Books
These books address the paradox of Washington, DC: the juxtaposition of a monumental city that celebrated the American republic in a city known for both its racial inequality and its denial of representation in the local and federal government. These writers address the breakdown of slavery and the emergence of a relatively large free black community before emancipation, the impact of the Black migrations during the Civil War and early twentieth century, the implementation of a commission form of government that effectively disfranchised its citizens until the enactment of home rule in 1973, residential segregation and displacement, and the impoverishment of most of its Black residents.
Consult these books to help frame your questions, see how they use their sources, and explore your interests.
1919, the Year of Racial Violence by Call Number: E185.5 .K78 2014ISBN: 9781107061798Publication Date: 2014-12-081919, The Year of Racial Violence recounts African Americans' brave stand against a cascade of mob attacks in the United States after World War I. The emerging New Negro identity, which prized unflinching resistance to second-class citizenship, further inspired veterans and their fellow black citizens. In city after city - Washington, DC; Chicago; Charleston; and elsewhere - black men and women took up arms to repel mobs that used lynching, assaults, and other forms of violence to protect white supremacy; yet, authorities blamed blacks for the violence, leading to mass arrests and misleading news coverage. Refusing to yield, African Americans sought accuracy and fairness in the courts of public opinion and the law. This is the first account of this three-front fight - in the streets, in the press, and in the courts - against mob violence during one of the worst years of racial conflict in US history.
Alley Life in Washington by Call Number: E185.93.D6 B63ISBN: 9780252010033Publication Date: 1980-09-01In this classic study, James Borchert examines Black residential patterns in Washington with a focus on alley dwellings which originated in the 1850s, their proliferation, the living conditions within them, and the community and folklife of their residents. Supported by maps showing the racial composition of these alleys and their locations throughout the city, As the primary form of housing for poor Black Washingtonians during the Jim Crow era, these alley dwellings provided them the space to create communities that supported their culture.
At the Threshold of Liberty by ISBN: 1469662221Publication Date: 2021-02-22The capital city of a nation founded on the premise of liberty, nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., was both an entrepot of urban slavery and the target of abolitionist ferment. The growing slave trade and the enactment of Black codes placed the city's Black women within the rigid confines of a social hierarchy ordered by race and gender. At the Threshold of Liberty reveals how these women--enslaved, fugitive, and free--imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent them from ever experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power.
Between Justice and Beauty by Call Number: HN80.W3 G55 1995ISBN: 0812219589Publication Date: 2006-06-06As the only American city under direct congressional control, Washington has served historically as a testing ground for federal policy initiatives and social experiments--with decidedly mixed results. Well-intentioned efforts to introduce measures of social justice for the district's largely black population have failed. Yet federal plans and federal money have successfully created a large federal presence--a triumph, argues Howard Gillette, of beauty over justice. In a new afterword, Gillette addresses the recent revitalization and the aftereffects of an urban sports arena.
Black Georgetown Remembered by Call Number: F202.G3 L47 2016ISBN: 162616326XPublication Date: 2016-02-28Georgetown's little-known black heritage shaped a Washington, DC, community long associated with white power and privilege. Black Georgetown Remembered reveals a rich but little-known history of the Georgetown black community from the colonial period to the present. Drawing on primary sources, including oral interviews with past and current residents and extensive research in church and historical society archives, the authors record the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and successes of a vibrant neighborhood as it persevered through slavery and segregation, war and peace, prosperity and depression. This beautifully redesigned 25th anniversary edition of Black Georgetown Remembered, first published in 1991, includes a foreword by Maurice Jackson, a new introduction by Kathleen M. Lesko, and more than two hundred illustrations, including portraits of prominent community leaders, sketches, maps, and nineteenth-century and contemporary photographs.
Black in Place by Call Number: HT177.W3 S84 2019ISBN: 1469654008Publication Date: 2019-11-25While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as "Chocolate City," it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor. In this book, Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.'s shift to a "post-chocolate" cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street's economic and racial developments. In doing so, she offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital.
