Victoria W. Wolcott
Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
449 Rush Rhees Library
Rochester, New York 14627-0070
wolc@mail.rochester.edu
phone: 585.275.4756
fax: 585.756.4425
Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1995
Courses Offered
(subject to change)
Spring 2009
On Leave
Fall 2009
HIS 373W/473: Sex & Gender in the American City (WST 373/473)
Spring 2010
HIS 334W/434: U.S. Colloquium II
Fields of Interest
African-American history; urban history; Post-1945; women's history; popular culture.
My research focuses on the African-American experience in the twentieth-century urban North. My first book, Remaking Respectability, examines the Great Migration of southern African-American women to Detroit, Michigan in the 1920s and 1930s. The book traces how divergent notions of appropriate behavior and deportment shaped the actions of elite and working-class African Americans during this period. Female migrants often depended on storefront churches, numbers runners, and other nontraditional sources of economic survival and personal identity that urban reformers considered problematic. By World War II these female migrants had helped foster a racial politics of self-determination in the motor city.
Studying an interwar black community has led me to a second major research project. Recreation and leisure were major concerns within the African-American community throughout the interwar period. Black reformers who struggled to find respectable and safe forms of leisure within the city found their efforts stymied by segregation policies practiced by white owners of amusement parks, swimming pools, and movie theaters. In my current research I am looking more closely at race and recreation in northern cities after World War II. I have published an article examining a 1956 race riot at Crystal Beach amusement park near Buffalo, New York for the Journal of American History. I am complementing this research with studies on urban amusement parks, swimming pools, and skating rinks in post-war American cities to complete a monograph, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: Integrated Amusements in the Postwar Urban North.
Representative Publications:
- "Recreation and Race in the Postwar City: Buffalo's 1956 Crystal Beach Riot," Journal of American History (June 2006): 63-90.
- Remaking Respectability: African-American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
- "Gendered Perspectives on Detroit History," Michigan Historical Review (Spring 2001): 75-91.
- "The Culture of the Informal Economy: Numbers Runners in Inter-War Black Detroit," The Radical History Review (Fall 1997): 46-75.
- "'Bible, Bath, and Broom': Nannie Helen Borroughs, the National Training School, and the Uplift of the Race," Journal of Women's History (Spring 1997): 88-110.
- "Mediums, Messages, and Lucky Numbers: African-American Female Spiritualists and Numbers Runners in Inter-War Detroit," in Patricia Yeager, ed., The Geography of Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 273-306.
