Browsing by Subject "Jim Crow"

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    Exhibiting Racism: How collections of difficult cultural heritage are (not) being presented at two universities in the Midwest United States
    (2022-12) Hammer, Jennifer K.
    This paper is about the study and practice of presenting cultural heritage material remains of systemic racism, a form of "difficult cultural heritage" that challenges the "dominant culture narrative" with a "negative self-history". A literature review defines terms, situates the subject within museum history and trends, shows how it is relevant to current scholarship, and connects it to contemporary U.S. cultural debates and museum practices; thus revealing an industry-standard framework that can be used in the exhibition of difficult cultural heritages. This framework is then applied to current exhibition practices at two Midwest university organizations -- the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Michigan -- concluding with recommendations for the organizations, followed by discussion and reflection.
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    Tolerance, governance, and surveillance in the Jim Crow South: Asheville, North Carolina, 1876-1946
    (2013-02) Epstein, Seth Edward David
    This dissertation argues that logics of tolerance were central to emerging forms of urban governance in the New South tourist locale of Asheville, North Carolina between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries. White authorities' practices of "race relations," the development of civic sites of historical memory, and the regulation of disorderly spaces worked to distribute the responsibility of surveillance to many actors. Most significantly, objects of suspicion were enlisted and enlisted themselves in networks of authority as a means to police and, hopefully, transcend the danger to urban order they themselves embodied. These networks were hierarchical. Their priorities and the relations between actors within them were shaped and supported by white authorities' political privilege to formulate racialized, gendered, and class-conscious definitions of deviance. They were also distributive, as their operation depended on the efforts of multiple participants. The forms of governance organized around techniques of tolerance did not dispel white authorities' suspicion, nor aim to. Instead, the projects considered here created opportunities to make that suspicion operable and regularize its management. By focusing on one city, this dissertation is able to demonstrate how the development, maintenance, and changes in networks of tolerance played a key role in making and remaking both place and space in Asheville. Scrutinizing these networks is essential for understanding how tolerance both created space for civic participation and sharply curtailed what would be tolerated within it. Through variously articulating, critiquing, and performing the expectation of surveillance, African Americans, Jews, and white Christians sought to redefine the boundaries of tolerable difference in urban spaces as well as the meanings of blackness, Jewishness, and whiteness. This dissertation employs insights drawn from cultural geography and government studies to interrogate tolerance as a technique of management. It therefore newly historicizes the emergence of tolerance as a national civic value in the interwar period and reassesses its analytical value to urban history.