Jean Toomer's Cane was the first major text of the Harlem Renaissance and the first important modernist text by an African-American writer. It powerfully depicts the terror in the history of American race relations, a public world of lynchings, race riots, and Jim Crow, and a private world of internalized conflict over identity and race which mirrored struggles in the culture at large. Toomer's own life reflected that internal conflict, and he has been an ambiguous figure in literary history, an author who wrote a text that had a tremendous impact on African American authors but who eventually tried to distance himself from Cane and from his identification as a black writer. In Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr examine original sources—Toomer's rediscovered early writings on politics and race, his extensive correspondence with Waldo Frank, and unpublished portions of his autobiographies—to show how the cultural wars of the 1920s influenced the shaping of Toomer's book and his subsequent efforts to escape the racial definitions of American society. That those definitions remain crucial for American society even today is one reason Toomer's work continues to fascinate and to influence contemporary writers and readers.
The View from Brindley Mountain is a memoir of a slower yet coarser era in the sandy hills of northern Alabama and the eventual break with innocence as one restless, native son sets out on a journey i
Originally published in 1984. The Sage in Harlem establishes H. L. Mencken as a catalyst for the blossoming of black literary culture in the 1920s and chronicles the intensely productive exchange of ideas between Mencken and two generations of black writers: the Old Guard who pioneered the Harlem Renaissance and the Young Wits who sought to reshape it a decade later. From his readings of unpublished letters and articles from black publications of the time, Charles Scruggs argues that black writers saw usefulness in Mencken's critique of American culture, his advocacy of literary realism, and his satire of America. They understood that realism could free them from the pernicious stereotypes that had hounded past efforts at honest portraiture, and that satire could be the means whereby the white man might be paid back in his own coin. Scruggs contends that the content of Mencken's observations, whether ludicrously narrow or dazzlingly astute, was of secondary importance to the Harlem intellectuals. It was the honesty, precision, and fearlessness of his expression that proved irresistible to a generation of artists desperate to be taken seriously. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance turned to Mencken as an uncompromising—and uncondescending—commentator whose criticisms were informed by deep interest in African American life but guided by the same standards he applied to all literature, whatever its source. The Sage in Harlem demonstrates how Mencken, through the example of his own work, his power as editor of the American Mercury, and his dedication to literary quality, was able to nurture the developing talents of black authors from James Weldon Johnson to Richard Wright.
Vol. One in ECHOES OF THE LITTLE BIG HORN SERIES, KICK THE DEAD LION by Charles G. du Bois, is a Custer classic, it focuses on the performance of Custer, Benteen and Reno; Enlisted Men’s Petition analysed. “On June 25, 1876, the greatest Indian battle in the history of the American West was fought on the Little Bighorn River in southeastern Montana. The combined forces of Sioux and Cheyennes encamped there defeated the Seventh U.S. Cavalry Regiment and annihilated five companies of the regiment under the personal leadership of Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer. The firing had scarcely ceased, the Indians had only scattered, and the soldier dead still lay hastily buried on a lonely Montana ridge when it began—the unending, ever-increasing slander and defamation against General Custer. His brilliant record established during the Civil War, his victories on the western plains in the years that followed were ignored. The nation’s hero was slowly toppled from his pedestal. The Lion was dead. Like jackals snapping at the heels of the lord of the jungle, the defamers began their work. It was no simple task, but they applied themselves with vigor. So thorough was the campaign that only those close to the fallen Custer rallied to his defense. Now they are gone, friend and foe alike, but the perpetrators of the campaign of hate have bequeathed to history a legacy of distorted fact and perverted truth.”-Introduction.
Using Cheyenne and Arapaho accounts, Charles J. Brill tells the story of General George Armstrong Custer’s winter campaign on the southern plains in 1868-69, including his attack in Black Kettle’s village on the snowy backs of the Washita River. Brill’s searing account details the ruthlessness of the U.S. Army’s efforts to punish southern plains tribes for what they considered incessant raiding and depredation. Brill provides the Indian point of view as he follows Custer into a battle that remains controversial to the present day. In a new foreword to this edition, Mark L. Gardner discusses the significance of Brill’s history-placing it in context with other Custer and Indian Wars studies-and its Value to scholars and general readers today. Gardner also provides an overview of the career of Oklahoma journalist Charles J. Brill, much of whose life has remained a mystery until now.
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