Capital Elites by Call Number: F198 .J33 1995ISBN: 156098354XPublication Date: 1994-10-17In this social history of the nation's capital, Kathryn Allamong Jacob demonstrates that the capital's social elite has always been unique because its fortunes - unlike those of aristocrats who ruled other American cities - are tied inextricably to the ubiquitous presence of the federal government. The Civil War affected Washington like no other city, vanquishing the hereditary elite - the Antiques - and opening the gates to new millionaires - the Parvenues - who shaped the postwar society of the capital.
Carving Out the Commons by Call Number: HD7287.72.U6 H87 2018ISBN: 1517901979Publication Date: 2018-03-13An investigation of the practice of "commoning" in urban housing and its necessity for challenging economic injustice in our rapidly gentrifying cities Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C., began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource--housing--that had been used to extract profit from them and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned by them. In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban "commoning" through a close investigation of the city's limited-equity housing cooperatives. Drawing on feminist and anticapitalist perspectives, Huron asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and other resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create and maintain commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism. Arguing against the romanticization of the commons, she instead positions the urban commons as a pragmatic practice. Through the practice of commoning, she contends, we can learn to build communities to challenge capitalism's totalizing claims over life.
Chocolate City by Call Number: E185.93.D6 A78 2017ISBN: 9781469635866Publication Date: 2017-11-06Monumental in scope and vividly detailed, Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation's capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between America's expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification. But D.C. is more than just a seat of government, and authors Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove also highlight the city's rich history of local activism as Washingtonians of all races have struggled to make their voices heard in an undemocratic city where residents lack full political rights. Tracing D.C.'s massive transformations--from a sparsely inhabited plantation society into a diverse metropolis, from a center of the slave trade to the nation's first black-majority city, from "Chocolate City" to "Latte City"--Asch and Musgrove offer an engaging narrative peppered with unforgettable characters, a history of deep racial division but also one of hope, resilience, and interracial cooperation.
DC Jazz by Call Number: ML3508.8.W27 D3 2018ISBN: 1626165890Publication Date: 2018-06-01This anthology of essays edited by noted historians Maurice Jackson and Blair Ruble establishes the pivotal role of Washington, D.C. in the development of jazz. Washington is home to some of the most important clubs in the jazz world and the birthplace of some of its greatest players and promoters. Institutions such as the U.S. Congress, Smithsonian, Kennedy Center, Library of Congress, Duke Ellington High School, Howard University, local churches and University of the District of Columbia have promoted the musical genre.
Democracy's Capital by Call Number: F200 .P43 2019ISBN: 1469653907Publication Date: 2019-11-25From its 1790 founding until 1974, Washington, D.C.--capital of "the land of the free--lacked democratically elected city leadership. Fed up with governance dictated by white stakeholders, federal officials, and unelected representatives, local D.C. activists catalyzed a new phase of the fight for home rule. Amid the upheavals of the 1960s, they gave expression to the frustrations of black residents and wrestled for control of their city. Bringing together histories of the carceral and welfare states, as well as the civil rights and Black Power movements, Lauren Pearlman narrates this struggle for self-determination in the nation's capital. She captures the transition from Black protest to black political power under the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations and against the backdrop of local battles over the War on Poverty and the War on Crime. Through intense clashes over funds and programming, Washington residents pushed for greater participatory democracy and community control. However, the anticrime apparatus built by the Johnson and Nixon administrations curbed efforts to achieve true home rule. As Pearlman reveals, this conflict laid the foundation for the next fifty years of D.C. governance, connecting issues of civil rights, law and order, and urban renewal.
Dream City by Call Number: F216.2 .J34 2014ISBN: 0786755938Publication Date: 2014-04-22With a new afterword covering the two decades since its first publication, two of Washington, D.C.’s most respected journalists expose one of America’s most tragic ironies: how the nation’s capital, often a gleaming symbol of peace and hope, is the setting for vicious contradictions and devastating conflicts over race, class, and power. Jaffe and Sherwood have chillingly chronicled the descent of the District of Columbia—congressional hearings, gangland murders, the establishment of home rule and the inside story of Marion Barry’s enigmatic dynasty and disgrace.
An Example for All the Land by Call Number: F205.N4 M37 2010ISBN: 0807834149Publication Date: 2010-10-04An Example for All the Land reveals Washington, D.C. as a laboratory for social policy in the era of emancipation and the Civil War. In this panoramic study, Kate Masur provides a nuanced account of African Americans' grassroots activism, municipal politics, and the U.S. Congress. She tells the provocative story of how black men's right to vote transformed local affairs, and how, in short order, city reformers made that right virtually meaningless. Bringing the question of equality to the forefront of Reconstruction scholarship, this widely praised study explores how concerns about public and private space, civilization, and dependency informed the period's debate over rights and citizenship.
