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Preface and Acknowledgments MUCH HAS CHANGED in the fifteen years since the first edition of this book appeared, but its most basic presumptions seem as true as when I began: Cultures, including those of oppressed and oppressing groups, naturally interpenetrate and shape each other; Americans still hold and are influenced by messianic myths about their nation; and African American jeremiahs still protest injustice. It is pleasing to learn how generally well received was my original study of seven historic national African American leaders’ use of the American jeremiad, a rhetoric of indignation expressing deep dissatisfaction and challenging the nation to reform. Black leaders from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King and later have employed this widespread rhetoric of social prophecy and criticism to create a variant that is specifically African American. It is also gratifying that Temple University Press believes that the book and response it has received merit this revised, expanded, and updated edition. Significant additions and changes have been made to this second edition. It is more inclusive. I agreed with two reviewers’ point that the first book would have benefited from more sustained analysis of the thought and rhetoric of a major Black Nationalist figure. Accordingly , a chapter has been written on Malcolm X, the famous Nation of Islam then independent black leader of the 1950s and 1960s. The new chapter on Malcolm adds another fascinating individual and, I think, enriching analytical layer to this study of the African American jeremiad tradition. The Conclusion and Introduction also contain considerable new material. Statements by Jesse Jackson dating through the early twentyfirst century are used as evidence, and the jeremiad of African viii Preface and Acknowledgments American conservative activist Alan Keyes has been added to the conclusionary section on the black jeremiad’s continuation in post-Civil Rights America. I have made cuts in places, such as in Chapter One on Douglass and the Introduction, to keep the second edition from growing too bulky. To the first edition’s acknowledgments to Professors David W. Noble, Sacvan Bercovitch, Herbert Aptheker, Wilson J. Moees, Russel Menard, Raymond Arsenault, and Brenda J. Plummer, I now add thanks to Professor Drew R. Smith, Director of the Public Influences of African American Churches Project, a project of the Leadership Center at Morehouse College funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. I am grateful for the enlivening academic acquaintances I made among the project’s other commissioned scholars, especially Professors Lewis V. Baldwin of Vanderbilt University, Clarence Taylor of LeMoyne College , and C. R. D. Halisi of California State University, Los Angeles. Working on the project was enormously stimulating and influenced this revised edition. I was honored to participate in the Public Influences of African American Churches Project and to take part in one of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ excellent studies of various American communities’ political activities. I thank Cynthia Kaufman, my colleague in Women’s Studies at De Anza College, whose insights into Ida B. Wells led me to reevaluate Wells’s status as a jeremiah. I continue to be inspired by the example of historian David W. Noble, my University of Minnesota graduate advisor, whose impressive body of scholarship continues with his latest book Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism. I am very pleased to be teaching at De Anza College and count myself blessed for my work, friends, and family, and especially for Beth, Christopher, and Sean. Also, thanks to Beth for being my first and closest editorial advisor. The African American Jeremiad ...

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