One More River to Cross (Revised & Expanded)


Book Description

Book one of the Standing on the Promises trilogy. After this groundbreaking, deeply moving trilogy about black LDS pioneers was first published, modern-day descendants came forward with further information, photographs, and more detailed history. In this new edition, the authors have corrected some errors and dramatized the experience of additional black pioneers.




International Journal of Mormon Studies Volume 6 (2013)


Book Description

The International Journal of Mormon Studies is a European based internationally focused, peer-reviewed online and printed scholarly journal, which is committed to the promotion of interdisciplinary scholarship by publishing articles and reviews of current work in the field of Mormon studies. With high quality international contributors, the journal explores Mormon studies and its related subjects. In addition, IJMS provides those who submit manuscripts for publication with useful, timely feedback by making the review process constructive.




One More River To Cross


Book Description

Military bridging, often impeded by mines and hostile enemy fire, is a vital part of the advance of any modern army. Britain's Royal Engineers have played a leading role in this crucial military operation, from the ravines behind the D-Day beaches to recent operations in Bosnia and Kosovo. The Royal Engineers have displayed incredible ingenuity in developing responses to the increasing amounts of firepower directed at bridging troops. This definitive study has been prepared with the assistance of the Royal Engineers and contains details on 170 pieces of bridging equipment, the history of all Royal Engineer assault squadrons, and accounts of all Victoria Crosses won during bridging actions.




Your Sister in the Gospel


Book Description

"Dear Brother," Jane Manning James wrote to Joseph F. Smith in 1903, "I take this opportunity of writing to ask you if I can get my endowments and also finish the work I have begun for my dead.... Your sister in the Gospel, Jane E. James." A faithful Latter-day Saint since her conversion sixty years earlier, James had made this request several times before, to no avail, and this time she would be just as unsuccessful, even though most Latter-day Saints were allowed to participate in the endowment ritual in the temple as a matter of course. James, unlike most Mormons, was black. For that reason, she was barred from performing the temple rituals that Latter-day Saints believe are necessary to reach the highest degrees of glory after death. A free black woman from Connecticut, James positioned herself at the center of LDS history with uncanny precision. After her conversion, she traveled with her family and other converts from the region to Nauvoo, Illinois, where the LDS church was then based. There, she took a job as a servant in the home of Joseph Smith, the founder and first prophet of the LDS church. When Smith was killed in 1844, Jane found employment as a servant in Brigham Young's home. These positions placed Jane in proximity to Mormonism's most powerful figures, but did not protect her from the church's racially discriminatory policies. Nevertheless, she remained a faithful member until her death in 1908. Your Sister in the Gospel is the first scholarly biography of Jane Manning James or, for that matter, any black Mormon. Quincy D. Newell chronicles the life of this remarkable yet largely unknown figure and reveals why James's story changes our understanding of American history.




One More River to Cross


Book Description

This is the story of Isaac Brown, a slave who was accused of the attempted murder of a plantation owner in Maryland, escaped, and ultimately made his way to freedom in Canada. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, Isaac Brown, a slave, was accused of the attempted murder of a prominent plantation owner, despite there being no evidence of his guilt. Brown, after enduring two brutal floggings, was shipped to a New Orleans slave pen. From there the resourceful Brown was able to make a daring escape to Philadelphia in the free state of Pennsylvania. His biggest error was writing a note informing his free wife and eleven children in Maryland of his whereabouts. The note was intercepted and led to his arrest and attempted extradition back to Maryland. While engaged in researching an ancestor named Isaac Brown, Bryan Prince encountered the very high-profile case of what turned out to be a different Isaac Brown. The story of this slave, with its culmination in Brown’s dramatic escape and ultimate success in crossing the border into Canada, is the riveting subject of historian Bryan Prince’s latest book.




The Expanding Boundaries of Black Politics


Book Description

This volume joins the preceding volumes in this distinguished series in presenting contemporary research by leading political scientists addressing topics of interest to those concerned with African-American affairs. It captures the expanding boundaries of black politics and the persistent interests of the black community at large.The anchoring symposium, ""The Expanding Boundaries of Black Politics,"" presents the scholarship of a cadre of young black political scientists actively engaged in the critical tasks of moving forward the study of black politics. Their concerns include expanding the boundaries of black politics along the lines of epistemology and methodology, especially in regard to core issues and areas within this field. In an introductory essay by Todd Shaw, the work of these scholars is situated within the context of temporal shifts in scholarly emphases. Overlapping issues and concerns across time as well as black political scholarship as defined in the field since its beginning are addressed.The second part of this volume, entitled ""Maximizing the Black Vote; Recognizing the Limits of Electoral Politics,"" concentrates on serious lingering social concerns. These include the policy significance of black mayors affecting the concomitant impact of the black vote, the boundaries being pushed concerning the conjunction of black theology and sexual identity, a gendered analysis of familial policies, and the deepening social and economic plight of young black males including felon disfranchisement.The Expanding Boundaries of Black Politics carries forth the search for an understanding of the relationship between religion, the black church, and black political behavior; cross-racial group coalitions as concerns matters of immigration, growing multiculturalism, and the impact on black politics; maximizing the impact of the black vote focusing on voting rights enforcement, the black vote in presidential elections, and the voice of the Congressional Black Caucus