Free Negroes in the District of Columbia, 1790-1846 by Call Number: E185.93.D6 B69ISBN: 9780195015522Publication Date: 1972-01-01A seminal study that explores the strategies used by Black people to secure their freedom.
The Great Society Subway by Call Number: TF725.W37 S37 2006ISBN: 080188246XPublication Date: 2006-03-15In the first comprehensive history of the Metro, Zachary M. Schrag tells the story of the Great Society Subway from its earliest rumblings to the present day, from Arlington to College Park, Eisenhower to Marion Barry. Unlike the pre-World War II rail systems of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the Metro was built at a time when most American families already owned cars, and when most American cities had dedicated themselves to freeways, not subways. Why did the nation's capital take a different path? What were the consequences of that decision? Using extensive archival research as well as oral history, Schrag argues that the Metro can be understood only in the political context from which it was born: the Great Society liberalism of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. The Metro emerged from a period when Americans believed in public investments suited to the grandeur and dignity of the world's richest nation.
Jim Crow Capital by Call Number: E185.86 .M9525 2018ISBN: 1469646714Publication Date: 2018-11-19In the aftermath of the loss of home rule, memories of voting and citizenship rights inspired a new generation of Washingtonians to restore local government in their city and lay the foundation for black equality across the nation. And women were at the forefront of this effort. Here Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy tells the story of how African American women in D.C. transformed civil rights politics in their freedom struggles between 1920 and 1945. Even though no resident of the nation's capital could vote, black women seized on their conspicuous location to testify in Congress, lobby politicians, and stage protests to secure racial justice, both in Washington and across the nation. Women crafted a broad vision of citizenship rights that put economic justice, physical safety, and legal equality at the forefront of their political campaigns. Black women's civil rights tactics and victories in Washington, D.C., shaped the national postwar black freedom struggle in ways that still resonate today.
The Ledger and the Chain by Call Number: E442 .R68 2021ISBN: 9781541616615Publication Date: 2021-04-20An award-winning historian Joshua Rothman reveals the harrowing forgotten story of America's internal slave trade--and its role in the making of America. He explores the lives of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard who trafficked and sold enslaved people from Maryland and Virginia to the cotton-producing states in the largest slave-trading operation in the nation. Their shops and pens located in Alexandria, the center of their operations in the Upper South, are vividly portrayed in this seminal book.
Lincoln's Citadel by Call Number: E501 .W76 2013ISBN: 0393081559Publication Date: 2013-08-19Vulnerable and insecure, the capital was rife with Confederate sympathizers. On the crossroads of slavery and freedom, the city was a refuge for thousands of contraband and fugitive slaves. The Lincoln administration took strict measures to tighten security and established camps to provide food, shelter, and medical care for contrabands. In 1863, a Freedman's Village rose on the grounds of the Lee estate, where the Confederate flag once flew.The president and Mrs. Lincoln personally comforted the wounded troops who flooded wartime Washington. In 1862, Lincoln spent July 4 riding in a train of ambulances carrying casualties from the Peninsula Campaign to Washington hospitals. He saluted the "One-Legged Brigade" assembled outside the White House as "orators," their wounds eloquent expressions of sacrifice and dedication. The administration built more than one hundred military hospitals to care for Union casualties.These are among the unforgettable scenes in Lincoln's Citadel, a fresh, absorbing narrative history of Lincoln's leadership in Civil War Washington. Here is the vivid story of how the Lincoln administration met the immense challenges the war posed to the city, transforming a vulnerable capital into a bastion for the Union.
