American Studies Program

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“It’s never, never too late.” Joshua P.H. Livingston Profiled by Bloom Season on His Career Path, Commitment to Community, and Pandemic Pivot

What lies at the intersection of pedagogy and barbering? For Joshua P.H. Livingston, visiting assistant professor of American studies, the answer is Friend of a Barber: a combination barbershop and studio space where social discourse comes with the cut. Speaking with Bloom Season, Livingston spoke about his professional growth during the pandemic, advocating for a reassessment of one’s values and purpose when considering a shift in career. “What’s interesting is that I picked up a side hustle and then kept up with the first hustle,” Livingston says. “I ended up teaching full-time and going to barber school. I learned that there are interesting ways of being able to find synergies between two things that you care about.” For those considering a change, Livingston has pragmatic advice about finances, but the most important thing, he says, is to not be afraid. “It’s never, never too late,” he says.

Full Story and Video on Bloom Season

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Post Date: 01-18-2022

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Joshua P.H. Livingston Joins Faculty of Bard College American Studies Program in Fall 2021

Bard College is pleased to announce that Joshua P.H. Livingston will join the faculty of the American Studies Program, effective fall 2021. Livingston received his PhD in social welfare from the City of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and holds an MSW and a certificate in human services management from Boston University. Using his current work and experiences as a Licensed Master Barber and the Black American barbershop as an exemplar, Livingston’s work focuses on how social innovation, social enterprise, and “placemaking” can be utilized by young people of color to challenge institutional environments through the use of community forms that hold cultural significance. He is the co-owner of Friend of a Barber in New York City’s East Village and brings nearly twenty years of practice experience in youth-based program development, management, and evaluation to his work. At Bard, Livingston will serve as visiting professor of American Studies focusing on placemaking. He will be teaching a course titled Beyond Black Capitalism in the fall.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(8/25/21)

Post Date: 08-30-2021

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Juneteenth in Historical and Cultural Context

A Collection of Resources from Bard College Faculty and Staff

Following President Botstein's message declaring Friday, June 18, 2021 an official campus holiday at Bard College, here are further resources for those who wish to read, listen, reflect, and learn more about the historical and cultural significance of Juneteenth as a day of celebration and commemoration (to begin, see “So You Want to Learn About Juneteenth?” from the New York Times).
  
Please join us in thanking our contributing colleagues for their expertise and generous suggestions.
 

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Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth
David Blight, A Slave No More
For children/younger readers:  Patricia C. McKissack and Frederick McKissack, Jr., Days of Jubilee
—Myra Young Armstead, Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies and Vice President for Academic Inclusive Excellence

Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (2012)
Tiya Miles, All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (2021) 
Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham, Black Futures (2020)
Alaina Roberts, I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (2021) 
Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s PBS series “Reconstruction: America after the Civil War”
—Christian Crouch, Associate Professor of Historical Studies and Director, American Studies Program

Ralph Ellison’s posthumously published novel titled Juneteenth
—Tabetha Ewing, Associate Professor of History

Clint Smith's just-released book of essays, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America does a wonderful job of addressing both the historically specific, and the broader context of how slavery is and has been understood (and, more often than not, how it has been rather intentionally misunderstood). Here's a quick Twitter thread of the author recounting the places in which the book's essays are rooted, one of then being Galveston, Texas.
—Pete L'Official, Assistant Professor of Literature
  
A resource I have pulled from often is a place called Learning for Justice, in the past you may have heard of it under their old name Teaching Tolerance. This article, “We Are Our Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams” by Monita K. Bell is one I've found particularly memorable. 
 
For students younger than Kindergarten age, I often read this book in class and had a discussion about it: Juneteenth for Mazie, by Floyd Cooper.
—Sam Prince ’14, Regional Admissions Counselor, Pacific Northwest 

Karen Cox, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (just out)
Maurice O. Wallace, Shawn Michelle Smith, Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity
John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass
Susan Stessin-Cohn and Ashley Hurlburt-Biagini, In Defiance: Runaways from Slavery in New York's Hudson River Valley, 1735-1831
—Julia Rosenbaum, Associate Professor of Art History
 
“Let My People Go,” performed by Paul Robeson
—John Ryle, Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
—Drew Thompson, Associate Professor, Historical and Africana Studies 

Post Date: 06-16-2021

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Bard History Professor Jeannette Estruth Awarded J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship by the American Historical Association and John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress

The American Historical Association and John W. Kluge Center at the Library Of Congress has awarded Bard College History professor Jeannette Estruth the J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship in American History. The annual award is offered annually to support significant scholarly research in the collections of the Library of Congress by scholars at an early stage in their careers in history. The fellowship is named in honor of J. Franklin Jameson, a founder of the American Historical Association, longtime managing editor of the American Historical Review, formerly chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, and the first incumbent of the library’s chair of American history.

