African American Field Examination
Spring 2009
Answer one question from Part I and two questions from Part II. You must do a
total of three (3) questions. Be sure each essay has a clear line of argument,
addresses as many dimensions of the question as possible, and offers relevant,
persuasive evidence from specific secondary sources wherever appropriate.
Good luck!
Part I. Please answer one of the two questions below.
1. Historian Rayford Logan termed the period from 1877 to 1917 the Nadir of
the African American experience. He used that concept to signify that the
era was one in which Blacks were incorporated into the southern
plantation economy as super-exploited sharecroppers, experienced a
revocation of their recently won constitutional rights, became the subject
of ridicule and contempt in the popular culture and were subjected to racial
terrorism in the form of urban pogroms and lynching. In discussing the
Nadir, it is important that you identify the role of racial violence in
structuring the African American experience during this era. You should
also explicate Black agency and resistance to both urban pogroms and
lynching during the Nadir. Be sure to identify the major events of urban
racial terror and the key years and critical lynching episodes during the
sociohistorical period.
2. Provide a comprehensive discussion of your proposed dissertation project,
and the multiple ways in which it potentially contributes to the extant
scholarship on racial violence in the 20th Century. Be sure to provide an
overview of the state of the literature in this area.
Part II: Please answer two of the three questions below.
3. You have been contacted by a prominent university press to edit collection entitled, Black
Workers in Urban America, 1910 to 1980. In organizing the collection, the press wants
you to include article that discusses the major theoretical and methodological issues
facing scholars interested in the African American workers. By providing examples from
prominent journal articles and monographs, please discuss at least four themes around
which you would organize this collection.
4. Of late the historians are reconceptualizing the Civil Rights movement as
the Black Freedom movement or the Black Freedom struggle. Other
scholars are reconceptualizing it as a phase of this broader
reconceptualization. At the heart of these reconceptualizations is the
question of historical periodization. Many historians have adopted the
concept of the “long Civil Rights movement,” thus expanding the
movements’ traditional boundaries beyond the era encapsulated from
1954-1965. Highlight the major debates on the long Civil Rights
movement. Provide your own argument as to the periodization of the civil
rights/Black Power movements. Reference region, class, gender, and
politics-local and national- where appropriate.
5. African American urban history when combined with urban studies is
perhaps the largest single area of scholarship in African American
Studies. Conceptual and methodological developments in this subfield
often influence the theoretical paradigms and methodologies that come to
shape African American history and Black Studies more broadly. Three
such concepts are agency, community building, and proletarianization.
Sometimes they are used collectively but often scholars utilize one or two
but not all three concepts. Trace the development of these three
concepts and their rise to paradigmatic status in the subfield of
African American urban history since the publication of W.E.B. Du
Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro in 1899 to the contemporary moment.
Be sure to chart the seminal works, major historiographic trends, and to
highlight the dialogue between advocates of agency, community and/or
proletarianization and other scholars and schools of thought.
1
Prelim Exam: African American History
Spring 2009
Answer one question from Part I and two questions from Part II. You must do a total of
three (3) questions. Be sure each essay has a clear line of argument, addresses as many
dimensions of the question as possible, and offers relevant, persuasive evidence from
specific secondary sources wherever appropriate. Good luck!
Part I: Please answer one of the two questions below.
Question 1: The journal of American history is publishing a forum on periodizing the
African American experience and has asked you to submit an essay. The editor sends
you an email with the following questions and ask that your essay provide answers to
them. The questions are as follows: In your estimation, what is the importance of
historical periodization to the African American experience? Discuss the historical
periodization schema/schemas you would employ to frame the African American
experience from the 17th Century to the first decade of the 21st. Identify major
watershed events and historical turning points through which African American history
has transitioned or transformed from one moment or period to another.
Question 2: Among the many important arguments made by Sterling Stuckey in Slave
Culture: The Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America is that the
colonial period comprised the longest period of time not only in the slave experience, but
in the African American experience overall. Stuckey and later Michael Gomex in
Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the
Colonial and Antebellum South and Gwendolyn Mildo Hall in Slavery and African
Ethnicities: Restoring the Links all argue that the colonial period was the major formative
moment in the creation of
African Americans as a distinct people. Discuss this processes by which various African
ethnicities which different cultures were transformed into a single people with a single
culture. Pay close attention to processes generated by slave masters and enslavement as
well as those arising from internal African initiative. Also be attentive to the roles of
women and gender, and to the themes of Black agency and resistance, community
building, and Black Nationalism.
