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WORK TITLE: This Is Not Dixie
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: TX
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.utrgv.edu/history/_files/documents/campney,%20department%20website%20cv,%20january%202017.pdf * https://webapps.utrgv.edu/aa/dm/index.cfm?action=profile&user=brent.campney *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Michigan, B.A., 1998; University of Kansas, M.A., 2001; Emory University, Ph.D., 2007.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of Kansas, Lawrence, instructor and teaching assistant, 1999-2001; Emory University, Atlanta, GA, instructor and teaching assistant, 2003-04; University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley (formerly University of Texas, Pan American), assistant professor, 2008-14, associate professor, 2014–.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles and book reviews to publications, including Pacific Historical Review, Middle West Review, American Nineteenth Century History, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Great Plains Quarterly, Georgia Historical Quarterly, Western Historical Quarterly, Kansas History, and Southern Spaces. Contributor of chapters to books.
SIDELIGHTS
Brett M.S. Campney is a writer and educator. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, a master’s degree from the University of Kansas, and a Ph.D. from Emory University. Campney served as an instructor and teaching assistant at the latter two schools. In 2008, he joined the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, which was known at the time as the University of Texas, Pan American. Campney worked at the university as an assistant professor until 2014, when he was promoted to associate professor. He has written articles and book reviews that have appeared in publications, including Pacific Historical Review, Middle West Review, American Nineteenth Century History, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Great Plains Quarterly, Georgia Historical Quarterly, Western Historical Quarterly, Kansas History, and Southern Spaces. He has also written chapters of books.
In 2015, Campney released his first book, This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927. In this volume, he begins by discussing racism in Kansas during and just after the Civil War. Campney explains that there were many instances in which black residents were expelled from the towns where they lived. They ended up banding together to form communities. The towns that expelled the blacks became known as “sundown towns.” Campney goes on to chronicle instances of false accusations of the rape of a white woman, leading to the conviction or lynching of a black Kansas man. The mobs that lynched the black men who were falsely accused often tortured their victims and took souvenirs to commemorate their actions. If members of lynch mobs were ever charged with violence against blacks, they were typically exonerated. As years passed, the police departments in Kansas began committing violence against blacks, and lynch mobs became less prevalent. Also, Jim Crow laws were enacted. Campney analyzes the ways in which the news media reported lynchings in Kansas, suggesting that the proliferation of reports on lynchings created an environment of fear for the state’s black population.
This Is Not Dixie received favorable reviews. Guy Lancaster, contributor to the Journal of Southern History, commented: “Campney has written an amazing and profound book that challenges many assumptions regarding racist violence in America, putting both the Midwest and the South in a deeper, richer context. This Is Not Dixie will no doubt inspire similar state-level studies.” Choice writer M.W. Quirk remarked: “Campney … makes a significant contribution to the field of racial violence and the understanding of the history of Kansas.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, March, 2016, M.W. Quirk, review of This is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927, p. 1068.
Journal of Southern History, Guy Lancaster, review of This Is Not Dixie, p. 697.
ONLINE
University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley Web site, http://wwwutrgv.edu/ (March 14, 2017), author faculty profile.*
LC control no.: n 2015023978
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Campney, Brent M. S.
Found in: This is not Dixie, 2015: ECIP t.p. (Brent M.S. Campney)
data view (assistant professor in the Department of
History and Philosophy at University of Texas-Pan
American)
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
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Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
Dr. M. S. Campney
Areas of Expertise
American History, Western and Southern History, Race and Ethnicity
Education
PhD, American Studies, Emory University, 2007
MA, American Studies, University of Kansas, 2001
BA, American Culture, The University of Michigan, 1998
Currently Teaching
HIST 4329 01 - Black History & Thought:
Syllabus
Course Evaluations
Textbooks
HIST 1302 27 - U.S. History II:
Syllabus
Course Evaluations
Textbooks
HIST 1302 21 - U.S. History II:
Syllabus
Course Evaluations
Textbooks
Bre
nt M. S. Campney
Dr.
Campney
is the author of
This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861
-
1927
(University of
Illinois Press, 2015). He has published articles in
American
Nineteenth Century History
,
Western
Historical Quarterly
,
Middle West Review
,
and
Georgia Historical Quarterly
, among others journals,
and
c
hapters
in
Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border
(University
Press of Kansas, 2013) and
Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence outside the South
(University of Illinois Press, 2013). He is currently at work on several
projects
, in
cluding an
investigation of race
relations in South
Texas in the
early
twentie
th century and a study of the black
civil rights struggle in the Midwest after World War II.
In his teaching, Campney focuses on the
history of race and ethnicity in nineteenth and twentieth century America
.
CV: http://www.utrgv.edu/history/_files/documents/campney,%20department%20website%20cv,%20january%202017.pdf
QUOTED: "Campney has written an amazing and profound book that challenges many assumptions regarding racist violence in America, putting both the Midwest and the South in a deeper, richer context. This Is Not Dixie will no doubt inspire similar state-level studies."
This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927
Guy Lancaster
82.3 (Aug. 2016): p697.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927. By Brent M. S. Campney. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. [xii], 281. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03950-8.)
