This page features many of the professional, non-teaching aspects of my career. At the top are my books and publications. Scroll down a bit farther, and you'll see many of the papers I've presented at conferences over the past few years. Many of those include links to a PDF of the paper presented. In some cases, the paper presented was a shortened version of the paper linked here, whereas others link to the shorter conference paper. Scroll down to the bottom, and you'll see a brief form of my curriculum vitae, including (somewhat) detailed information about my education and academic employment.
BOOKS
Re-Collecting the Past: An Examination of Rural Historically African American Settlements in the San Joaquin Valley
Examines three primary research threads: to reclaim an invisible or lost history, to explore reasons why that history remains invisible or lost, and to examine the processes whereby individual and collective memories are remembered, forgotten, recollected, or discarded in the process of understanding the past, the present, and the future. Towards that end, this dissertation examines the past and present in relation to almost two dozen rural historically African American settlements throughout the San Joaquin Valley. In addition to capturing a lost and forgotten history, contemporary issues, including water and poverty, are addressed. As this dissertation captures much of this invisible history, it also looks at the impact of that history, the impact of reclaiming that history, and how an historical absence or presence impacts individual and collective identity. After an extensive literature review of theory relating to practice, habitus, power, and identity, several chapters are dedicated to laying out the lost history of these communities. These chapters are followed by chapters that examine the contemporary lives of the people who continue to live in these communities. This blend of historical and ethnographic research provides a picture of the past, the present, and (in some cases) a vision for the future.
African Americans In The Rural San Joaquin Valley, California
This ethnohistorical study examines rural 19th and 20th century African American enclaves across the agricultural landscape of California's Central Valley. Agricultural labor contractors, beginning in the 1880s, recruited large numbers of southern African Americans. This thesis focuses on several almost invisible black communities from that period. Eissinger differentiates planned colonies, such as Allensworth from other historically African American settlements like Cookseyville, Bowles, Fairmead, Sunny Acres, South Dos Palos, Home Garden, Teviston, and Lanare, which grew outside existing towns. Utilizing interviews, newspaper clippings, archival sources, and census data, the author sheds light on the impact of African Americans on the rural landscape of the Valley.
Fairmead: A Century of Change
In 1912, the Co-operative Land and Title Company set out to build a model farming community near the center of California. For one hundred years, this unincorporated community has been home to Russian and Italian immigrants and African American and Hispanic farm workers.
This book chronicles many of the changes during the community's first century. Originally written to commemorate the community's centenary, this book has been used as a textbook in Madera County schools.
Available on-line through Amazon and Barnes & Nobel, this book is also available at the Fossil Discovery Center of Madera County.
All proceeds from the sale of this book go the Fairmead Community and Friends.
This book chronicles many of the changes during the community's first century. Originally written to commemorate the community's centenary, this book has been used as a textbook in Madera County schools.
Available on-line through Amazon and Barnes & Nobel, this book is also available at the Fossil Discovery Center of Madera County.
All proceeds from the sale of this book go the Fairmead Community and Friends.
PUBLICATIONS
Growing on the Side of the Road: Historically Black Settlements in Central California
Horizons of Change: The Unexpected, Unknown, and Unfortunate, Annual Meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association (PCBAHA), Seattle WA, August 2011
A version of this paper is published in The Journal of the West (Summer 2015)
ABSTRACT
This paper explores some of the twentieth century African American enclaves hidden in the agricultural landscape of California’s Central Valley. These settlements, overlooked in the historical record, are among more than a dozen rural historically black San Joaquin Valley communities. Due to a variety of factors, including restrictive covenants and sundown policies the majority of these communities grew just beyond the boundaries of neighboring all-white or predominantly white towns.
Unlike the planned communities of Allensworth, these historically black settlements, like Teviston, South Dos Palos, Lanare, and Fairmead, grew organically. Typically each settlement included churches and businesses that served the residents and their rural neighbors. Although tied to California Agriculture, each community claims its own unique history. Utilizing first person oral-history interviews, newspaper clippings, census records, and other primary sources, this paper begins to shed light on this aspect of the lives of African Americans on the rural landscape of the San Joaquin Valley.
Horizons of Change: The Unexpected, Unknown, and Unfortunate, Annual Meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association (PCBAHA), Seattle WA, August 2011
A version of this paper is published in The Journal of the West (Summer 2015)
ABSTRACT
This paper explores some of the twentieth century African American enclaves hidden in the agricultural landscape of California’s Central Valley. These settlements, overlooked in the historical record, are among more than a dozen rural historically black San Joaquin Valley communities. Due to a variety of factors, including restrictive covenants and sundown policies the majority of these communities grew just beyond the boundaries of neighboring all-white or predominantly white towns.