Jeannette Alden Estruth is an assistant professor of American History at Bard College, and a faculty associate at the Harvard University Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She received her doctorate in history, with honors, from New York University in 2018. In 2019, Estruth’s book project was a finalist for the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Huntington Library, the University of Virginia Miller Center, and the Berkshire Conference. Estruth’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Business Insider, Public Seminar, and Enterprise and Society, among others. Prior to her doctoral work, she worked at Harvard University Press and the Radical History Review. She is currently working on a book manuscript, The New Utopia: A Political History of the Silicon Valley, which explores the history of social movements, the technology industry, and economic culture in the United States.(6/2/21)
 

Post Date: 06-02-2021

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Women’s History Month Focus: Emerald Rose McKenzie ’52

By Myra Young Armstead
Vice President for Academic Inclusive Excellence and Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies

We can find clues to the past in the built environment—as examples: a cul de sac, a plaza, a park, a neighborhood of turreted houses, the clustering of certain shops, monuments, and, importantly, the unnoticed, naturalized, familiar names of streets and buildings. These artifacts, constructions, and materialized symbols literally map who and what we value as members of society. This is true on the local level, too. McKenzie House on the south end of Bard’s campus just past the triangle on Annandale Road is so named in honor of Emerald Rose McKenzie ’52, one of the first African American women to graduate from the College. She majored in sociology as an undergraduate here and went on to a long, successful career as a social worker for the Jewish Guild for the Blind after receiving a master’s degree in that field from New York University. McKenzie’s singular presence at Bard in the 1950s prompts interrogations into the intersectionalities of her identity as a woman, a Black person, and a disabled/visually handicapped person in the immediate postwar period. What follows is just a start. 

Emerald was born in Nassau, the Bahamas, on September 17, 1927, and shortly thereafter emigrated to the United States with her parents and siblings. By 1930, her working-class family lived in Brooklyn in a quadruplex building erected on Sutter Avenue in 1901 near the border of Brownsville and East New York. Her father worked as a clerk that year for a meatpacking company, supporting his wife and their four children, of which Emerald was the youngest at just two years of age. When he passed two years later, his death certificate listed him as a tailor. In some ways, the family’s circumstances seem to have improved since they were now living on Warwick Street—still in Brownsville but in a newer multifamily building constructed in 1930. In the 1930s, Brownsville was still a predominantly Russian Jewish area of Brooklyn, with a recent influx of Southern Black migrants and Caribbean immigrants representing roughly 6 percent of the total population by 1940. In that year, Emerald’s widowed mother, Alma, headed a household that consisted of the same four siblings as before with a younger nine-year-old brother now added to the mix. The Black population grew during Emerald’s childhood, so that by 1950 it had doubled and was concentrated in Brownsville’s least desirable housing. However, the New Deal’s National Youth Administration employment program allowed Emerald’s older sister Hermine to add to the family income as a teacher’s secretary in 1940. Another older sister, Dorit, worked as an “operator” in a dressmaking factory that same year. She probably was a sewing machine operator. Cynthia Dantzic, whose undergraduate years at Bard partially overlapped with Emerald’s, recalls that Hermine was a fine, highly skilled seamstress, too. Before the 1950s, the family moved to a private house with a large rear garden on Bainbridge Street, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. This neighborhood in central Brooklyn, known for its beautiful brownstones, drew “large numbers of eastern European Jews, Italians, and later blacks from the South and the Caribbean” in the 1930s, although by Emerald’s teen years in the 1940s the area was becoming predominantly Black as others moved out.
 
Cynthia explained that Emerald was born with some visual impairment but that some later physical trauma, perhaps an athletic accident , left her completely sightless when she was 16. That would have been in 1948. However, the accident must have occurred earlier because according to Bard College admissions records, Emerald attended the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind (NYIEB) for four years and graduated in 1948. (In 1986 the NYIEB was renamed the New York Institute for Special Education, serving “children with visual impairments but also children with emotional/learning needs and preschool children with developmental disabilities.”) 

