Call for Participation: Mark Twain House and Museum Essay Series

The Mark Twain House and Museum has just launched a new program called “It Happened in Your Town.” They are inviting Connecticut teachers, students, and historical societies to provide research on their local communities in the year 1874. The museum invites SHGAPE members to put this research in a broader context for the public through a series of short essays.

Interview with SHGAPE President Al Broussard

My recent scholarship explores civil rights, African American activism and racial justice in the western states and territories. My first book, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Justice in the West, 1900-54, based largely on my doctoral dissertation, explored many of these questions in a far western city with a global reputation for tolerance and civility toward racial minorities. I argued, among other things, that while western cities like San Francisco, and you could include Oakland, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland, were clearly more progressive than cities in the South, the progressive mystique that they portrayed was largely a facade. My work also revealed the presence of an active civil rights movement in the western states dating from the mid-nineteenth century and continuing well into the new century.