Unlike the planned communities of Allensworth, these historically black settlements, like Teviston, South Dos Palos, Lanare, and Fairmead, grew organically. Typically each settlement included churches and businesses that served the residents and their rural neighbors. Although tied to California Agriculture, each community claims its own unique history. Utilizing first person oral-history interviews, newspaper clippings, census records, and other primary sources, this paper begins to shed light on this aspect of the lives of African Americans on the rural landscape of the San Joaquin Valley.
Kern County: California's Deep South
Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide: Settler Colonialism/Heteropatriarchy/White Supremacy, University of California, Riverside, Riverside California, March 2011
ABSTRACT
Sometimes the best way to understand a place as diverse as California is to examine big picture topics such as major historical figures and movements. However, much can be learned by studying localized topics. One example is Kern County, at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. As early as 1884, large-scale agricultural concerns owned by men who had come to the area from the American South recruited African Americans for fieldwork, especially in the newly developed cotton culture of Central California. Recreating the plantation climate of the South established a longstanding tradition of racism and exclusion, which, in many ways, continues, today, throughout the region. Using archival material, interviews, and other primary sources, this paper examines the history of Kern County’s exclusionary past, including issues of agricultural labor through the first half of the twentieth century, sundown policies and restrictive covenants, the Ku Klux Klan, racial violence, and other forms of overt, systemic, and on-going racism, as a case study. An abbreviated version of this paper was originally presented in March of 2011, at the Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide conference at the University of California, Riverside.
A version of this paper was published in a special edition of The New Mountain Pioneer, in Frazier Park, California, December, 2014
A 2016 story on local Kern County TV covers some of the same material:
In September, 2016, some of the material from this paper was directly referenced in an article in the Tribune, in San Luis Obispo County.
Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide: Settler Colonialism/Heteropatriarchy/White Supremacy, University of California, Riverside, Riverside California, March 2011
ABSTRACT
Sometimes the best way to understand a place as diverse as California is to examine big picture topics such as major historical figures and movements. However, much can be learned by studying localized topics. One example is Kern County, at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. As early as 1884, large-scale agricultural concerns owned by men who had come to the area from the American South recruited African Americans for fieldwork, especially in the newly developed cotton culture of Central California. Recreating the plantation climate of the South established a longstanding tradition of racism and exclusion, which, in many ways, continues, today, throughout the region. Using archival material, interviews, and other primary sources, this paper examines the history of Kern County’s exclusionary past, including issues of agricultural labor through the first half of the twentieth century, sundown policies and restrictive covenants, the Ku Klux Klan, racial violence, and other forms of overt, systemic, and on-going racism, as a case study. An abbreviated version of this paper was originally presented in March of 2011, at the Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide conference at the University of California, Riverside.
A version of this paper was published in a special edition of The New Mountain Pioneer, in Frazier Park, California, December, 2014
A 2016 story on local Kern County TV covers some of the same material:
In September, 2016, some of the material from this paper was directly referenced in an article in the Tribune, in San Luis Obispo County.
Recollection of a Forgotten Community: Fairmead Engineers the Present from the Past
Southwestern Anthropological Association 85th Annual Conference, Garden Grove, California, April 2014
Published in the proceedings of the Southwestern Anthropological Association 85th Annual Conference
The Politics of Going Home
Discourse and History: 10th Annual History Graduate Student Symposium, History Graduate Students Association at California State University, Fresno, Fresno, California, April 2008
Published in the Hindsight Graduate History Journal, Spring 2008, Vol. 2, 52-65, California State University, Fresno
PAPERS, CONFERENCE, AND PUBLIC PRESENTATIONS
Full Circle
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Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Anthropological Association (SWAA).
May 2018, Fresno California In 2015, Mark Arax, Joel Pickford, and I took Ernest Lowe back to some of the communities in which he took photographs of African American farm labor, in the 1960s. This paper chronicles the two day adventure the four of us took in South Dos Palos and Teviston where, after fifty years, we located some of the subjects of Lowe's amazing photographs Watch for update |
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2018 Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, April, 2018. Sacramento, California
Watch for update. |
Growing on the Side of the Road
This presentation, as part of Black History Month, at Porterville college was loosely based on my article of the same name in the Journal of the West, from 2015.
It was a public presentation sponsored by the Porterville College Cultural Historical Awareness Program (CHAP). Thanks to Anthropology professor, Robert Simpkins for the invite and for allowing me to share the history of these communities with students and the general public in Porterville.
