Contemporary Authors

• Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War ( nonfiction) Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2018

• Kendra Tiara Field - https://www.kendrafield.com/bio/

  Kendra T Field050.JPG

  Kendra Field is assistant professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University. Field is the author of Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War (Yale University Press, January 2018). The book traces her ancestors’ migratory lives between the Civil War and the Great Migration. Field also served as Assistant Editor to David Levering Lewis' W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography (Henry Holt, 2009).

  Field has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, and Harvard University's Charles Warren Center in American History. Field's recent articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Western Historical Quarterly, and Transition. She is the recipient of the Western Writers of America's, 2017 Spur Award for Best Western Short Nonfiction, the 2016 Boahen-Wilks Prize, and the OAH's Huggins-Quarles Award. Field has advised and appeared in historical documentaries including Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross" (2013) and "Roots: A History Revealed" (2016).

  Field received her Ph.D. in American History from New York University. She also holds a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a B.A. from Williams College. Previously, Field served as Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside, and worked in education and the non-profit sector in Boston and New York.
  https://www.kendrafield.com/bio/

• Tufts University - https://ase.tufts.edu/history/faculty/field.asp

  Faculty

  Contact Info:
  Department of History
  Tufts University
  East Hall
  Medford, MA 02155

  Email Prof. Field
  Personal Website

  Kendra Taira Field
  Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies
  Nineteenth-century U.S., African American, Native American
  Biography

  Kendra Field is assistant professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University. Field is the author of Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War (Yale University Press, January 2018). The book traces her ancestors' migratory lives between the Civil War and the Great Migration. Field also served as Assistant Editor to David Levering Lewis' W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography (Henry Holt, 2009). Field's research and teaching areas include race, slavery, freedom, migration, and social movements in the long nineteenth century; African-American family history, memory, and public history.

  Field has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, and Harvard University's Charles Warren Center in American History. Field's recent articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Western Historical Quarterly, and Transition. She is the recipient of the Western Writers of America's, 2017 Spur Award for Best Western Short Nonfiction, the 2016 Boahen-Wilks Prize, and the OAH's Huggins-Quarles Award. Field has advised and appeared in historical documentaries including Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s "The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross" (2013) and "Roots: A History Revealed" (2016).

  Field received her Ph.D. in American History from New York University. She also holds a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a B.A. from Williams College. Previously, Field served as Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside, and worked in education and the non-profit sector in Boston and New York.
  Selected Publications

  Field, Kendra T. Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, January 2018).
  Field, Kendra T. and Daniel Lynch. "'Master of Ceremonies': The World of Peter Biggs in Civil War-Era Los Angeles," Western Historical Quarterly, October 2016. 2017 Winner of the Western Writers of America 2017 Spur Award for Best Western Short Nonfiction
  Field, Kendra T. "'No Such Thing as Stand Still': Migration and Geopolitics in African-American History," Journal of American History (December 2015).
  Field, Kendra T. and Ebony Coletu. "The Chief Sam Movement, A Century Later: Public Histories, Private Stories, and the African Diaspora," with Ebony Coletu, Transition Magazine 114 (July 2014). 2016 Winner of the Boahen-Wilks Prize, awarded by the Ghana Studies Association
  Field, Kendra T. "The Violence of Family Formation: Enslaved Families and Reproductive Labor in the Marketplace," Reviews in American History, June 2014.
  Field, Kendra T. "'Grandpa Brown didn't have no land.': Race, Gender, and An Intruder of Color in Indian Territory," in Gender and Race in American History, ed. Carol Faulkner and Alison Parker (University of Rochester, 2012).
  Assistant Editor, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography, by David Levering Lewis (Henry Holt, 2009).

  Education

  Ph.D. New York University, 2010
  M.P.P. Harvard University, 2002
  B.A. Williams College, 1999

  Recent Awards

  Winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Western Short Nonfiction, 2017
  Bernstein Faculty Fellowship, Tufts University, 2017-2018
  Winner of the Boahen-Wilks Prize, Ghana Studies Association, 2016
  Faculty Fellow, Charles Warren Center in American History, Harvard University, 2016-2017
  Nominee, Pushcart Prize, 2015
  Neubauer Faculty Fellowship, Tufts University, 2014-2015
  Huntington Library Fellowship, 2013
  Andrew W. Mellon Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship, 2012
  University of California President's Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities, 2012
  Hellman Fellowship, Hellman Family Foundation, 2012
  Huggins-Quarles Award, Organization of American Historians, 2009
  Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, 2009
  Charles Eastman Dissertation Fellowship, Dartmouth College, 2008