Political and cultural authorities in Kansas regularly blamed outbreaks of racist violence on white southerners, usually men from Missouri who had ostensibly brought their reprobate traditions to the Sunflower State. Indeed, Kansas has long employed Dixie as a foil against which to present its own free state narrative of racial goodness. However, as Brent M. S. Campney thoroughly explicates in this book, Kansas (and, by extension, the American Midwest) was no bastion of tolerance, for "so-called southern-style" violence was manifest here from the earliest days of statehood (p. 217).
Campney opens This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927 with the Civil War and Reconstruction. A variety of expulsions created "sundown towns," leaving the small black population of Kansas "concentrated in scattered pockets" and allowing white residents to "[reassert] their domination with a relatively small number of spectacular incidents" (p. 43). The coming of the Exodusters precipitated more violence as white Kansans sought to keep African Americans away or at least subordinated. Indeed, much of the book after the first chapter reflects scholarly studies of antiblack violence in the South, describing alleged acts of rape that led to many lynchings, white mobs who often engaged in torture and souvenir-taking, the regular exoneration of mob members, and the eventual substitution of mob violence with state-sanctioned police violence and Jim Crow legislation. In fact, the title This Is Not Dixie, though taken from an actual quotation, recalls Rene Magritte's famous painting of a pipe, The Treachery of Images, with its label, "This is not a pipe," for this book challenges the idea of southern distinctiveness as embodied in its regime of racist violence.
Most studies on antiblack violence focus on particular taxonomies of atrocity such as lynching, race riots, police violence, and racially motivated expulsions. By contrast, Campney examines the broader continuum of racist violence in Kansas, even going beyond the enumerated body count typical of most studies to illustrate the power of threatened lynchings, or "lynchings-in-the-making," which often go unremarked even though "they generated a level of fear among blacks commensurate with that experienced during completed lynchings because the final outcomes could never be predicted" (pp. 116, 203). The symbolic power of violence grew enormously as newspapers relayed increasingly detailed accounts of atrocities from across the state and nation. As Campney makes clear, even though lynching declined in Kansas in the 1890s, the proliferation of lynching reports in the papers and the number of threatened lynchings could leave the impression that such forms of violence were on the rise.
Campney also argues for a reevaluation of the civil rights movement by tracing its origins back to abolition and emancipation, for African American leaders, such as William Bolden Townsend, who founded the State Anti-Lynching Association and the Kansas branch of the Afro-American Council, resisted the rising tide of violence in Kansas. Campney documents a black disdain for Kansas's free state narrative as well as instances in which black newspapers rhetorically "exploited the self-righteous certainty of white Kansans who thought that they were morally superior to their southern counterparts" (p. 177). Black resistance to white mob activity during the Coffeyville riot of 1927 illustrates how traditional scholarship on the New Negro movement, "which targets the large urban centers where many intellectuals and activists resided, undermines the critical roles of ordinary people throughout the country in their common cause" (p. 200).
Campney has written an amazing and profound book that challenges many assumptions regarding racist violence in America, putting both the Midwest and the South in a deeper, richer context. This Is Not Dixie will no doubt inspire similar state-level studies.
GUY LANCASTER
Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture
Lancaster, Guy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lancaster, Guy. "This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 3, 2016, p. 697+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460447791&it=r&asid=a9ae2420080c21bcacb555d82b345af8. Accessed 23 Feb. 2017.
QUOTED: "Campney ... makes a significant contribution to the field of racial violence and the understanding of the history of Kansas."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460447791
Campney, Brent M. S.: This is not Dixie: racist violence in Kansas, 1861-1927
M.W. Quirk
53.7 (Mar. 2016): p1068.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Campney, Brent M. S. This is not Dixie: racist violence in Kansas, 1861-1927. Illinois, 2015. 281 p bibl index afp ISBN 9780252039508 cloth, $50.00
(cc) 53-3186
E185
2014-47485 CIP
Campney (Univ. of Texas Rio Grande Valley) makes a significant contribution to the field of racial violence and the understanding of the history of Kansas in the post-Civil War period. He outlines a new definition of racial violence beyond lynching that encompasses all acts of racially inspired violence, including race riots, mobbing, killing by police, and violence. These acts, while infrequent, were significant in the consciousness of residents and received notable attention from Kansas newspaper editors. Campney makes extensive use of the newspaper collection of the Kansas State Historical Society to illustrate the statewide nature of racial violence. He also reveals the role of African Americans in Kansas in exposing and resisting racist violence. Along with the earlier Lynching in the New South, by W. Fitzhugh Brundage (1993), and William D. Carrigan's The Making of a Lynching Culture (CH, Sep'05, 43-0513), This Is Not Dixie secures the University of Illinois Press's dominance as a publisher of scholarship on racial violence in the post-Civil War era. For students of Kansas's image in the 20th century, this book adds an additional dimension to the portrayal by Robert Smith Bader in Hayseeds, Moralizers, and Methodists (1988). Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.--M. W. Quirk, Rock Valley College
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Quirk, M.W. "Campney, Brent M. S.: This is not Dixie: racist violence in Kansas, 1861-1927." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Mar. 2016, p. 1068. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA445735606&it=r&asid=e522fffb8a17d340f466c8e6009b9f6d. Accessed 23 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A445735606