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Books by Wilson
Jeremiah Moses
Golden Age of Black Nationalism,
1850-1925 (1988) /
The Wings of Ethiopia
(1990)
Alexander
Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent
(1992) /
Destiny & Race: Selected Writings, 1840-1898
(1992)
Black
Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary
Manipulations of a Religious Myth (1993)
Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa
Narratives from the 1850s
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Afrotopia: The Roots of African American
Popular History
(2002)
Creative Conflict in African American Thought (2004)
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Teaching
Preferences
By Wilson J. Moses
I met Judith this
summer at the Catholic Institute of Paris, where she is
perfecting her French. She also studies Japanese, and
German; loves Wagner and Tchaikovsky; is interested in
medieval languages and literature; holds a junior black
belt in karate; displays a gentle sense of humor; and
patiently helps me with my grammar assignments.
Tall and slender,
with dark hair and green eyes; she gave one student a
look of puzzled incredulity, when he asked if she liked
bars or discos. Still she moves like a dancer. Lovely
to behold; pleasant to be around. What a perfect
angel! She even plays the harp. Really, she does!
This is not a metaphor. The only thing I have invented
is her name.
She holds a music
scholarship at one of the Big Ten Universities, not the
one where I teach. But I know of others like her, in
the honors college of my own institution. One of these
honors angels represented Pennsylvania in the Miss
America Pageant last year. Another took a course with
me, as a freshman, and the following summer while I was
in Paris, wrote me delightful letters in French. If our
faculty had to describe her in just one word, it would
be - "adorable."
How different from
the infamous Donnie Gilmore, whom I know only from the
Boston newspaper reports of his crime and punishment.
An acquaintance of mine, whom I shall call Professor
Carlson, tells me he had him as a student. At the end
of the course, Donnie, who had barely been present all
semester, allegedly walked into Carlson's office and
demanded a grade of B.
Carlson, who is a
former prizefighter with the personality of a pit bull,
stands 6 ft 2, and at that time weighed a muscular 220
pds., is a good judge of character and a man of the
world. He gave Donnie his B, and Donnie graduated, to
embark on a career selling stocks and bonds.
On entering the
"real world," Donnie attempted to employ those "Mau Mau
tactics," with which he had bullied his way through the
genteel groves of academe. His boss was a man of the
"real world," but, alas, not of the streets, and a less
shrewd judge of character than my friend Professor
Carlson. They say he laughed Donnie out of his office,
then fired him. So Donnie went home, and returning with
what Cardinal Richelieu called the ultima ratio,
did some firing of his own—at point blank range.
Donnie's former
boss is now playing the harp.
There are certain
students we all love to teach. Lovely, enthusiastic
American beauty roses, with IQs above 132, gifted
imaginations, nice tidy work habits, and appreciative
smiles. It is easy for teachers to fall in love with
persons so beautifully equipped, and so splendidly
prepared to recognize our superior teaching skills.
They are not like that lazy, disrespectful, lawless
rogue, Donnie Gilmore. We do not encounter his kind in
the AP program, or in the honors college. Heavens no!
posted 20 August 2007
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Liberian Dreams
Back-to-Africa
Narratives from the 1850s
Edited by Wilson
J. Moses
In the early
nineteenth century, the American Colonization Society
was formed for the purpose of encouraging emigration of
free blacks to Africa. While intent on ridding the
United States of what the Society's members saw as a
dangerous black population, the association also
attracted some liberals who viewed its goals as an
incentive toward emancipation.
Attitudes among
African Americans toward colonization were varied, some
viewing it as an opportunity to start new lives in a
free country and others seeing in it a deceptive scheme
of the white man. But when the passage of the Fugitive
Slave Act in 1850 put the freedom of every person of
African descent in jeopardy, many began to consider
emigration their only option.
This collection of
historic documents illuminates the debate on emigration
through the narratives of four black men who in 1853
traveled to the new black nation of Liberia. Their
accounts offer surprisingly different views and insights
on the young country and provide both endorsements and
condemnations of the colonization effort.
Liberian Dreams
contains four selections that have never before been
published in a single volume: William Nesbit's attack on
Liberia and its sponsors, Samuel Williams's spirited
defense of the black republic in response to Nesbit,
Daniel Peterson's pro-emigration tract commissioned by
the ACS, and Augustus Washington's balanced critique of
both sides of the issue. Each account offers a
perspective not found in the others, and together they
cover nearly the full range of debate among black
Americans of that time.
These narratives
shed light not only on the experience of creating a new
country but also on the conflict among African Americans
over the colonization effort, and they offer a unique
opportunity to witness African Americans encountering
Africans and their cultures. The selection by Augustus
Washington in particular reveals the insights of an
educated community activist with a sure understanding of
the issues at stake.
Historian Wilson
Moses, who has published widely on African American
history and black nationalism, provides an introduction
that expertly places the selections in context.
Wilson Jeremiah Moses is Professor of History at Penn
State. Among his other books are Black
Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary
Manipulations of a Religious Myth (Penn State, 1993)
and
The Golden Age of Black Nationalism,
1850-1925 (Oxford, 1988).
Source:
PSU Press
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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King of the Mountain
The Nature of Political Leadership
By Arnold M. Ludwig
“People may choose to ignore their animal heritage by interpreting their behavior as divinely inspired, socially purposeful, or even self-serving, all of which they attribute to being human, but they masticate, fornicate, and procreate, much as chimps and apes do, so they should have little cause to get upset if they learn that they act like other primates when they politically agitate, debate, abdicate, placate, and administrate, too."—from the book King of the Mountain presents the startling findings of Arnold M. Ludwig's eighteen-year investigation into why people want to rule. The answer may seem obvious—power, privilege, and perks—but any adequate answer also needs to explain why so many rulers cling to power even when they are miserable, trust nobody, feel besieged, and face almost certain death. Ludwig's results suggest that leaders of nations tend to act remarkably like monkeys and apes in the way they come to power, govern, and rule. Profiling every ruler of a recognized country in the twentieth century—over 1,900 people in all, Ludwig establishes how rulers came to power, how they lost power, the dangers they faced, and the odds of their being assassinated, committing suicide, or dying a natural death. Then, concentrating on a smaller sub-set of 377 rulers for whom more extensive personal information was available, he compares six different kinds of leaders, examining their characteristics, their childhoods, and their mental stability or instability to identify the main predictors of later political success. Ludwig's penetrating observations, though presented in a lighthearted and entertaining way, offer important insight into why humans have engaged in war throughout recorded history as well as suggesting how they might live together in peace. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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