Part II: Please answer two of the three questions below.
Question 3: Drawing on your knowledge of the extant literature, critically discuss the
major themes, debates and trends in the field of "Black Freedom Studies" over
the past several decades. Pay particular attention to issues of periodization,
place, gender, class, and internationalism.
Question 4: African American urban history when combined with urban studies is
perhaps the largest single area of scholarship in African American Studies. Black Urban
history represents over twenty percent of historical research on African Americans, so
2
this is a large and important literature, please discuss the development of the subfield of
African American urban history, focusing on the paradigmatic shifts and debates from the
publication of W.E.B. DuBois' The Philadelphia Negro in 1899 to Kimberley L. Phillips'
AlabamaNorth 100 years later.
In 1985, Joe William Trotter published Black Milwaukee which posited the
“proletarianization thesis” as the interpretative lens through which African American 20th
century urban history should be viewed. Discuss the contributions and challenges of the
new paradigm. Describe the state of the field on African American urban history since
the publication of Black Milwaukee. Be sure to highlight the dialogue between scholars
and schools of thought, chart the seminal works, major historiographic trends, dominant
paradigms, and leading theories.
Question 5: Discuss your own developing dissertation research interests, situating them
in the relevant body or bodies of African American historiography. Refer to both
seminal and recent works in your response. What scholarly questions will your
dissertation pursue, and how will your project contribute overall to the field of
African American history?
1
Prelim Exam: African American History
Fall
2008
Answer one question from Part I and two questions from Part
II. In addition you must answer one question that is U.S.
focused and one with a transnational emphasis. You must
complete a total of three (3) questions. Please be sure
each essay has a clear line of argument, addresses as many
dimensions of the question as possible, and offers
relevant, persuasive evidence from specific secondary
sources wherever appropriate. Best of luck!
Part I: Choose one
1) Racial violence has been a persistent theme throughout
African American history, yet the forms, rationales, and
responses by African Americans have changed over time and
across space. Beginning with the slave trade discuss the
roles and forms anti-black racial violence took and the
rationales used to justify it. In your discussion be sure
to address distinctions in the the types of anti-black
violence by place (region and size), state sponsored or
private, and whether it was gender or class specific. Of
course, you must situate Black agency, specifically
resistence into your discussion.
2) In methodological terms, discuss the pros and cons of
event-based histories of racialized violence and
resistance. If you choose to make your focus the US, make
comparison with other parts of the world wherever it is
germane.
3) You have recently been hired at a Research I university
and asked to create a graduate seminar on the African
American experience. You decide to focus the course on
antiblack racial violence. In designing your course, you
should select between lynching, and race riots and
rebellions. In making your choice, you decide to use a
mixture of the seminal literature as well as the recent or
emerging literature. Would you organize the class
thematically or chronologically, by major debates, or via
some mixture? Are there period markers in which a work
created a new paradigm that shaped how activists and
scholars (not just historians) approached lynching, or race
riots and rebellions, if so provide a periodization of the
2
scholarship by paradigm. Also you should provide a
rationale for your text selections in which you offer a
succient discussion of the contributions that each work has
made to the study of lynching or race riots and rebellions.
You should discuss a variety texts, divided in some fashion
between books and articles, and from disciplines in
addition to history.
Part II: Choose two
4) Allowing for both the global reach of white supremacy
and the materially specific realities of racial oppression
in the US, what - if any -- are the differentials between
racialized violence and resistance in North America and the
European colonies in the late 19th, early 20th centuries?
5) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak coined the phrase "white men
saving brown women from brown men" to describe the British
abolition of suttee (widow-burning) in nineteenth-century
colonial India. To what extent is this claim paradigmatic
of modern struggles which involve racial violence and its
resistance?
6) Manning Marable has argued that African Americans are
not so much dominated by hegemony as by brute force.
