I have a few books on my African American culture/history reading list texts that are from 1970-1990s and not readily available here in Australia.

To date I've been using ebay and amazon (exy) to buy those not available here... but the list keeps growing and it gets exy buying one here, one there, so I wondered if anyone can suggest or recommend a local 2nd hand bookshop in the US that is likely to stock a lot of these books? Then I can do a one=stop shop, and create a buying history with them so they might recommend other titles to me.

Some on my list are Race Rebels/Kelley To Make our World Anew/Kelley, Black Culture & Consciousness/Levine, African American Odyssey/Clark & Hine eta ll (SO exy!! but looks fab) etc...
.
other recommendations appreciated also... thanks
.

Well if you want cheap:

The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/408

The Negro Problem
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/15041

A Century of Negro Migration by Carter Godwin Woodson
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10968

The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 by Carter Godwin Woodson
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11089

Unfortunately Project Gutenberg doesn't seem to be organized by quality or genre.

It does meet the inexpensive criteria however.

umbra

quote:

Originally posted by umbrarchist:
It does meet the inexpensive criteria however.

umbra

you are such a cheeky one
I am after quality first, just a more cost-effective way of purchasing. Currently I pay $US10 delivery for each book from the USA coz noone seems to stock more than one title I want. You know I ought to start an African/African American bookshop out here! A cafe that has books, guest speakers, forums, poetry readings and zillions of books. Oh, and African and soul food. And Italian cofffee. And Habib Koite playing through the surround-sound. Hmmm. Ya never know....
.

quote:

You know I ought to start an African/African American bookshop out here! A cafe that has books, guest speakers, forums, poetry readings and zillions of books.

With wireless internet access of course so they can read inexpensive books from the net. LOL


CHEEKY?

We don't use that in the states. Is that British for obnoxious?

umbra

quote:

Originally posted by FireFly:
I have a few books on my African American culture/history reading list texts that are from 1970-1990s and not readily available here in Australia.

To date I've been using ebay and amazon (exy) to buy those not available here... but the list keeps growing and it gets exy buying one here, one there, so I wondered if anyone can suggest or recommend a local 2nd hand bookshop in the US that is likely to stock a lot of these books? Then I can do a one=stop shop, and create a buying history with them so they might recommend other titles to me.

Some on my list are Race Rebels/Kelley To Make our World Anew/Kelley, Black Culture & Consciousness/Levine, African American Odyssey/Clark & Hine eta ll (SO exy!! but looks fab) etc...
.
other recommendations appreciated also... thanks
.

You probably are not going to do much better than the two you sources that you site.

When you say ebay, do you also mean half.com. I would also suggest alibris.com. As far as bookstores, one of the best with respect to used books is Powell's Books in Portland, OR. Another one that you might check is The Strand bookstore in NYC.

If you are looking for older text, umbra is on point with Project Gutenberg. Also, if you have access to something a database like FirstSearch, you might also be able to find versions of text in an electronic format.

I will mention one more, which for many people is ethically dubious. There are lots of books that have been scanned and are available as txt files as well as pdf files via file sharing networks. Most people only think of these in terms of movies or music, but there are gigabytes of scholarly material available. People also seed text, audio, and video of scholars lecturing or teaching. Again, some of this material is copyright protected, and thus such distribution may be in violation of various laws and statutes.

thanks umbrarchist & kresge - this is a new resource of info for me. I'll check it out.

quote:

Originally posted by umbrarchist:
CHEEKY?

We don't use that in the states. Is that British for obnoxious?

umbra

CHEEKY = mischievous, playful, bold, provocative, sassy. Depending on the person and the context, it can be downright sexy. Obnoxious? Nah, obnoxious = obnoxious.

quote:

Originally posted by listener:
Hi,
you can search for e-books. And you can find historical African American books on websites of universities. There are many resources on internet
I don't know, but for Germany the shipping costs from the USA are really expensive.

yep, done all that... if I read all the books I read online, I've have no eyesight left and never leave the computer... which is a tad impractical. I also like to keep books as reference. I've found heaps of worthwhile info online - and even emailed Uni Profs directly for reading list info ~ it's just expensive paying postage separately. I pay around $US10 postage per book. If I can group books then that makes it more economical. Don't even ask about Amazon rate$.
.

Hi,
I've printed the online books. When I order American books on the German Amazon, I don't have to pay the shipping costs
When I was in America I bought a lot of books and I couldnt take them with me for the rest of the trip. So I sent them to Germany. It was 60 $, I would never do this again

hey listener, you've just given me a crazy idea... if I ever get rich enough (highly UNLIKELY but hey who knows) I could buy a jet and fly around the world buying up books for people and dropping in to deliver them personally. And have a glass of Shiraz while I'm there, of course!

