Just as Mississippi whites in the 1950s and 1960s had fought to maintain school segregation, they battled in the 1970s to control the school curriculum. Educators faced a crucial choice between continuing to teach a white supremacist view of history or offering students a more enlightened multiracial view of their state's past. In 1974, when Random House's Pantheon Books published Mississippi: Conflict and Change (written and edited by James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis), the defenders of the traditional interpretation struck back at the innovative textbook. Intolerant of its inclusion of African Americans, Native Americans, women, workers, and subjects like poverty, white terrorism, and corruption, the state textbook commission rejected the book, and its action prompted Loewen and Sallis to join others in a federal lawsuit (Loewen v. Turnipseed) challenging the book ban. Charles W. Eagles explores the story of the controversial ninth-grade history textbook and the court case that allowed its adoption with state funds. Mississippi: Conflict and Change and the struggle for its acceptance deepen our understanding both of civil rights activism in the movement's last days and of an early controversy in the culture wars that persist today.

"Boldly suggests that cultural organizing shaped the trajectory and spirit of the Civil Rights Movement."--Journal of American Ethnic History "Street brings together many different cultural strands in this work and argues cogently that they were an important part of a movement that affirmed African American self-belief at the same time as it demanded freedom and equality.”—Journal of American Studies "Draws upon a wealth of primary and secondary sources and is comprehensive yet clear and concise. . . . An absorbing examination of the relationship between politics and creative works."--North Carolina Historical Review "Eloquently reaffirms the notion that an informed understanding of Black America’s multifaceted culture is foundational to fathoming the complexities of the black freedom movement."--William L. Van Deburg, author of Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life From Aretha Franklin and James Baldwin to Dick Gregory and Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement deliberately used music, art, theater, and literature as political weapons to broaden the struggle and legitimize its appeal. In this book, Joe Street argues that the time has come to recognize the extent to which African American history and culture were vital elements of the movement. Drawing upon a wide variety of sources, from the Free Southern Theater to freedom songs, from the Cuban radio broadcasts of Robert F. Williams to the art of the Black Panther Party, Street encourages us to consider the breadth of forces brought to bear as weapons in the struggle for civil rights. Doing so also allows us to reconsider the roots of Black Power, recognizing that it emerged both from within and as a critique of the southern integrationist movement.

Originally published in 1987, this new, expanded edition further argues that the civil rights movement and its opposition, with their conflicting images and hopes for America, foreshadowed the ongoing "culture wars" of recent days."--BOOK JACKET.

What do America's children learn about American history, American values, and human decency? Who decides? In this absorbing book, Jonathan Zimmerman tells the dramatic story of conflict, compromise, and more conflict over the teaching of history and morality in twentieth-century America. In history, whose stories are told, and how? As Zimmerman reveals, multiculturalism began long ago. Starting in the 1920s, various immigrant groups--the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, even the newly arrived Eastern European Jews--urged school systems and textbook publishers to include their stories in the teaching of American history. The civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s brought similar criticism of the white version of American history, and in the end, textbooks and curricula have offered a more inclusive account of American progress in freedom and justice. But moral and religious education, Zimmerman argues, will remain on much thornier ground. In battles over school prayer or sex education, each side argues from such deeply held beliefs that they rarely understand one another's reasoning, let alone find a middle ground for compromise. Here there have been no resolutions to calm the teaching of history. All the same, Zimmerman argues, the strong American tradition of pluralism has softened the edges of the most rigorous moral and religious absolutism.

A riveting account of how Christian fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics have joined forces in a battle against their progressive counterparts for control of American secular culture.

Boldly stated and passionately supported, this argument against religious influence on the American government and legal system analyzes the impact that religion has on culture in the United States. The book makes the claim that many laws based on religious beliefs, specifically theology promoted in the Middle Ages, are misattributed as long-standing social values and that changing the theology itself threatens the religious institution supporting it--igniting a cultural war engulfed in fear and resulting in political dysfunction. It reveals that from sexuality to family planning to the tax system, religious doctrines direct American life without accounting for difference. Castle provides strategies for overcoming the imposition of religious views and demonstrates the value in standing up for a secular nation where morality is not tied to one particular religious group. This revised and expanded edition provides additional information on the origins and activities of the religious right, and its assault on women's, reproductive, and LGBT rights. It analyzes the Trump Administration's threat to those rights, and it provides case studies of the havoc religious rightists have wrought in states they control, focusing on Mike Pence's Indiana and Sam Brownback's Kansas.

In a sweeping analysis of religion in the post-Civil War and twentieth-century South, Freedom's Coming puts race and culture at the center, describing southern Protestant cultures as both priestly and prophetic: as southern formal theology sanctified dominant political and social hierarchies, evangelical belief and practice subtly undermined them. The seeds of subversion, Paul Harvey argues, were embedded in the passionate individualism, exuberant expressive forms, and profound faith of believers in the region. Harvey explains how black and white religious folk within and outside of mainstream religious groups formed a southern "evangelical counterculture" of Christian interracialism that challenged the theologically grounded racism pervasive among white southerners and ultimately helped to end Jim Crow in the South. Moving from the folk theology of segregation to the women who organized the Montgomery bus boycott, from the hymn-inspired freedom songs of the 1960s to the influence of black Pentecostal preachers on Elvis Presley, Harvey deploys cultural history in fresh and innovative ways and fills a decades-old need for a comprehensive history of Protestant religion and its relationship to the central question of race in the South for the postbellum and twentieth-century period.