Scholars in the Black radical tradition tend to agree with
his assessment. If this is so, how might one account for
the tendency of the U.S. state repressive and ideological
apparatuses (in Althusser’s terminology) to respond to
African Americans disproportionately through the mechanisms
of violence and repression? In other words, what explains
the dominance of force rather than fraud, coercion rather
than consent, in the relationship between the African
American people and the U.S. state, and white civil
society? Select a period of African American history and
offer an explanation for the excessive use of antiblack
violence during that particular sociohistorical moment.
1
Preliminary Examination:
African American History
Professors S.K. Cha-Jua and C.E. Lang
Fall
2007
Answer one question from Part I and two questions from Part II.
You must complete a total of three (3) questions.
Please be
sure each essay has a clear line of argument, addresses as many
dimensions of the question as possible, and offers relevant,
persuasive evidence from specific secondary sources wherever
appropriate. Best of luck!
Part I: Choose one
1. In recent years, the “African Diaspora” has become a popular
motif for interpreting the experiences of African Americans.”
Though popular the “African Diaspora” is a slippery concept
which various scholars conceptualize quite differently. For
some, it references those black communities outside the
continent that were formed through the forced migration of the
European (Atlantic) Slave Trade. For others, it refers to the
global relocation of people of African descent, prior to,
during, and after the European (Atlantic) Slave Trade. And for
still others, it refers to Africa and its displaced communities
outside of the continent. How do you understand the concept?
Focusing on both the 19th and 20th centuries address the ways in
which your understanding of the “African Diaspora” illuminates
otherwise hidden or marginalized aspects of African American
history? How does your understanding of the “African Diaspora”
reshape our understanding of the Black liberation movement
across the long 20th century (1890-1999)?
2. Create a list of nine prominent Pan-Africanist theorists,
three each should be selected from Africa, the United States,
and from other countries and communities in the Atlantic world.
Which individuals regardless of region do you consider the three
most prominent Pan-Africanist theorists? Why? With special
attention to the sociohistorical circumstances in which they
wrote, compare and contrast their major writings.
Part II: Choose two
2
3. Following the Second World War the United States emerged as a
global superpower, anti-colonialist struggles emerged throughout
Africa and the third world, and the U.S. Black liberation
movement developed a mass base and became more militant and
radical. The confluence of these historical events combined to
make “Black Internationalism” a prominent theme in the African
American Liberation movement during the 1930s and early 1940s
and the late 1960s (1966-1975) than at any time other time in
the 20th century. Write an essay that explores the development
and maturation of “Black Internationalism” as a motif in African
American social movements since the Depression. How does this
concept reshape our understanding of the Black Liberation
movement? How do you see the rise of studies of “Black
Internationalism” transforming what Ture and Hamilton called the
politics of Black liberation?
4. The period since the mid-1970s is often referred to as the
“post-civil rights era.” While under theorized the phase is
generally understood to mean a period of retrenchment, a moment
of regression, a rollback in the pursuit of racial equality.
The contemporary era is also often referred to as globalization
or global capitalism. Historical writing has generally been
deeply influenced by the social context in which historians
wrote. Critically assess six recent trends (locality, women and
gender, working class, shift toward northern struggle,
reconceptualizing periodization, and internationalization) in
“Civil Rights studies” and/or the “New Black Power studies” over
this period. How do these historiographical trends evidence
responses to the momentous transformations of the last 30 years?
Refer to examples of seminal and recent literature in your
response.
5. Divide the African American experience into historical
periods and discuss the historical development of African
Americans from the 17th Century to the first decade of the 21st.
Your discussion should highlight major themes such as Black
agency, women and gender, and community building.
To
distinguish agency from community building, you should stress
resistance to racial oppression during your discussion. Also it
is important that you identify different ideologies used by
African American activists, however, for this examination, you
should specifically tease out the particularities of Black
radicalism in African American history.
Your discussion of
community building should emphasize the internal development of
Black civil society, the construction of Black social and
cultural capital.
Be sure to identify and explore major
3
watershed events and historical turning points, i.e., from
slavery to freedom, that is, the processes by which African
American history transitions and/or transforms from one moment
or historical period to another.
