Making the MexiRican City
To commemorate National Hispanic Heritage Month, this week's review analyzes the community-building and activist practices Mexican and Puerto Rican migrants employed in 20th-century Michigan.
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Posted on January 20, 2020 in Review of the Week
Breaking white supremacy : Martin Luther King Jr. and the black social gospel
Dorrien, Gary J. Yale, 2018
610p index, 9780300205619 $45.00, 9780300231359
This massive, thoroughly researched volume is the second of Dorrien’s two-part study of the history of the black social gospel tradition. In the first volume, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (CH, Feb’16, 53-2606), Dorrien examined the long history of the tradition in the 19th and early-20th centuries, culminating in Du Bois’s “lover’s quarrel” (as Dorrien calls it) with the black church. In this magisterial followup, Dorrien (social ethics, Union Theological Seminary; religion, Columbia Univ.) focuses on the intellectual forces that produced Martin Luther King Jr. In the first part of the book Dorrien examines the major carriers of black social “gospelism” in the first half of the 20th century, including Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman, and Adam Clayton Powell. In the second part he examines King and the movement, noting especially King’s growing radicalism and anger. He concludes with discussion of Pauli Murray, whose message, like King’s, resonates today. This is intellectual history at its finest; acknowledging his own choices, the author calls for others to fill in the social history of the black gospel. A triumph of careful scholarship, rigorous argument, clear prose, unblinking judgments, and groundbreaking conclusions, this two-part study is an indispensable resource on American religious history.
Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
Reviewer: P. Harvey, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Subject: Humanities – Religion
Choice Issue: Jul 2018
To commemorate National Hispanic Heritage Month, this week's review analyzes the community-building and activist practices Mexican and Puerto Rican migrants employed in 20th-century Michigan.
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This week's review offers a roadmap for teaching contemporary US history, providing instructors with tips to tackle recent divisive topics and engage students with primary sources.
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Researching the experiences of day laborers in Denver, Colorado, this week's review examines wage theft and nefarious labor practices that reflect broader systemic labor issues in the US.
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This week's review showcases the work of international women photographers dating back to the 19th century, disrupting stereotypes over what constitutes women's work.
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