Personalized book delivery... hmmm... all those new faces and conversations... damn, just got to buy that jet plane first.

hey umbrarchist! your links to Carter Godwin Woodson are timely indeed. The section of course notes I'm following list Woodson (among 4 other names) - his is a name I wasn't familiar with until today.

I have Soul Of Black Folks and a 'reader' of it, but haven't read them yet. Thanks.

quote:

Smile hey umbrarchist! your links to Carter Godwin Woodson are timely indeed.

Are you reading H. G. Wells' Time Machine simultaneously?

That stuff is from the 1930's.

I had seen several documentaries on Du Boise but I didn't read "The Souls of Black Folk" until six or so years ago. I was expecting to have to force my way thru it but it was much more interesting than I expected. This is the paragraph that sticks in my mind:

quote:

Still the price of cotton fell, and gradually the landlords deserted their plantations, and the reign of the merchant began. The merchant of the Black Belt is a curious institution,--part banker, part landlord, part banker, and part despot. His store, which used most frequently to stand at the cross-roads and become the centre of a weekly village, has now moved to town; and thither the Negro tenant follows him. The merchant keeps everything,--clothes and shoes, coffee and sugar, pork and meal, canned and dried goods, wagons and ploughs, seed and fertilizer,--and what he has not in stock he can give you an order for at the store across the way. Here, then, comes the tenant, Sam Scott, after he has contracted with some absent landlord's agent for hiring forty acres of land; he fingers his hat nervously until the merchant finishes his morning chat with Colonel Saunders, and calls out, "Well, Sam, what do you want?" Sam wants him to "furnish" him,--i.e., to advance him food and clothing for the year, and perhaps seed and tools, until his crop is raised and sold. If Sam seems a favorable subject, he and the merchant go to a lawyer, and Sam executes a chattel mortgage on his mule and wagon in return for seed and a week's rations. As soon as the green cotton-leaves appear above the ground, another mortgage is given on the "crop." Every Saturday, or at longer intervals, Sam calls upon the merchant for his "rations"; a family of five usually gets about thirty pounds of fat side-pork and a couple of bushels of cornmeal a month. Besides this, clothing and shoes must be furnished; if Sam or his family is sick, there are orders on the druggist and doctor; if the mule wants shoeing, an order on the blacksmith, etc. If Sam is a hard worker and crops promise well, he is often encouraged to buy more,--sugar, extra clothes, perhaps a buggy. But he is seldom encouraged to save. When cotton rose to ten cents last fall, the shrewd merchants of Dougherty County sold a thousand buggies in one season, mostly to black men.

The Souls of Black Folk came out in 1903 and I wasn't expecting to find much of relevance to today in it. But the interaction of technology and economics are of interest to me. Black Americans talk about slavery a lot but I don't hear much emphasis on the cotton gin in that story.

I found a website that said one person could remove the seeds from two pounds of cotton fiber in a day. A hand cranked cotton gin enabled one person to produce 25 pounds of seed free fiber in a day. How much could large horse and water powered gins produce? That technology changed the economics of the South.

quote:

Thanks in large part to the cotton gin, cotton growing became very profitable, and cotton quickly became the most important crop across much of the southern United States. In 1793, before the cotton gin, some 187,600 pounds of cotton was harvested in the United States. Just two years later, the cotton harvest was over 6 million pounds, and in 1810, it was some 93 million pounds.

The work involved in growing cotton was hot and difficult. In the South, most of this work was done by African slaves. It is generally accepted that the gin's ability to quickly remove seeds from cotton, together with the difficulty of mechanizing the planting, cultivating, and picking of cotton, helped to fasten slavery on the South. Many African Americans feel strongly that the invention of the cotton gin prolonged the abuses of slavery. In 1790 there were about 657,000 slaves in the Southern states. In 1810 there were almost 1.3 million.

http://invention.smithsonian.org/centerpieces/whole_clo...aterials/eiPac1.html

That paragraph by Du Boise is from post-slavery times but it is an indication of how Black Americans spent what money they got. That same type of spending behavior is apparent today. The techno-economic games continue.

umbrarchist

I now have the Carter Godwin Woodson book. Not being a fan of Courier "typeface" it took me a little while - and a friend's help - to strip out all those hard returns with a macro and change to font to Ariel so it's actually readable. I now have a 223 page book.

quote:

Are you reading H. G. Wells' Time Machine simultaneously?
That stuff is from the 1930's.

I've got so much reading I want to do I may never leave the house
As for time machine, only saw the movies. The original was ok, but oh deaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar, not one of Guy Pierce's better films. One I'm sure he'd rather forget. He did his best, but a script is a script is a ... croc

quote:

I had seen several documentaries on Du Boise but I didn't read "The Souls of Black Folk" until six or so years ago. I was expecting to have to force my way thru it but it was much more interesting than I expected.

