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The Harlem Renaissance is the best known and most widely studied cultural movement in African American history. Now, in Harlem Renaissance Lives, esteemed scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham have selected 300 key biographical entries culled from the eight-volume African American National Biography, providing an authoritative who's who of this seminal period. Here readers will find engagingly written and authoritative articles on notable African Americans who made significant contributions to literature, drama, music, visual art, or dance, including such central figures as poet Langston Hughes, novelist Zora Neale Hurston, aviator Bessie Coleman, blues singer Ma Rainey, artist Romare Bearden, dancer Josephine Baker, jazzman Louis Armstrong, and the intellectual giant W. E. B. Du Bois. Also included are biographies of people like the Scottsboro Boys, who were not active within the movement but who nonetheless profoundly affected the artistic and political statements that came from Harlem Renaissance figures. The volume will also feature a preface by the editors, an introductory essay by historian Cary D. Wintz, and 75 illustrations.
The weekly source of African American political and entertainment news.
The weekly source of African American political and entertainment news.
Spencer's discussion encompasses the music and writings of a wide range of important figures, including James Weldon Johnson, Harry T. Burleigh, Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, Alain Locke, William Grant Still, R. Nathaniel Dett, and Dorothy Maynor. He argues that the singular accomplishment of the Harlem Renaissance composers and musicians was to achieve a "two-tiered mastery" promoted by Johnson, Locke, the Harmon award, and Crisis and Opportunity magazines.
In the silent era, American cinema was defined by two separate and parallel industries, with white and black companies producing films for their respective, segregated audiences. Jane Gaines's highly anticipated new book reconsiders the race films of this era with an ambitious historical and theoretical agenda. Fire and Desire offers a penetrating look at the black independent film movement during the silent period. Gaines traces the profound influence that D. W. Griffith's racist epic The Birth of a Nation exerted on black filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux, the director of the newly recovered Within Our Gates. Beginning with What Happened in the Tunnel, a movie that played with race and sex...
Pendergast traces the shift in US periodicals from Victorian masculinity--which valued character, integrity, hard work, and duty--to modern masculinity--which valued personality, self- realization, and image. Arguing that the rise of mass consumer culture was a key factor in the change, he describes how such magazines as American Magazine, Esquire, and True presented masculinity in ways that reflected the magazines' relationship to advertisers, contributors and readers. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Innovative new study mapping African American and Francophone black intellectual collaborations over human rights and citizenship from 1919 to 1963.
For much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, public officials in cities like New York, Chicago, and Baltimore have criminalized uprisings as portending Black "thugs" throwing rocks at police and plundering private property to undermine complaints of police violence. Liberal mayors like Fiorello H. La Guardia have often been the deftest practitioners of this strategy. As the Depression and wartime conditions spurred youth crime, white New Yorkers' anxieties—about crime, the movement of Black people into white neighborhoods, and headlines featuring Black "hoodlums" emblazoned all over the white media—drove their support for the expansion of police patrols in the city, especially i...
Editors Birnbaum (writer) and Taylor (history, Florida International U.) have gathered an impressive array of documentary materials from a variety of sources, including excerpts from books and articles, and recent newspaper articles. Their material, divided into the broad categories of slavery, reconstruction, segregation, the second reconstruction, backlash redux, and towards a third reconstruction, traces the ongoing black struggle for civil rights from the arrival of the first Africans to America today. Each major section begins with a brief introduction by the editors. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
From the earliest sound films to the present, American cinema has represented African Americans as decidedly musical. Disintegrating the Musical tracks and analyzes this history of musical representations of African Americans, from blacks and whites in blackface to black-cast musicals to jazz shorts, from sorrow songs to show tunes to bebop and beyond. Arthur Knight focuses on American film’s classic sound era, when Hollywood studios made eight all-black-cast musicals—a focus on Afro-America unparalleled in any other genre. It was during this same period that the first black film stars—Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge—emerged, not coincide...