Louis P. Masur and Samuel D. Kassow Win Plaudits
HARTFORD, Conn. – Louis P. Masur, author of The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of the Photograph that Shocked America, and Samuel D. Kassow, who wrote Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, have won plaudits from book reviewers in recent weeks.
Masur is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Institutions and Values, and Kassow is the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity.
The Soiling of Old Glory is the story-behind-the-story of the world-famous, Pulitzer prize-winning photograph of a young white man attacking a black man with a metal flagpole from which hangs an American flag. The photo was shot in Boston by Stanley Forman in 1976, and it became emblematic of the strained race relations that characterized that city and many parts of the nation. The photo, which appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the country, presents a frightening image of an angry white teenager brandishing an American flag at a well-dressed African-American man.
“A gem of a book,” is how Publishers Weekly characterized The Soiling of Old Glory, which was just published by Bloomsbury Press and will be released April 1. “Masur addresses the source of the picture’s power on a multitude of levels, bringing uncommon wisdom and explanatory skills to his analysis of the collision of the Civil Rights movement, racism and community concerns about court-ordered busing programs.”
In a review in BookPage, John T. Slania, a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago, called The Soiling of Old Glory “an engaging book for anyone interested in journalism, photography, history or social themes, as – like a photograph – it reflects the actions and attitudes of America at a distinctive place and time.”
Kassow’s book, which was published last year by Indiana University Press, “may well be the most important book about history that anyone will ever read,” says Peter N. Miller in the April 9 issue of The New Republic. “As a tale about why doing history matters, Samuel D. Kassow’s book has few equals in our collective record.”
Who Will Write Our History? was selected by the Jewish Book Council as runner-up for the 2007 National Jewish Book Award, which is a program in its 57th year, making it the longest-running award of its kind in North America.
Kassow is the world’s leading authority on Emanuel Ringelblum, who, in 1940, established a secret organization named Oyneg Shabes in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to document Jewish life in wartime Poland and to compile an archive that would preserve the documents for posterity. Ringelblum died in 1944 but before he did, he hid thousands ofdocuments in milk cans and tin boxes. They were discovered in 1946 and 1950.
Although a handful of historians have worked with the material, Kassow, a historian of imperial Russia, “is the first to give a picture of the whole project, and of its amazing chief protagonist,” says Miller in The New Republic. “For all these reasons, this book – itself an act of historical rescue – is a work of tremendous significance.”