1
Prelim Exam: African American History
Professors S.K. Cha-Jua and J. Millward
Fall
2007
Answer one question from Part I and two questions from Part
II. You must do a total of three (3) questions.
Be sure
each essay has a clear line of argument, addresses as many
dimensions of the question as possible, and offers
relevant, persuasive evidence from specific secondary
sources wherever appropriate. Good luck!
Part I:
Please answer one of the two questions below.
1) Reverberations in the fields of women and gender studies
have significantly altered how historians approach their
craft both in terms of teaching and research.
With this
in mind, develop a syllabus on “Gender and African American
Resistance” for a 16 week course.
Your reading list
should highlight classic and new debates on the topic. You
should include a rationale for why you chose particular
readings. You should also include and introductory
statement that frames the goals of the course. Be mindful
that “gender” includes both men and women. Thus, this is
not a syllabus for a women’s history course, per se. It
can also be used in an undergraduate course.
2) If you could include only TWO works on slavery in a
U.S. history course for graduate students, what would those
two works be and why? In what ways do those works speak to
the debates in U.S. historiography?
In what ways do they
introduce new themes or contribute new kinds of questions?
Part II:
Please
answer two of the three questions below.
3) The period since the mid-1970s is often referred to as
the “post-civil rights era.” While under theorized the
phase is generally understood to mean a period of
retrenchment, a moment of regression, a rollback in the
pursuit of racial equality. The contemporary era is also
often referred to as globalization or global capitalism.
2
Historical writing has generally been deeply influenced by
the social context in which historians wrote. Critically
assess six recent trends (locality, women and gender,
working class, shift toward northern struggle,
reconceptualizing periodization, and internationalization)
in “Civil Rights studies” and/or the “New Black Power
studies” over this period. How do these historiographical
trends evidence responses to the momentous transformations
of the last 30 years? Refer to examples of seminal and
recent literature in your response.
4) Several generations of musicologists have examined
African American music divorced from the sociohistorical
context and the institutional matrix of Black civil society
in which the African American people fashioned their
cultural productions. Conversely, since the late 1960s,
historians have generally been cognizant of the broader
sociohistorical context and often the matrix of Black civil
society in which black musicians worked. Trace the
revolution in the study of African American music from the
publication of Sterling Stuckey’s “Through the Prism of
Folklore: The Black Ethos During Slavery” in 1968 (the
basis of Slave Culture, 1987) to Ruth Feldstein’s, JAH
article, "I Don't Trust You Anymore": Nina Simone, Culture,
and Black Activism in the 1960s,” (March 2005). What
strategies, methods, and theoretical approaches have
scholars used to highlight issues of African American
agency, creative processes, and nationalist and/or radical
sentiments? What new insights have been produced as a
result of recent scholarship? In answering the above
please discuss both general applications to scholarship on
African American musical genres and specific applications
to jazz scholarship.
5) African American urban history when combined with urban
studies is perhaps the largest single area of scholarship
in African American Studies. Conceptual and methodological
developments in this subfield often influence the
theoretical paradigms and methodologies that come to shape
African American history and Black Studies more broadly.
Three such concepts are agency, community building, and
proletarianization. Sometimes they are used collectively
but often scholars utilize one or two but not all three
concepts. Trace the development of these three concepts
and their rise to paradigmatic status in the subfield of
3
African American urban history since the publication of
W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro in 1899 to the
contemporary moment. Be sure to chart the seminal works,
major historiographic trends, and to highlight the dialogue
between advocates of agency, community and/or
proletarianization and other scholars and schools of
thought.
African American Field Examination
Examiners: Cha-Jua and Millward
Spring 2007
Directions: In order to demonstrate your proficiency in
African American History, please answer three of the five
questions below. Bear in mind that this examination will
evaluate your ability to address African American history
in a balanced manner from 1619 to the present. Therefore,
choose questions whereby your responses demonstrate your
breadth and depth of African American history. In effect,
two of your responses should cover African American history
across three centuries. Should one period of time or series
of scholarly debates require more attention than others,
please provide a rationale for why this is so.
