The presses of some major Massachusetts universities offer appealing and noteworthy selections on Black history and education issues.
For this special edition on higher education in Massachusetts, Diverse Bookshelf gathered recent offerings from the presses of some of the state’s prestigious universities. They include titles on new research in Black history and topical issues in education:
Boycotts, Buses, And Passes: Black Women’s Resistance in the U.S. South and South Africa, by Pamela E. Brooks, $29.95, University of Massachusetts Press, (December 2008), ISBN-10: 1558496785, ISBN-13: 978-1558496781, pp. 320.
Oral histories from eyewitnesses provide rich material for an Oberlin College professor’s examination of the leadership roles that women took in the parallel movements for civil rights and human dignity in the United States and South Africa in the mid-1950s.
Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century, by Jonathan Zimmerman $18.95, Harvard University Press (December 2008), ISBN-10: 0674032063, ISBN-13: 978-0674032064, pp. 312.
In the 20th Century, nearly 200,000 teachers from the United States heeded calls to teach in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The author, who taught in the Peace Corps in the 1980s, examined letters, diaries and other records of teachers’ experiences abroad. Borrowing a title from Mark Twain, he reflects on what the Americans taught and learned.
Jump For Joy: Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in 1930s America, by Gena Caponi- Tabery, $26.95, University of Massachusetts Press (June 2008), ISBN-10: 1558496637, ISBN-13: 978-1558496637, pp. 264.
A scholar of “expressive culture” looks at what she calls the jump era (after the swing era). She ties the physical act of jumping that emerges in dance (the jitterbug) and sport (basketball) to its symbolism as a metaphor for bold, exuberant action. Caponi-Tabery also explores ways that Black cultural victories beginning in the late 1930s were a springboard for civil rights advances.
