Böcker av Frederick Douglass Opie

Upsetting the Apple Cart surveys the history of black-Latino coalitions in New York City from 1959 to 1989. In those years, African American and Latino Progressives organized, mobilized, and transformed neighborhoods, workplaces, university campuses, and representative government in the nation's urban capital. Upsetting the Apple Cart makes new contributions to our understanding of protest movements and strikes in the 1960s and 1970s and reveals the little-known role of left-of-center organizations in New York City politics as well as the influence of Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns on city elections. Frederick Douglass Opie provides a social history of black and Latino working-class collaboration in shared living and work spaces and exposes racist suspicion and divisive jockeying among elites in political clubs and anti-poverty programs. He ultimately offers a different interpretation of the story of the labor, student, civil rights, and Black Power movements than has been traditionally told. His work highlights both the largely unknown agents of historic change in the city and the noted politicians, political strategists, and union leaders whose careers were built on this history. Also, as Napoleon said, "e;An army marches on its stomach,"e; and Opie's history equally delves into the role that food plays in social movements, with representative recipes from the American South and the Caribbean included throughout.

"A welcome contribution both because Caribbean coast laborers have received relatively little attention and because Opie does such an excellent job of placing black migrants at the center of Guatemalan and Caribbean history."--Labor "A valuable contribution to the study of the theme of black immigrant workers of Guatemala."--Mesoamérica "Enriches historical narratives. This is a wonderful case study that complicates Latin American history, and particularly labor history in that region, by emphasizing the positive role played by black migrants in labor mobilization in Guatemala."--Jean Muteba Rahier, Florida International University In the late nineteenth century, many Central American governments and countries sought to fill low-paying jobs and develop their economies by recruiting black American and West Indian laborers. Frederick Douglass Opie offers a revisionist interpretation of the lives of these workers, who were often depicted as simple victims with little, if any, enduring legacy. Using primary and secondary sources as well as ethnographic data, Opie details the struggles of these workers who were ultimately inspired to organize by the ideas of Marcus Garvey.The story of black American migration to Guatemala is of interest because a substantial number of the migrant black laborers in Guatemala found there opportunities for economic advancement. Black proletarians, subsistence farmers, and businessmen who stayed on in Guatemala made an indelible mark on Guatemalan culture, particularly in the Caribbean region, where English became the lingua franca, jazz and reggae became popular forms of musical expression, and jerk chicken and meat patties became part of the local cuisine. Frederick Douglass Opie, professor of history and foodways at Babson College, is the author of Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America. He blogs at www.foodasalens.com and has appeared on the popular American Public Media program "The Splendid Table" and on the History Channel. A volume in the series Working in the Americas, edited by Richard Greenwald and Timothy J. Minchin

Frederick Douglass Opie deconstructs and compares the foodways of people of African descent throughout the Americas, interprets the health legacies of black culinary traditions, and explains the concept of soul itself, revealing soul food to be an amalgamation of West and Central African social and cultural influences as well as the adaptations blacks made to the conditions of slavery and freedom in the Americas.Sampling from travel accounts, periodicals, government reports on food and diet, and interviews with more than thirty people born before 1945, Opie reconstructs an interrelated history of Moorish influence on the Iberian Peninsula, the African slave trade, slavery in the Americas, the emergence of Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. His grassroots approach reveals the global origins of soul food, the forces that shaped its development, and the distinctive cultural collaborations that occurred among Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Americans throughout history. Opie shows how food can be an indicator of social position, a site of community building and cultural identity, and a juncture at which different cultural traditions can develop and impact the collective health of a community.