand - but also in how we interact. Stay tuned.

my new book unveils an unlikely nineteenth century city narrative

Some of the content below originally appeared in  a posting on my   Gender, Race and the Urban Space blog:

I am writing on this blog less as I teachThe Nineteenth Century City class in the Fall. I may return to it from time to time as I make new discoveries while teaching a new graduate course titled "Gender, Race and the Urban Space" and a new undergraduate course titled "Antebellum America."

Although I am not blogging as often on this site, I do want to take the time to share something related to the theme if often address: black urban life. My book Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Black and White Intimacies in Antebellum America is now available for pre-order on bookseller websites like Amazon.

The book, which will be published by Northern Illinois University Press this June, uncovers the ways in which (always have to get the requisite "ways  in which" academic speak in there) women and children of color migrated outside slave territory before the Civil War with the assistance of an unlikely body - southern white men. Ohio and Cincinnati in particular was filled with newly freed black and mixed race women and children owing partly to its place on the Mississippi-Ohio river network.

Ultimately, relying greatly on correspondence from African American women and children and legal documents as well as published contemporary writings, the book demonstrates that while white men can hardly be excused from their participation in oppressing people of color during the antebellum period, they unveil themselves as being uncomplicated as most human beings when they made decisions to demonstrate some measure of concern for certain enslaved women and the children they had with them. The book is yet another that shows the struggle of unmarried mothers of color in cities, but, again, white men are a  part of the conversation in anticipated and unanticipated ways. In providing black or mixed race women and children with the means to leave often rural spaces, white men were inserting them knowingly or unknowingly into emerging urban life in America. Indeed, the "nineteenth century city" is often the setting for my book.
That newly freed black and mixed race women and children manifest in such a setting is significant partly because far too often we do not often see people of African descent in chronicles of rising of industry and urbanization in the United States. Instead, we hear a great deal about such inventions as steamboats and when we hear of white-black interaction, it often involves race riots such as the kind that indeed took place in Cincinnati and other cities like Philadelphia and New York before the Civil War.

The explosion of literature on urban history, one of the fastest growing subfields of African American history, is widening the lens on black urban life during the nineteenth century. I look forward to sharing what I've discovered about the experiences of black women and children in antebellum and postbellum Cincinnati and elsewhere. Yes, given the racial hostility in Cincinnati, that city often served as a staging ground for some new migrants who eventually moved on to places as varied as Colorado, Kansas, Washington state, northern Mexico and some even returned to the South.

That said, I have entertained the idea of ending this blog and addressing my students and others via only my teaching and technology site. That site was created because technology - as in films, videos and music clips -  is so important to how I teach and even conduct research (film and theatre were prongs in my first graduate degree).

One day at a time on it all. In the meantime, back to teaching - and celebrating the coming release of my first historical monograph. Great way to start the new year.