Brief Curriculum Vitae
Dr. Laurence Glasco
Department of History
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260
Born 1940, Xenia, Ohio. B.A., 1962 from Antioch College; Ph.D. in 1973 from the State University of N.Y. at Buffalo. Taught at the University of Pittsburgh since 1969, where I am Associate Professor of History and Director, Program for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in World Perspective.
My principal research interests are race and ethnicity. My MA thesis was a study of the racial philosophy of José Vasconcelos, a Mexican philosopher of the twentieth century who wrote optimistically of racial mixture and the creation of a "Cosmic Race." My dissertation was a study of ethnic social structure and ethnic relations among Irish, Germans and native-born whites in Buffalo, New York in the mid-19th century. More recently I have been writing a history of African Americans in Pittsburgh, and comparative studies of race relations and the history of blacks in Cuba and the United States.
Principal publications on blacks in Pittsburgh include:
"Double Burden: History of Blacks in Pittsburgh, PA.," in S.P. Hays, ed., City at the Point (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1989)
Legacy in Bricks and Mortar: African-American Landmarks in Allegheny County (with Frank Bolden and Eliza Smith), Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, 1995.
"Rise of Blacks as a Political Power"; "Educational, Social, and Cultural Institutions and Achievements"; "The Church"; in African American Historic Sites Survey of Allegheny County, with Eliza Brown, et al., (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1994)
“Taking Care of Business: The Black Entrepreneurial Elite in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh,” Pittsburgh History (Winter 1995/96): 177-182.
“Optimism, Dilemmas, and Progress: The Pittsburgh Survey and Black Americans,” in M. Greenwald and M. Anderson, eds., Pittsburgh Surveyed: Social Science and Social Reform in the Early Twentieth Century, (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), pp. 205-220
"Carlos F. Peterson's Once Upon a Hill", Heart Quarterly (Fall 1997), pp. 14-17.
“High Culture in Black Pittsburgh: Historical Perspectives,” submitted for publication.
Edited version of 1940 WPA typescript, "The Negro in Pittsburgh," to be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press
Investigations of race relations in Cuba include:
"National Versus Racial Identity: Juan Gualberto Gomez of Cuba and W.E.B. Du Bois of the United States," in Wolfgang Reinhard and Peter Waldmann, Nord und Süd in Amerika (Freiburg, Germany: Rombach, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 470-484.
"From Assimilation to Integration: The Narrow Spectrum of Afro-Cuban Ideology: Juan Gualberto Gómez, Evaristo Estenoz and Juan René Betancourt," in Diaspora vol. V (1996): 97-117
(with Alejandro de la Fuente) "Are Blacks 'Getting Out of Control'? Racial Attitudes, Revolution and Transition in Cuba," in Miguel Centeno and Mauricio Font (eds.), Toward a New Cuba? Legacies of a Revolution (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997), pp. 53-71
“Race in Three Cuban cities: Havana, Sanata Clara and Santiago de Cuba,” America Negra (December, 1998), p. 67-71.
Other studies on race and ethnicity include:
“Urban Slavery in World Perspective,” for A Historical Guide to World Slavery, ed. Seymour Drescher and Stanley Engerman, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1998)
“Brazil and Race: Lessons from Bahia,” Journal of Afro-Latin American Studies and Literatures II (Spring 1994): 11-22.
“Race, Caste and Untouchability: Lessons from India,” Sanskriti (August 25, 1993)
"The Life Cycles and Household Structures of American Ethnic Groups," Journal of Urban History, 1 (May, 1975). Reprinted in T. Hareven, ed., Family and Kin in Urban Communities (1976), and N. Cott and E. Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own. (1979).
"Ethnicity and Occupation in the Mid-Nineteenth Century," in R. Ehrlich, ed., Immigrants in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (University of Virginia Press, 1977).