  Courses

  Family Histories and American Culture
  African American History to 1865
  African American Memory and History
  Slavery and Race in North America
  Black and Native New England
  Race and Space in American History

• Dartmouth - https://native-american.dartmouth.edu/news/kendra-taira-field-2008-2009

  Kendra Taira Field (2008-2009)
  Submitted by Web Services Editor on Mon, 09/01/2008 - 00:00

  Kendra Taira Field (2008-2009) - (Creek) wrote her dissertation for a PhD in History at New York University, titled: "African American Migration From the Deep South to Indian Territory, 1870-1920." Kendra is now an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Tufts University. She is now completing her first book, Growing Up with the Country: A Family History of Race and American Expansion. She has received the Huggins-Quarles Award of the Organization of American Histories and has also been awarded fellowships from the Hellman Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Quoted in Sidelights: an important work of American history
Field's family history further enriches her fine scholarly work.
Growing Up with the Country:
Family, Race, and Nation After the
Civil War
Publishers Weekly.
264.48 (Nov. 27, 2017): p51. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation After the Civil War
Kendra Taira Field. Yale Univ., $38 (256p)
ISBN 978-0-300-18052-7
Field, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University, debuts with an important work of American history drawn from her personal family history. In the second half of the 19th century, three of Field's ancestors--Thomas Jefferson Brown, Monroe Coleman, and Alexander "Elic" Davis--left the postemancipation South for Indian Territory (Oklahoma) searching for freedom. Field cogently argues that the lives of her relatives and the tens of thousands of freed people who moved west between 1865 and 1915 expose the "deeply transnational and multiracial dimensions of freedom's first generation." She skillfully portrays the
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
interaction of freed people with Native Americans in Oklahoma to reveal the links among national identification, racial constructions, and class divisions. Some freed people used marriage to Native Americans to distance themselves from an oppressive history and to gain access to land, a source of stability and independence. Some pushed Congress to create a "black state" within the Oklahoma territory. The story that Field relates regarding the 1913-1915 Chief Sam back-to-Africa movement is exceptionally fascinating. Readers looking for an innovative hybrid of history and memoir won't find that here; rather, Field's family history further enriches her fine scholarly work. Maps & Illus. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation After the Civil War." Publishers
Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 51. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A517575696/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ba8d3a2e. Accessed 21 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517575696
2 of 2 5/20/18, 11:42 PM

• Williams College : Williams Magazine
  https://magazine.williams.edu/2018/spring/feature/the-language-of-family/
  Word count: 2392

  Quoted in Sidelights: “In New Jersey, our family was black, while back home in rural Oklahoma we were Creek Indian, too,” she writes in her preface. “As a child in the 1970s and 1980s, I loved nothing more than listening to my grandmother’s stories about growing up African-American and Creek Indian in 1920s Oklahoma. In the long wake of the Newark riots, watching Odevia Brown Field plant tomatoes in the patch behind her house, I learned about a time when our family had owned hundreds of acres of land, alongside our Indian and African-descended kin.” She continues: “Like many historians, I imagine, I first learned the meaning of change over time, and space, within my own family, as I listened to mythical stories of long-lost black landownership from the vantage point of the post-civil rights era.” After her father’s death in 2004, she notes, she realized it was her job to gather these stories and put them together. “I wanted to know how one generation shaped the next, why these stories were repeated and where the shadows came from,” she explains.

  The Language of Family
  A new book by historian Kendra Taira Field ’99 explores family, race and nation after the U.S. Civil War.

  Between 1865 and 1915, tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people journeyed out of the South and into the West and beyond. Among them were the ancestors of Kendra Taira Field ’99, who made their way to Indian Territory and what would become Oklahoma. There they developed black and, as families merged, black Indian towns and settlements. They owned land and built churches and schools. They were, Field says, “freedom’s first generation.”

  When their lives and livelihoods were threatened by statehood, Jim Crow segregation and oil speculation, some of Field’s family members joined a powerful back-to-Africa movement, while others emigrated to Canada or Mexico. Over the course of their lifetimes, they experienced what she calls “a constant shifting of racial categories over both time and space.”

  Field, now a history professor at Tufts University, initially collected their stories “on the side,” she says, until she was encouraged “to consider creating scholarship out of them.” The result is Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race and Nation after the Civil War. Published in January by Yale University Press, the book chronicles the epic journeys of three branches of Field’s family tree over the course of half a century. Their lives and choices “deepen and widen the roots of the Great Migration” and—as the following excerpt from the preface shows—demonstrate how “ideas about race and color powerfully shaped the pursuit of freedom.”