1. The transition from various African ethnicities to one
people, African Americans, is a key theme and the subject
of a rich historiographical debate in early African
American history, though it has important implications for
contemporary African American history, as well. So too is
the transition from slavery to freedom, please write an
essay discussing the creation of the African American
people and the contributions of enslaved and free blacks to
the creation of the African American identity and community
between the 17th century and the Civil War. Please keep in
mind, law, agency, and various modes of resistance.
2. Develop a syllabus for an undergraduate course on
African American history from 1877 to the present. Keep in
mind that this syllabus should represent your knowledge of
classic, pivotal, and recent debates as well as critical
moments in African American history. Please provide a
rationale for how you would structure the course, i.e.,
chronological or thematically, for the texts (you must
select a minimum of 10 texts and ten articles), and for the
assignments you would give.
3. Of late the historians are reconceptualizing the Civil
Rights movement as the Black Freedom movement or Black
Freedom struggle. Other scholars are reconceptualizing it
as a phase of this broader re conceptualization. At the
heart of these reconceptualizations is the question of
historical periodization. Many historians have adopted the
concept of the “long Civil Rights movement,” thus expanding
movement’s traditional boundaries beyond the era
encapsulated from 1954-1965. Highlight the major debates
on the long Civil Rights movement. Provide your own
argument as to the periodization of the “civil rights” of
Black Freedom movement/struggle. Reference region, class,
gender and politics-local and national- where appropriate.
4. In 1985, Joe William Trotter published Black Milwaukee
which posited the “proletarianization thesis” as the
interpretative lens through which African American 20th
century urban history should be viewed. Discuss the
contributions and challenges of the new paradigm. Describe
the state of the field on African American urban history
since the publication of Black Milwaukee. Be sure to
highlight the dialogue between scholars and schools of
thought, chart the seminal works, major historiographic
trends, dominant paradigms, and leading theories.
African American Field Examination
S.K. Cha-Jua and D. Roediger
Spring 2006
1. Divide the African American experience into historical periods and discuss the
historical development of African Americans from the 17th Century to the first decade of
the 21st. Your discussion should highlight major themes such as Black agency, women
and gender, and community building. To distinguish agency from community building,
you should stress resistance to racial oppression during your discussion. Also it is
important that you identify different ideologies used by African American activists,
however, for this examination, you should specifically tease out the particularities of Black
radicalism in African American history. Your discussion of community building should
emphasize the internal development of Black civil society, the construction of Black social
and cultural capital. Be sure to identify and explore major watershed events and historical
turning points, i.e., from slavery to freedom, that is, the processes by which African
American history transitions and/or transforms from one moment or historical period to
another.
2. Following the Second World War the United States emerged as a global superpower
and sought to reconcile domestic racial oppression with U.S. imperialist ambition. Write
an essay that explores the major historiographical trends in the development and
maturation of African American social movements since 1941. Pay particular attention to
how African Americans engaged the new post-1945 global world in relation to anticolonialism, the Cold War, and Third World nationalism. Additionally, in answering this
question you should demonstrate knowledge of social movement theory as well as
competence in the historical literature.
3. African American urban history when combined with urban studies is perhaps the
largest single area of scholarship in African American Studies. Black Urban history
represents over twenty percent of historical research on African Americans, so this is a
large and important literature, please explore the major historiographic trends, dominant
paradigms, and leading theories in the field since W.E.B. Du Bois The Philadelphia Negro
in 1899.
4. Racial violence has been an essential part of racial oppression in the United States.
Although racial violence has been ubiquitous throughout the African American
experience, the type of racial violence deployed, the site of its deployment, and its
particular causes and rationalizations have changed over time and space. Of the range of
possibilities, e.g., whipping, race riots, etc, please narrow your focus to the history of
lynching. Drawing on the literature answer four subsets of questions: (1) explain why
lynching became the dominant form of racial violence during the nadir, 1877-1917; (2)
explain why 95 percent of all lynching occurred in the South; (2) address the justifications
used to rationalize this form of racial violence; and (4) examine African Americans
response to lynching and its justifications.
Finally, explore the contradiction between the percentage of lynching in which rape or
attempted rape were alleged and the place of the rape myth in the historical literature. In
your opinion what accounts to this disparity?