I also presented an updated version of this talk at Col. Allen Allensworth State Park, in June of 2017 and at Merced College on 2/28 2019
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Where Water Flows Communities Grow: Water and Rural California African American Settlements
Annual Meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE), New Orleans, September 2013 33rd Annual CCPH Conference, California Council for the Promotion of History, Hanford, California, October 2013 ABSTRACT There are times when a cliché has value because, ultimately, it is true. Anyone who drives the highways and back roads of California’s Great Central Valley, especially the southern half, -- the San Joaquin Valley named after the river system of that name – will see numerous signs posted on the edge of the road that read some version of “Where Water Flows, Food Grows!” This slogan is often mounted on the side of out-of-service cotton trailers or old trucks, occasionally next to a similar sign suggesting that “Jesus is Lord!” or posting an admonition to “Get US Out of the UN!” Often, these signs include attacks on specific politicians whose policies are seen as a threat to farmer’s access to abundant water. However over-the-top some of these signs and claims may appear on the surface, ultimately, the core message in a semi-arid region like the San Joaquin Valley holds up – if the water does not flow, nothing will grow. Today, the region is one of the most productive agricultural regions on the planet, because of irrigation. The irony is that the region was originally named for an extensive river system, and was home to one of the largest fresh-water lakes in North America: Tulare Lake. A region originally blessed with abundant water is now so arid that it requires an extensive system of irrigation canals. However, water has also had a major impact on human habitation, especially poor rural communities. This paper explores some of the impact on rural, black communities throughout the region and ways in which those communities react. |
Re-Collecting the Past: Fairmead Discovers Her History After 100 Years
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Annual Meeting of the Southwest Oral History Association (SOHA), Las Vegas, April 2013
What is linked, here, is a PDF of my PowerPoint presentation from the conference -- essentially, the slides shown to the conference, and the edited text that accompanied the images. |
At the Edge of Forgetting: Rural African Americans Fade Into the San Joaquin Valley Mist
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Borders and Crossings, 111th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), San Francisco, CA, November 2012 |
At the Corner of Your Eye: Recollections of Forgotten Communities
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Telling Stories: Analysis, Interpretation, and Narrative, Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Anthropological Association (SWAA), Chico, California, April 2012
ABSTRACT Paul Connerton has suggested that the study of the “social formation of memory is to study those acts of transfer that make remembering possible.”1 In this paper I examine the process of remembering, recalling, and forgetting in relation to several historically African American settlements in the San Joaquin Valley and how memory is potentially used and abused. Utilizing first-person interviews and oral histories; archival materials, including newspaper articles, and published secondary sources, this paper probes what Paul Ricoeur called the “intermediate level of reference between the poles of individual memory and collective memory, where concrete exchanges operate between the living memory of individual persons and the public memory of the communities to which they belong.”2 By examining how the existence of these settlements has been obscured, barred, or eliminated from the public memory and how they are remembered (or not remembered) both within these segregated communities and by the hegemonic valley society. |
Obscured by the Tule Fog: African Americans Fade into the San Joaquin Valley
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33rd Annual Central California Research Symposium, Fresno, California, April 2012 |
Cookseyville and Lanare: Two Rural California African American Townships
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Moving beyond National, Cultural, and Disciplinary Boundaries, Annual Meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, Santa Clara California, August 2010
ABSTRACT This paper compares two twentieth century African American enclaves hidden in the agricultural landscape of California’s Central Valley. These townships, like about a dozen other unique black communities, arose during the period of the Southern Exodus and are overlooked in the historical record. Unlike planned colonies, such as Allensworth, townships, like Cookseyville and Lanare, grew organically outside existing towns. Although some of these communities are tied to California’s Agribusiness empires, each community claims its own story, and a unique history. Few researchers have ever studied these townships. Michael Eissinger is one of only two scholars to have written about this topic. Utilizing first person oral-history interviews, newspaper clippings, census records, and other primary sources, this paper begins to shed light on the lives of African Americans living in the rural landscape of the San Joaquin Valley and California’s agricultural heritage. |
Allensworth: Least Successful All-Black Rural Community in Central California
The Transplantation of African Americans and Cotton Culture to California’s Rural San Joaquin Valley during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
African Americans and Cotton Culture in the Rural San Joaquin Valley
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Graduate Research and Creative Activities Symposium, Department of Graduate Studies, California State University, Fresno, Fresno, California, May 2009
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Rural African American Communities in the San Joaquin Valley
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Beyond the City Limits: The Rural African American Experience in the West, Central Valley Institute for Regional and Historical Studies, California State University, Fresno, Fresno, California, April 2008 |