  In New Jersey, our family was black, while back home in rural Oklahoma we were Creek Indian, too. As a child in the 1970s and 1980s, I loved nothing more than listening to my grandmother’s stories about growing up African-American and Creek Indian in 1920s Oklahoma. In the long wake of the Newark riots, watching Odevia Brown Field plant tomatoes in the patch behind her house, I learned about a time when our family had owned hundreds of acres of land, alongside our Indian and African-descended kin. Grandpa Brown had a place they called Brownsville, she said, where they built a school and a church. I learned, too, about the oil speculators who gradually came to see my (African-American and Creek) great-grandfather; for the occasional lump sum, he worked as a Mvskoke translator across Oklahoma, telling them “just where to look for oil.” Through my grandmother’s stories, I learned about Indian and African-American land loss.

  About once a year, my grandmother would pull out the $25 check she had received from Sun Oil Corp., insisting that I look at it, too. I remember how she stared at that check, asking questions, already knowing the answers. In grade school, I memorized occasional facts about slavery and the Trail of Tears, but it was through my grandmother that I learned about the intersection of the two: that some Native Americans had held slaves, that African-Americans had participated in Indian “land runs” and that the North American “frontier” was far more complicated than my textbooks let on. During summertime visits to Oklahoma, I began collecting evidence. Uncle Thurman would take us out to Brownsville, driving red dirt roads for hours, following the perfectly rectangular perimeter of the 1,000-acre homeplace. There was no longer a house, but we found the steps to the school, amid a landscape of tall grass, Indian paintbrushes, and oil wells. One year at a YMCA summer camp in the Catskills, when I stumbled across a collection of Indian creation myths nearly identical to the Brer Rabbit folk tales my father occasionally told me as a child, I ran to a pay phone to call him. Was Brer Rabbit Indian, black or both? These were the wrong questions, but at the time, back east, there was barely language for what I wanted to know. There was, thankfully, the language of family. When I moved away to college, my family’s stories stayed with me, quietly highlighting the incompleteness of other historical narratives.

  Long before I cared for the discipline of history, my grandmother’s stories made me whole, pointing to things I sensed, but for which I had no words. Author Ronne Hartfield writes, “Our mother’s stories have given us the maps by which our tribe locates its journeying, its streams and rivers, its stony places, its sometimes astonishing, more often incredibly affirming twists and turns.” Historian E. Frances White attests that her own grandfather’s stories were “so wonderful that I began to believe that they could not be true.” As she grew older, however, she stopped worrying about whether they were true. “What is important here is that my grandfather told me the stories; the stories made sense to me; and, most important, the stories made sense of the world for me.”

  In recent years, psychologists have begun to examine what human beings have long understood, the importance of a strong “intergenerational self”: children knowing they “belong to something bigger than themselves.” One study revealed that in the face of conflict and uncertainty, “the more children know about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self esteem.” Such findings have particular implications, both urgent and hopeful, for African-American communities.

  Forcibly separated from our family members by the first and second Middle Passage, by slavery and the slave trade, we were also separated, in large part, from our family histories. Frederick Douglass opened his 1892 Life and Times this way: “The reader must not expect me to say much of my family. Genealogical trees did not flourish among slaves.” Rooted in the repetitive social trauma of family separation and “haunted by the need to know,” historian Heather Williams writes, in the post-emancipation era, descendants searched for “those who were lost through sale or through the negligence of history.” When the African-American search extended beyond the history of individuals or individual families, it began “to help construct the history of a people.” Just as “enslaved children were stunned when they found out they could be sold,” “some people are still stunned by the blow,” including the deprivation of family members and family history: “People cannot fathom it, and they want to reestablish and reclaim that history.”

  And so we have. Dorothy Redford, descendant and genealogist of the North Carolina Somerset Plantation, recalled, “I began as a woman alone, drifting in both time and space,” and by the end, she had “a past peopled with links as strong and solid as any family in this nation.” As she pieced together the lives of their ancestors and organized a reunion on the grounds, Williams reflects, “All the slaves on the plantation became her people.” E. Frances White’s family “worked hard to develop strong black egos in its children” and thus sent her to spend a week with her grandfather each summer. He was a follower of Marcus Garvey and “had an impressive library filled with everything he could find on Africa and its diaspora. It did not matter to him whether a book was racist or uplifting; if it was about black people, he would buy it.” There White encountered “both a history of the Ku Klux Klan, written by a klansman, and C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins.”