Living in, Living Out by Call Number: HD6072.2.U52 W183 1994ISBN: 1560983620Publication Date: 1994-10-17This oral history portrays the lives of African American women who migrated from the rural South to work as domestic servants in Washington, D.C., in the early decades of this century. In Living In, Living Out, Elizabeth Clark-Lewis narrates the personal experiences of eighty-one women who worked for wealthy white families. These women describe how they encountered - but never accepted - the master-servant relationship, and recount the strategies they used to change their status from "live in" servants to daily paid workers who "lived out." Clark-Lewis describes the women's roots in the rural South, where limited prospects encouraged African American families to plan their daughters' migration to northern cities. While still very young, girls were trained to do household chores; as they got older, "traveling talk" began to prepare them to survive in the world of white employers. After an elaborate search for places to live with northern kin, girls were sent off with familiar folk rituals: they were given charms for good luck, blessings from the church, and fetishes for remembrance.
The Nation and Its City by Call Number: F198 .L58 1994ISBN: 9780801844645Publication Date: 1994In this first study of the politics and policy-making behind the creation of "modern" Washington, Alan Lessoff explores a city that would seem an exception to the usual rules of urban development, one without industry and commercial growth to drive it. He argues, however, that this absence of typical economic interests allows a particularly clear view of politics and urban issues in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Explaining how government in post-Civil War Washington promoted prosperity, established aesthetic standards, protected health and safety, managed race relations, and resolved federal-local conflicts, Lessoff reveals the true character of American politics and policy-making in the period as never before.
Nature and History in the Potomac Country by Call Number: GE155.P68 R53 2009ISBN: 0801890322Publication Date: 2009-03-06James D. Rice's fresh study of the Potomac River basin begins with a mystery. Why, when the whole of the region offered fertile soil and excellent fishing and hunting, was nearly three-quarters of the land uninhabited on the eve of colonization? Rice wonders how the existence of this no man's land influenced nearby Native American and, later, colonial settlements. Did it function as a commons, as a place where all were free to hunt and fish? Or was it perceived as a strange and hostile wilderness? Rice discovers environmental factors at the center of the story. Making use of extensive archaeological and anthropological research, as well as the vast scholarship on farming practices in the colonial period, he traces the region's history from its earliest known habitation. With exceptionally vivid prose, Rice makes clear the implications of unbridled economic development for the forests, streams, and wetlands of the Potomac River basin. With what effects, Rice asks, did humankind exploit and then alter the landscape and the quality of the river's waters? Equal parts environmental, Native American, and colonial history, Nature and History in the Potomac Country is a useful and innovative study of the Potomac River, its valley, and its people.
A Question of Freedom by ISBN: 0300234120Publication Date: 2020-11-24Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. A Question of Freedom asks us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.
Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City by Call Number: HT177.W3 H97 2017ISBN: 022644953XPublication Date: 2017-04-17For long-time residents of Washington, DC's Shaw/U Street, the neighborhood has become almost unrecognizable in recent years. Where the city's most infamous open-air drug market once stood, a farmers' market now sells grass-fed beef and homemade duck egg ravioli. On the corner where AM.PM carryout used to dish out soul food, a new establishment markets its $28 foie gras burger. Shaw is experiencing a dramatic transformation, from "ghetto" to "gilded ghetto," where white newcomers are rehabbing homes, developing dog parks, and paving the way for a third wave coffee shop on nearly every block. Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City is an in-depth ethnography of this gilded ghetto. Derek S. Hyra captures here a quickly gentrifying space in which long-time black residents are joined, and variously displaced, by an influx of young, white, relatively wealthy, and/or gay professionals who, in part as a result of global economic forces and the recent development of central business districts, have returned to the cities earlier generations fled decades ago. As a result, America is witnessing the emergence of what Hyra calls "cappuccino cities." A cappuccino has essentially the same ingredients as a cup of coffee with milk, but is considered upscale, and is double the price. In Hyra's cappuccino city, the black inner-city neighborhood undergoes enormous transformations and becomes racially "lighter" and more expensive by the year.
Racism in the Nation's Service by Call Number: JK723.A34 Y45 2013bISBN: 1469628384Publication Date: 2016-02-01Between the 1880s and 1910s, thousands of African Americans passed civil service exams and became employed in the executive offices of the federal government. However, by 1920, promotions to well-paying federal jobs had nearly vanished for black workers. Eric S. Yellin argues that the Wilson administration's successful 1913 drive to segregate the federal government was a pivotal episode in the age of progressive politics. Yellin investigates how the enactment of this policy, based on Progressives' demands for whiteness in government, imposed a color line on American opportunity and implicated Washington in the economic limitation of African Americans for decades to come. Using vivid accounts of the struggles and protests of African American government employees, Yellin reveals the racism at the heart of the era's reform politics. He illuminates the nineteenth-century world of black professional labor and social mobility in Washington, D.C., and uncovers the Wilson administration's progressive justifications for unraveling that world. From the hopeful days following emancipation to the white-supremacist "normalcy" of the 1920s, Yellin traces the competing political ideas, politicians, and ordinary government workers who created "federal segregation."
