The previous post addressed the great American political realignment of the twentieth century, offering Daisy Lampkin’s partisan work as an important inflection point. When Lampkin, Robert Vann, and others advocated that African American voters repudiate the Republican party and support the Democrats in the 1930s, after a decade’s worth of intense activism and advocacy, it was a watershed moment in American political history. It was the Republican party, after all—the “party of Lincoln—that as Lampkin herself once pointed out had stood foursquare behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the Constitutional revisions in the wake of the Civil War that defined citizenship for African Americans. Up until this point the Democrats, especially in their southern stronghold, had always been the party of Jim Crow and segregation.

But after the 1930s, prompted in part by the mass influx of African American voters represented by Lampkin and Vann’s defection, the Democratic party increasingly (though always imperfectly) began to embrace a civil rights agenda. In response, over the course of the 1950s and 60s, conservatives began to leave the Democratic party and take their segregationist views into the Republican party. The once solid Democratic south remained solidly in support of segregation, but by now it was the Republican party, and not the Democratic party, that championed these views. The two-party system had realigned itself, primarily around the topic of race.
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Today let’s look at the other end of that pivot. If many voters were streaming into the Democratic party and realigning its views on race, many voters (and their politicians) were also streaming out of the Democratic party into the Republican party, also realigning its views on race. The career of long-time South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, still a revered figure in the state, is a case in point.

Among my goals for this blog is not merely to introduce the world to the tragically underappreciated Daisy Lampkin, but also to demystify for lay readers and novice historians what historical research looks like and how judgments and reasonable historical interpretations are made. In this post I give some indication how new research discoveries can combine with that we already know (i.e., the “historiography”), to produce new interpretations. What follows is somewhat speculative, but that is the nature of historical hypotheses. Further research will either confirm my propositions or falsify them.

​Very much belatedly, in 2021, the federal government finally recognized Juneteenth as a national holiday, a day in which all Americans should take pride. On June 19, 1865, at Galveston, Texas, some of the last enslaved persons still held in bondage were informed of their freedom.* Juneteenth thus symbolizes the final eradication of chattel slavery in this country, an outcome for which not only hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers and their commander in chief died, but a day for which many thousands of Americans, including many themselves enslaved and those in the abolitionist movement, had worked and struggled, at considerable personal cost.

​Daisy Lampkin was born in 1883 or 1884, nearly twenty years after the 13th Amendment (mostly) outlawed slavery in the US. But her life intersected with the history of the anti-slavery movement in a number of ways, making her an heir to Juneteenth and an important point of connection between nineteenth century abolitionism and twentieth century suffrage and civil rights activism.

The dismantling by the Trump administration of venerable foreign policy agencies such as the USAID, and the hobbling of venerable multilateral institution such as NATO, the World Health Organization, the UN, and many others, seems unquestionably to have brought to a sudden, and shocking, end the exercise of American power on the global stage. I write at some length about many of these institutions, and the vigorous support of them by Americans and global partners, in my book. I give primary attention to what American multilateralism meant for post-WWII Dutch reconstruction and renewal. But the work of these institutions and practices carried similar consequences for nations and communities around the world, for decades after the end of World War II. 

​In the early days of a project, all is new, all directions possible, no conclusions are fixed. It’s an exciting time of discovery, to formulate hypothesis, test them against the evidence, change course as needed, and see where the research takes you.
 
When I started the project on Daisy Lampkin I knew that I would be learning new things about race and gender and class in America, about how the suffrage movement influenced the civil rights movement, and about how African American women such as Daisy made their entrée into such networks. I also expected to learn, and am learning, a great deal about how local communities, including cultural and political powerbases, related to larger patterns of national influence. What I didn’t realize at the beginning was the role that technology would be playing in the narrative:

Socialism has been much in the American news of late. The historical and political abuse heaped on the word has been in no way reduced by its prevalence. One day I aim to write a primer on the history of socialism for confused American readers. For now, after the break, an excerpt from my forthcoming book about the postwar evolution of Dutch socialism which may offer some useful perspective.  

Prague is a beautiful city under any circumstances, but sometimes the universe determines to speak with even greater magic, and purpose.  Ten years ago this month I accompanied my ex-wife an on academic fellowship to the Czech Republic. We had our indefatigable four-year-old, Dashie, in tow. Her job was to teach, ours to explore this glorious and historic city. It was a hot summer, uncharacteristic for Prague—the heat radiated off the stone walks and buildings. Dashie and I took refuge in a basement bowling alley many of those days. But before the weather turned oppressive, we walked. And walked. And we started to see connections that I had not anticipated.