Yohuru Williams

Keri Leigh Merritt

Rhae Lynn Barnes

A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America

After Life

Darkology: The Hidden History of Amateur Blackface Minstrelsy and the Making of Modern America, 1860-1970 develops a critical bibliography and uses material culture to uncover the pervasive world of amateur blackface minstrelsy that took hold in most cities in the United States North and West between 1860 and 1970. Previously lost to history, amateur minstrelsy was integral to domestic and international imperialism. This dissertation aims to understand the cultural origins and consequences of amateur blackface minstrelsy, to map its political geography, and recapture the significance of its print culture. Despite an abundant body of evidence, the print culture of amateur blackface had remained unstudied. Darkology discloses the relationship between racially exclusive fraternal orders and the U.S. Government, and the immense body of blackface print that they created for public use. Darkology reveals the lost history of amateur blackface by providing the first bibliographic study of amateur blackface print, extends the chronology of theatrical blackface minstrelsy by seventy years through 1970, expands the geography of blackface in amateur form to the West, and reveals legal campaigns waged by the NAACP to ban blackface during the Civil Rights Movement.

Darkology: The Hidden History of Amateur Blackface Minstrelsy and the Making of Modern America, 1860-1970

After Life is a collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored mass death and loss during the global COVID-19 pandemic, mass uprisings for racial justice, and the near presidential coup in 2021 following the 2020 election. Inspired by the writers who documented American life during the Great Depression and World War II for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the editors asked twenty-first-century historians and legal experts to focus on the parallels, convergences, and differences between the exceptional "long 2020", while it unfolds, and earlier eras in U.S. History. Providing context for the entire volume, After Life’s Introduction explains how COVID-19 and America's long history of inequality, combined with a corrupt and unconcerned federal government, produced one of the darkest times in our nation’s history. Discussing the rise of the COVID-19 death toll in the United States, eventually exceeding the 1918 flu, the AIDS epidemic, and the Civil War, it ties public health, immigration, white supremacy, elections history, and epidemics together, and provides a short history of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the beginnings of a Third Reconstruction. After Life documents how Americans have dealt with grief, pain, and loss, both individually and communally, and how we endure and thrive. The title is an affirmation that even in our suspended half-living during lockdowns and quarantines, we are a nation of survivors—with an unprecedented chance to rebuild society in a more equitable way.

Rhae Lynn Barnes

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