I'm interested in your reference to the cotton gin and it's impact of prolonging slavery as compared to the introduction of the cotton harvester but I'd like to read a little more before I comment.

I have Reconsidering The Souls of Black Folk by Stanley Crouch & Playthell Benjamin (2002) - I've only dipped into it, but what I've read is really interesting.

One book I can recommend (but it's not cheap) and it's art: The Middle Passage by Tom Feelings, here is a link: http://www.juneteenth.com/middlep.htm

The Artist: Tom Feelings

Tom Feelings, well known artist and illustrator of children's books passed away on August 25, 2003. He was 70 years old.

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Feelings attended the school of Visual Arts for two years and then joined the Air Force in 1953, working in London as a staff artist for the Graphics Division of the Third Air Force. From 1959 until 1964 he worked as a freelance artist, his primary subjects drawn from the Black people of his community. In 1961, he went south to draw the people of Black rural communities: some of these drawings were published in Look magazine as part of a feature entitled "The Negro in the U.S."

In 1964, Feelings traveled to Ghana, where he spent two years working for the Ghana government's magazine, The African Review, teaching illustration, and serving as an art consultant for the government publishing house. In 1966, he returned to the United States to concentrate on illustrating books with African and African-American themes. To Be a Slave, written by Julius Lester and illustrated by Feelings, was chosen as the 1969 Newberry Honor Book, and was the first book of its kind to receive such an award. From 1971 - 1974. Feelings lived in Guyana, South America, working as a teacher and consultant for the Ministry of Education, and training young artists in textbook illustration.

Feelings received numerous awards for his illustrations. "Moja Means One," a Swahili counting book, and "Jambo Means Hello," a Swahili alphabet book, both written by Muriel Feelings, were chosen as Caldecott Honor Books in 1972 and 1974 and earned Brooklyn Arts Awards for Children citations from the Brooklyn Museum. "Jambo Means Hello" also won a Biennial of Illustrations award in Bratislava, Yugoslavia, The Horn Book Award from the Boston Globe in 1974, and a nomination for the American Book Award in 1982. "Something on My Mind" won the Coretta Scott King Award in 1978. The School of Visual Arts recognized him with its Outstanding Achievement Award in 1974. He has received eight Certificates of Merit from The Society of Illustrators, along with a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Grant in 1982. Feelings has been featured on numerous television programs.

In 1974, Feelings returned to New York, spending his time lecturing, attending exhibits throughout the country, and working on a book entitled "The Middle Passage," which depicts the journeys of slaves from Africa to America.

In His Own Words

"When I am asked what kind of work I do, my answer is that I am a storyteller, in picture form, who tries to reflect and interpret the lives and experiences of the people that gave me life. When I am asked who I am, I say, I am an African who was born in America. Both answers connect me specifically with my past and present ... therefore I bring to my art a quality which is rooted in the culture of Africa ... and expanded by the experience of being in America. I use the vehicle of 'fine art' and 'illustration' as a viable expression of form, yet striving always to do this from an African perspective, an African world view, and above all to tell the African story ... this is my content. The struggle to create artwork as well as to live creatively under any conditions and survive (like my ancestors), embodies my particular heritage in America."

Tom Feelings

http://ncanewyork.com/feelings/tom_feelings_tribute.htm

http://www.weyanoke.org/TomFeelings.html

http://www.mec.cuny.edu/news_stories/tom_feelings.htm

http://www.carolinaarts.com/1103usc-mckissick.html

Thanks for the headsup listener
It looks awesome, but to be honest I won't be buying it - my reading list is stretching at the edges too much and I need to focus. Someone loaned me their Uni Reader today which includes some great excerpts of African and Caribbean literature. Luckily for me some names I already have on my list to investigate: Wole Soyinka; Fanon; oh, and did I mention some African poetry plus I'm working through another Reader and I have quite a few other questions and dots-to-join in my head in reference to the slave experience in the USA. But I think as you dig, you'll find that out for yourself. Because as soon as you 'think' you have it worked out in your head, is when you don't.

When I mix the words book + art + Germany in my head I always remember the book 'Butterfly Ball' originally published in German. Exquisite artwork and illustration and much copied. Have you heard of it? We are going back to the 1970s bohemia

This message has been edited. Last edited by: FireFly,

I don't have a very long booklist. I do most of the research on internet. There are hundreds and thousands of really good websites, let it be African American in general or for areas in the US. Historical documents, laws, petitions and so on, all can be found on internet.
I am not so with the 'must reads', I prefer the books or texts of the unknown people. Once I've found a text of a survivor in Rwanda, you can learn much more from this than 'scientific' books.
There is also a publishing house (at least in Germany) for so-called 'Third-World-Authors', totally unknown writers, but they tell their (hi)story.
And it depends what you want to learn or to understand.


Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. (V. Frankl)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: FireFly,

quote:

And it depends what you want to learn or to understand.

what I want to learn and understand is limitless.
Besides, I've found... one conversation leads to another to a book to a forum to a website leads to another conversation, to a website to an audio book to a another person to ..... (much more besides)

For me it's trying to achieve a balance. I read a mix of personal narratives, art and history.

History adds dimension and context to the emotional power, sheer energy, beauty (or ugliness), and truth of a personal story or anecdote. Yes, there's much to learn, feel, and be moved by these on many levels especially as they speak to the heart. IMHO, these stories are written to help people understand, speak a truth or message that has been ignored, but also to encourage people to look beyond the author, to the history.

Other people's life stories and experience are other people's lives, it is only ever a 'glimpse' and is dependant on the time and the person telling the story - whether it's fact or fiction. IMO learning is about personal experience, individual interactions, our choices, and our shared humanity.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: FireFly,

quote:

The Souls of Black Folk came out in 1903 and I wasn't expecting to find much of relevance to today in it. But the interaction of technology and economics are of interest to me. Black Americans talk about slavery a lot but I don't hear much emphasis on the cotton gin in that story.

Just to come back to the above sentiment.

An aside... I was watching the first half of the film Darwin's Nightmare last night on DVD - which is about the social and ecological disaster that Lake Victoria, Tanzania (2nd largest lake on earth) has become after the introduction of Nile Perch fish, (a predator of local fish species) and the resulting debasement and degrading of the local people by the 'mechanics' of this particular industry. Watching it is heartbreaking enough - on many levels - however I was stunned to hear the words "cotton gin" uttered by one of the Indian "entrepeneurs" interviewed, who trades with one of the behemoth fish factories. So cotton gins are still used in Tanzania.

~ ~

I was confused if there was a difference between the cotton gin and cotton harvester... the answer is a resounding Yes.

I re-found this reference to cotton manufacture... I quote from Lemann's 'The Promised Land' which I consider quite astute, and may be of interest to anyone like myself who has a limited knowledge of this era/history....

It has been written about the cotton harvester/picker:
"the introduction of the cotton harvester may have been comparable to the unveiling of Eli Whitney's first hand oeprated cotton gin..."

"The cotton gin made it possible to grow medium- and short-staple cotton commercially, which led to the spread of the cotton plantation from a small coastal area to most of the South. As cotton planting expanded, so did slavery, and slavery's becoming the central institution of the Southern economy was the central precondition of the Civil War."

"What the mechanical cotton picker did was make obsolete the sharecropper system, which arose in the years after the Civil War as the means by which cotton planters' need for a great deal of cheap labor was satisfied. The issue of the labor supply in cotton planting may not sound like one of the grand themes in American history, but it is, because it is really the issue of race. African slaves were brought to this country mainly to pick cotton. For hundreds of years, the plurality of African-Americans were connected directly or indirectly to the agriculture of cotton..."

"Slavery was a political institution that enabled an economic system, the antebellum cotton kingdom. Sharecropping began in the immediate aftermath of the end of slavery, and was the dominant economic institution of the agrarian South for eighty years. The political institution that paralleled sharecropping was segregation; blacks in the South were denied social equality from Emancipation onward, and, beginning in the 1890s, they were denied the ordinary legal rights of American citizens as well. Segregation strengthened the grip of the sharecropper system by ensuring that most blacks would have no arena of opportunity in life except for the cotton fields.

The advent of the cotton picker made that the maintenance of segregation no longer a matter of necessity for the economic establishment of the South, and thus helped set the stage for the great drama of segregation's end."

"In 1940, 77% of black Americans still lived in the South - 49% in the rural South. The invention of the cotton picker was crucial to the great migration by blacks from the Southern countryside to the cities of the South, the West, and the North. Between 1910 and 1970, six and a half million black Americans moved from the South to the North; five million of them moved after 1940, during the time of the mechanization of cotton farming. In 1970, when the migration ended, black America was only half Southern, and less than a quarter rural; "urban" had become a euphenism for "black."

The black migration was one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements of people in history - perhaps THE greatest not caused by the immediate threat of execution or starvation. In sheer numbers it outranks the migration of any other ethnic group - Italians or Irish or Jews or Poles - to this country. For blacks, the migration meant leaving what had always been their economic and social base in America and finding a new one."

"The story of American race relations after the mechanical cotton picker is much shorter than the story of American race relations during the period when it revolved around the cultivation and harvesting of cotton by hand: less than half a century, versus three centuries. It is still unfolding. Already several areas of the national life have changed completely because of the decoupling of race from cotton: popular culture, presidential politics, urban geography, education, justice, social welfare. To recount what has happened so far is by no means to imply that the story has ended. In a way it has just begun, and the racial situation as it stands today is not permanent - is not, should not be, will not be."