Subversives by Call Number: E445.D6 H27 2003ISBN: 0807128384Publication Date: 2002-12-01Subversives is the first history of practical abolitionism in the streets, homes, and places of business of the nation's capital. Historian Stanley Harrold looks beyond resolutions, platforms, and debates to describe how desperate African Americans, both free and enslaved, and sympathetic whites engaged in a dangerous day-to-day campaign to drive the slavery out of Washington, D.C., and the Chesapeake region.
Tally's Corner by Call Number: E185.93.D6 L5 1967ISBN: 0742528952Publication Date: 2003-07-24The first edition of Tally's Corner, a sociological classic selling more than one million copies, was the first compelling response to the culture of poverty thesis--that the poor are different and, according to conservatives, morally inferior--and alternative explanations that many African Americans are caught in a tangle of pathology owing to the absence of black men in families. The debate has raged up to the present day. Yet Liebow's shadow theory of values--especially the values of poor, urban, black men--remains the single most parsimonious account of the reasons why the behavior of the poor appears to be at odds with the values of the American mainstream. The new introductions to this long-awaited revised edition William Julius Wilson and Charles Lemert describe the debates since 1965 and situate Liebow's classic text in respect to current theories of urban poverty and race.
Williams' Gang by Call Number: E442 .F67 2020ISBN: 1108493033Publication Date: 2020-01-16William H. Williams operated a slave pen in Washington, DC, known as the Yellow House, and actively trafficked in enslaved men, women, and children for more than twenty years. His slave trading activities took an extraordinary turn in 1840 when he purchased twenty-seven enslaved convicts from the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond with the understanding that he could carry them outside of the United States for sale. When Williams conveyed his captives illegally into New Orleans, allegedly while en route to the foreign country of Texas, he prompted a series of courtroom dramas that would last for almost three decades. Based on court records, newspapers, governors' files, slave manifests, slave narratives, travelers' accounts, and penitentiary data, Williams' Gang examines slave criminality, the coastwise domestic slave trade, and southern jurisprudence as it supplies a compelling portrait of the economy, society, and politics of the Old South.
Discovery Tools
Researchers interested in a complete literature review should consult the following:
Use HoyaSearch to search for terms such as "Washington, D.C.," "District of Columbia," neighborhoods, organizations, and individual persons in the subject or title fields to find resources available at Lauinger and in the Consortium libraries in either analog or electronic formats.
The most substantial bibliographic database containing citations of articles on the history of the United States and Canada, this database is indexed by author, title, and subject. It is also possible to search this database by keyword. It is frequently updated and includes writings from approximately 2,000 journals, books, dissertations, and periodicals. Entries for articles include abstracts.
Search tip: Limit search to the subject: "Washington (D.C.) -- History"
This database provides access to the full-text of articles from selected journals. It is possible to search this database by item title, abstract, and caption. Keyword searches will also return items found within the text of the article. As a result, JSTOR is a powerful tool for searches of both general topics and very particular research questions.
The Records of the Columbia Historical Society (1897-1989) and Washington History (1989-present), both publications of the DC History Center (formerly Historical Society of Washington), are available on JSTOR. Both journals include articles of historical interpretation, transcripts of addresses and speeches, and book reviews. The Records include memoirs of Washington residents that often include details of nineteenth-century life, including descriptions of the landscape and social life.
Search tip: Washington History has regularly published bibliographies of scholarship on the Metro Washington area by Matthew Gilmore. To find these bibliographies, use the Advanced Search function. Enter "Gilmore, Matthew" as an author, "bibliography" as a keyword, and Washington History as the journal title.
ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global
Washington, D.C., has been a subject of several theses and dissertations. To broaden your search, look for dissertations on the Chesapeake or Mid-Atlantic regions and the counties that comprise Greater Washington.