Education was clearly a priority Emerald held for herself with the full support of her family. In the 1940s, there were two high schools for blind students in New York City—the NYIEB on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, and the Lavelle School for the Blind on Paulding Avenue in the Bronx; the latter was Catholic but recognized in 1942 by the New York State Education Department, from which it began receiving funding. Both options for Emerald Rose required either a long daily commute from Brooklyn to the Bronx—a daunting undertaking for a sighted student, so much more so for a blind one—or residential status at the school. It is almost certain that Emerald Rose lived on the campus of the NYIEB from 1944 until her graduation in 1948.
 
McKenzie came to Bard College as a transfer student, having spent her first undergraduate year at Brooklyn College. In the fall of 1949 when she matriculated in Annandale as a sophomore, Brooklyn College was just 13 years old—a progressive educational project of the New Deal era designed as the country’s first coeducational, public liberal arts college and as “a stepping stone for the sons and daughters of immigrants and working-class people toward a better life through a superb—and at the time, free—college education.” The school was in Brooklyn, her home, and free, but one can only imagine the physical challenges she faced as a blind student at a large, urban school built for persons with full visual abilities.

Somehow, McKenzie learned about Bard. Like Brooklyn College, the College had recently (in 1944) become coeducational, and through a generous scholarship from the American Federation for the Blind her educational costs were completely covered. The coeducational aspect of Bard was a huge draw. In the fall of 1949, 121 women joined 149 men to make up the total student population. By way of contrast, Dantzic recalled that when she, another Brooklynite, graduated high school, she hoped to study art at Yale but was discouraged to learn that the Ivy did not accept women as undergraduates who were coming straight out of high school. (For that reason, Dantzic spent her first two college years at Bard with the intention of transferring to Yale, which she did for her B.F.A.) A second draw for McKenzie was the small size of the College (only 270 students when she entered), the quiet pace of things, and the individualized attention she could receive from her professors. Dantzic recalled the bucolic setting, McKenzie’s well-trained seeing-eye dog, Karen, and the kind of basic academic resources available to Emerald Rose—books in Braille; audiobooks on discs; a paid, personalized course book reader (Dantzic performed this service for McKenzie); and a Braille typewriter.

With this initial article, the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is launching a longer historical project on Emerald Rose McKenzie, the state of higher education for the visually impaired nationally during her lifetime, where Bard stood in relation to national standards then, and where it stands now. We are still researching more precise details of McKenzie’s biography and invite students interested in participating in this project to contact me, Myra Armstead, at [email protected]. In conjunction with the Archives Working Group of the Council for Inclusive Excellence, we are also beginning to research the longer history of disability awareness at Bard and are pleased to have the cooperation of Finn Tait ’22 as president and founder of the Bard Disabled Students Union.
 

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NOTES
1. U.S. Census, 1930; U.S. Census, 1940; Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 84.
2. Cynthia Dantzic, Interview with Myra Young Armstead, March 8, 2021.
3.  “A Brief History of NYISE,” nyise.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=391515&type=d&pREC_ID=922947, accessed March 15, 2021.
4.  “Brooklyn College: Our History,” brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/about/history/ourhistory.php, accessed March 15, 2021.
 

Post Date: 03-17-2021

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Review: Professor Susan Fox Rogers Compiles Dispatches from Contemporary Writers in Her Latest Book, When Birds Are Near

Rogers, a visiting associate professor of writing at Bard College, “assembles an exquisite array of diverse voices united by a shared love of birding” (Publishers Weekly). Each essay explores birding “as an art of wanderlust and extreme patience while highlighting varied species, in habitats from the shoreline of the Sargasso Sea in Bermuda (where Jenn Dean describes how the cahow, a species thought extinct since the 17th century, was rediscovered in the 20th) to the North Dakota prairie (where Richard Bohannon considers the Baird’s sparrow and the Sprague’s pipit, both small, unremarkable-looking species known in the birding world as LBJs, or ‘little brown jobs’).”

Post Date: 02-03-2021

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Brooklyn Museum Exhibition Curated by Bard Faculty Jeffrey Gibson and Christian Ayne Crouch Listed in Artforum’s Best of 2020

The Brooklyn Museum commissioned Bard College artist in residence Jeffrey Gibson to revive a neglected collection. Collaborating with associate professor of history Christian Ayne Crouch, the curators “took aim at the museum’s archive, cracking open the ideological biases—the ignorant and often racist beliefs and values—on which its collecting was premised,” writes Lynne Cooke of Artforum. Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks at the Brooklyn Museum is curated by Jeffrey Gibson and Christian Ayne Crouch with Eugenie Tsai and Erika Umali, and is on view through January 10, 2021.

Post Date: 12-07-2020