Call for Contributors: Blaming Down: New Histories of Scapegoating in the Modern United States

Sean Dinces Announcement
Location
United States
Subject Fields
American History / Studies

The editors of Blaming Down: New Histories of Scapegoating in the Modern United States invite chapter proposals from scholars with fresh perspectives on Americans’ long and checkered record, since the Civil War, of holding the disempowered and dissenting culpable for the nation’s problems.

The sixteen sections of Blaming Down will mirror the chapter organization of typical undergraduate Modern U.S. History textbooks. Instructors will thus be able to use the collection as a textbook supplement or replacement for Modern U.S. survey courses. We are focused on recruiting contributors with a record of clear and concise writing. Entries should be approximately 4,000 words.

Once recruitment of contributors is complete, we will begin the process of securing a contract with a publisher. Contributors without full-time academic employment (i.e., graduate students and adjunct faculty) will receive $250 upon completion of their chapter (provided from subvention and personal funds of the editors.)

We seek contributions that do at least one of the following:

  • Explore previously ignored examples of scapegoating
     
  • Synthesize relevant scholarship on better-known examples of scapegoating
     
  • Examine cases of scapegoating within groups often assumed to be socially, culturally, and politically monolithic (e.g., redbaiting within the African American community during the Civil Rights movement)
     
  • Shift the focus in the historical literature on scapegoating from simply documenting examples to analyzing their manifold causes—political, economic, social, and cultural
     
  • Analyze examples of scapegoating through a “non- essentialist” lens—that is, not as manifestations of immutable hatred harbored by one group toward another, but rather as historically specific phenomena

Send proposals of no more than 250 words and a current vita to sdinces@lbcc.edu. The deadline to submit is August 31, 2020.

 

Contact Information

Sean Dinces, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of History and Political Science
Long Beach City College
sdinces@lbcc.edu
www.seandinces.com

Vaneesa Cook, Ph.D.
University of Wisconsin-Madison
vcook@wisc.edu
www.scholarschope.net  

Contact Email
sdinces@lbcc.edu