From Drag Queens to Leathermen


Book Description

This book examines gendered language use in six gay male subcultures: drag queens, radical faeries, bears, circuit boys, barebackers, and leathermen. Within each subculture, unique patterns of language use challenge normative assumptions about gender and sexual identity. Rusty Barrett's analyses of these subcultures emphasize the ways in which gay male constructions of gender are intimately linked to other forms of social difference. In From Drag Queens to Leathermen, Barrett presents an extension of his earlier work among African American drag queens in the 1990s, emphasizing the intersections of race and class in the construction of gender. An analysis of sacred music among radical faeries considers the ways in which expressions of gender are embedded in a broader neo-pagan religious identity. The formation of bear as an identity category (for heavyset and hairy men) in the late 1980s involves the appropriation of linguistic stereotypes of rural Southern masculinity. Among regular attendees of circuit parties, language serves to differentiate gay and straight forms of masculinity. In the early 2000s, barebackers (gay men who eschew condoms) used language to position themselves as rational risk takers with an innate desire for semen. For participants in the International Mr. Leather contest, a disciplined, militaristic masculinity links expressions of patriotism with BDSM sexual practice. In all of these groups, the construction of gendered identity involves combining linguistic forms that would usually not co-occur. These unexpected combinations serve as the foundation for the emergence of unique subcultural expressions of gay male identity, explicated at length in this book.




Katie's Canon


Book Description

Katie's Canon is a selection of essays written for a variety of occasions throughout Cannon's celebrated career. This new edition contains three additional essays and a new foreword by Emilee Townes. The volume weaves together the particularities of Cannon's own history and the oral tradition of African American women, African American women's literary traditions, and sociocultural and ethical analysis. The result is a classic. Cannon addresses racism and economics, analyses of Zora Neale Hurston as a resource for a constructive ethic, the importance of race and gender in the development of a Black liberation ethic, womanist preaching in the Black church, and slave ideology and biblical interpretation.




Representations of Homosexuality


Book Description

Roger A. Sneed offers an alternative approach to black homosexuality for black religious scholars who have traditionally viewed homosexuality as a problem. Instead, by drawing on a range of black gay writers, Representations of Homosexuality points black religious scholarship towards an ethics of openness.




The Drag Queen Anthology


Book Description

Examine the cultural and political implications of male-to-female gender performance! The Drag Queen Anthology: The Absolutely Fabulous but Flawlessly Customary World of Female Impersonators examines the phenomena of male-to-female gender performance and the people who live it. This provocative collection of original essays explores the possibilities, limitations, ironies, and controversies surrounding men who perform as women to an audience that knows the truth but celebrates the illusion. The book’s contributors call on extensive backgrounds in sociology, anthropology, theater, literature—even military studies—and use a variety of approaches to address common themes and genres of presentation, performance, and style in a wide range of historical settings and cultures. The Drag Queen Anthology explores female impersonation in the past and present, addressing the often-contradictory cultural impulses found in the performance of femininity. The book examines the important issues of this unique form of gendering, including the cultural and sociopolitical implications of drag, the symbolic cultural ideals associated with women, the impact of the performer’s social identities on his performance, and the reactions of the GLBT, straight, and feminist communities to drag. The book looks at traditional drag performance, challenges accepted perceptions about female impersonation, and exposes the notion of the effeminate drag queen as an outdated myth. The Drag Queen Anthology examines the important issues of male-to-female gender performance, including: how drag queen performance is used to attain situational status and power how drag queens challenge contemporary notions of gender what embodiment occurs when men undertake performances of femininity how drag queen performance is viewed as a theatrical presentation of self what representations of drag queens in film suggest about current gender relations why communities organize around drag queen performers how drag queen performance differs on-stage and off how male-to-female gendered performance intersects with performances of sexual identity, social class, race, age, and ethnicity The Drag Queen Anthology: The Absolutely Fabulous but Flawlessly Customary World of Female Impersonators is an indispensable resource on drag’s core elements of performance and parody and how each affects contemporary notions of gender.