  My own first copy of Black Jacobins came from my granddad. So did W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction and every book Joel Augustus Rogers ever wrote. Orphaned as a child in the 1910s, my granddad, William H. Field, was taken in by an unlikely African-American entrepreneur named Charlotte Field. Aunt Charlotte, as he called her, gave him a roof over his head and a job delivering The Crisis in Paterson, N.J. By the 1950s, following one year at Howard University and several more in the military, he was living in East Orange, N.J., and working at the post office in Newark. Around this time, he wrote a letter to Joel Augustus Rogers, the prolific self-trained historian (and onetime Pullman porter) who combatted racist propaganda and popularized black history. In his letter to Rogers, my grandfather lamented the lack of “black books” for his children at the local library, pleading to one of his most cherished authors for help. Some weeks later, Rogers arrived at the East Orange Public Library with a box of his books. Afterward, my grandmother remembered fixing him dinner—“maybe it was lamb,” she recalled—at 74 Stockton Place. Thus while my grandmother shared countless family stories, my granddad, lacking knowledge of his own ancestors, immersed his children in other kinds of stories and another kind of family: the beauty and rigor of the black intellectual tradition. Somehow, I knew, Du Bois and Rogers were “my people,” too. How I cherished this extended family. Growing up in a household marked by the insecurities of illness and death, I borrowed their strength.

  On july 9, 1977, the new york times published an article about organ transplantation with a photograph of my mother, my father, my grandmother and me. Having developed kidney failure at 19, in 1968, my father received from my grandmother an early experimental kidney transplant. When I was born, some years after the surgery, the doctors told my father that he would be lucky to live to see my fifth birthday. But with the help of my mother’s fight, my father kept living—eventually becoming a kidney doctor himself, trying to understand this illness and its prevalence within African-American communities—and he carried me well into my 20s.

  Over the years, various theories emerged about my father’s kidney disease. Somehow they all led back to Okmulgee, Okla., where he spent his first five years in the 1940s. Sometimes my grandmother talked about “greasy creek,” the oil-rich creek where they would play, wondering about its effects. Other times she mentioned the day he fell into a gigantic Oklahoma anthill. The theory that registered with East Coast doctors in the 1980s amounted to untreated strep throat and a lack of antibiotics during his early years. The final, unspoken one had to do with leaving Oklahoma. My father had been raised by his grandparents those first few years of life, in a country town where he was adored by a large extended family, black, “mulatto,” Indian and proud; amid a contentious return to his mother and father in urban Paterson, N.J., the separation was traumatic. Thereafter, he would return to Oklahoma each summer, with his younger sister Beverly, to be with his Momma and Pawpaw, but there was a longing that never quite healed. He seemed to cling to Oklahoma for life.

  When my father passed away in 2004, having survived nearly four decades of illness—including a stroke that caused him to lose all of his speech—I stumbled back into history and found his intellectual curiosity and love of life waiting for me there. He loved Oklahoma, and the stories that reside there, more than the many places he had traveled in his 57 miraculous years. Making sense of our unspeakable loss together, my then 85-year-old grandmother accompanied me on nearly every research trip I made to Oklahoma, Mississippi and Alabama. She was every bit as curious as I, and far more skillful at enlisting others to come along for the ride, as we searched for missing puzzle pieces. In the 10 years that followed my father’s death and preceded my grandmother’s, Odevia Brown Field and I made the unspoken decision to dwell in the past.

  I remember clearly the two of us racing back from a morning fact-finding expedition over long and winding roads, hoping to arrive to Sunday buffet at the Sirloin Stockade “in time”—before her eldest sister Marzetta scolded us. We had already missed church. We arrived just in time to find my grandmother’s cousin, Clifford Fields. We shared with Clifford what we were up to, and he immediately took me under his wing and proceeded to share with me the decades of scattered genealogy notes he had vigilantly collected. In the years since that serendipitous meeting, Clifford has driven me down hundreds of country roads, knocked on dozens of strangers’ doors and asked nearly every question that no one else dared to ask.

  Like many historians, I imagine, I first learned the meaning of change over time, and space, within my own family, as I listened to mythical stories of long-lost black landownership from the vantage point of the post-civil rights era, and as I watched my father decline, a pillar of our family fall and my world ever so gradually collapse. Surrounded by secrets and the ever-present threat of separation through the passage of time and space, my job—first as a daughter, then as a historian—became putting the pieces back together. I wanted to know how one generation shaped the next, why these stories were repeated and where the shadows came from.

  Kendra Taira Field ’99 is an assistant professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University.