Emma's Postcard Album

Black Lives in the Early Twentieth Century
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4968-4315-9
Verlag: University Press of Mississippi

Buch, Englisch, 277 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 188 mm x 262 mm, Gewicht: 1030 g

Reihe: Atlantic Migrations and the African Diaspora

The turn of the twentieth century was an extraordinarily difficult period for African Americans, a time of unchecked lynchings, mob attacks, and rampant Jim Crow segregation. During these bleak years, Emma Crawford, a young African American woman living in Pennsylvania, corresponded by postcard with friends and family members and collected the cards she received from all over the country. Her album—spanning from 1906 to 1910 and analyzed in Emma's Postcard Album—becomes an entry point into a deeply textured understanding of the nuances and complexities of African American lives and the survival strategies that enabled people "to make a way from no way." As snippets of lived experience, eye-catching visual images, and reflections of historical moments, the cards in the collection become sources for understanding not only African American life, but also broader American history and culture.

In Emma's Postcard Album, Faith Mitchell innovatively places the contents of this postcard collection into specific historic and biographical contexts and provides a new interpretation of postcards as life writings, a much-neglected aspect of scholarship. Through these techniques, a riveting world we know far too little about is revealed, and we gain new insights into the perspectives and experience of African Americans—in their own words. Capping off these contributions, the text is a visual feast, illustrated with arresting images from the Golden Age of postcards as well as newspaper clippings and other archival material.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mitchell, Faith

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde
• Sozialwissenschaften Sport | Tourismus | Freizeit Antiquitäten, Sammelobjekte

Über Autor(innen)

Faith Mitchell is a medical anthropologist whose career has bridged research, philanthropy, and social and health policy. In addition to numerous policy-related publications, she is author of Hoodoo Medicine: Gullah Herbal Remedies and The Book of Secrets, Part 1. Mitchell is an Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute. She and her husband live in Northern Virginia.