James Langston Hughes's Books

Always Movin' on

The Life of Langston Hughes

By: James Haskins

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Always Movin' on

The Life of Langston Hughes

By: James Haskins

A biography of Langston Hughes, an Afro-American poet who tried to capture in his writing the spirit and rhythms of ordinary people.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

117

Publisher

Franklin Watts

Published Date

ISBN 10

0531012115

ISBN 13

9780531012116

Langston Hughes

The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence

By: C. James Trotman

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Langston Hughes

The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence

By: C. James Trotman

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

208

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Published Date

ISBN 10

0815317638

ISBN 13

9780815317630

Bloom's How to Write about Langston Hughes

By: James B. Kelley,Harold Bloom

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Bloom's How to Write about Langston Hughes

By: James B. Kelley,Harold Bloom

Offers advice on writing essays about the works of Langston Hughes and lists sample topics.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

209

Publisher

Infobase Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1438128703

ISBN 13

9781438128702

Langston Hughes

The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence

By: C. James Trotman

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Langston Hughes

The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence

By: C. James Trotman

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

208

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Published Date

ISBN 10

0815317638

ISBN 13

9780815317630

Bloom's How to Write about Langston Hughes

By: James B. Kelley,Harold Bloom

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Bloom's How to Write about Langston Hughes

By: James B. Kelley,Harold Bloom

Offers advice on writing essays about the works of Langston Hughes and lists sample topics.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

209

Publisher

Infobase Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1438128703

ISBN 13

9781438128702

Vicious Modernism

Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination

By: James de Jongh

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Vicious Modernism

Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination

By: James de Jongh

This book concentrates on the aesthetic and cultural force of Harlem, which inspired writers from Sherwood Anderson to Tom Wolfe.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

294

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521326206

ISBN 13

9780521326209

The New Red Negro

The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946

By: James Edward Smethurst

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The New Red Negro

The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946

By: James Edward Smethurst

The New Red Negro surveys African-American poetry from the onset of the Depression to the early days of the Cold War. It considers the relationship between the thematic and formal choices of African-American poets and organized ideology from the proletarian early 1930s to the neo-modernist late 1940s. This study examines poetry by writers across the spectrum: canonical, less well-known, and virtually unknown. The ideology of the Communist Left as particularly expressed through cultural institutions of the literary Left significantly influenced the shape of African-American poetry in the 1930s and 40s, as well as the content. One result of this engagement of African-American writers with the organized Left was a pronounced tendency to regard the re-created folk or street voice as the authentic voice--and subject--of African-American poetry. Furthermore, a masculinist rhetoric was crucial to the re-creation of this folk voice. This unstable yoking of cultural nationalism, integrationism, and internationalism within a construct of class struggle helped to shape a new relationship of African-American poetry to vernacular African-American culture. This relationship included the representation of African-American working class and rural folk life and its cultural products ostensibly from the mass perspective. It also included the dissemination of urban forms of African-American popular culture, often resulting in mixed media high- low hybrids.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

301

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0195344200

ISBN 13

9780195344202

American Poets and Poetry [2 volumes]

From the Colonial Era to the Present [2 volumes]

By: Jeffrey Gray,Mary McAleer Balkun,James McCorkle

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

American Poets and Poetry [2 volumes]

From the Colonial Era to the Present [2 volumes]

By: Jeffrey Gray,Mary McAleer Balkun,James McCorkle

The ethnically diverse scope, broad chronological coverage, and mix of biographical, critical, historical, political, and cultural entries make this the most useful and exciting poetry reference of its kind for students today. American poetry springs up out of all walks of life; its poems are "maternal as well as paternal...stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine," as Walt Whitman wrote, adding "Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion." Written for high school and undergraduate students, this two-volume encyclopedia covers U.S. poetry from the Colonial era to the present, offering full treatments of hundreds of key poets of the American canon. What sets this reference apart is that it also discusses events, movements, schools, and poetic approaches, placing poets in their social, historical, political, cultural, and critical contexts and showing how their works mirror the eras in which they were written. Readers will learn about surrealism, ekphrastic poetry, pastoral elegy, the Black Mountain poets, and "language" poetry. There are long and rich entries on modernism and postmodernism as well as entries related to the formal and technical dimensions of American poetry. Particular attention is paid to women poets and poets from various ethnic groups. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, Natasha Trethewey, and Tracy Smith are featured. The encyclopedia also contains entries on a wide selection of Latino and Native American poets and substantial coverage of the avant-garde and experimental movements and provides sidebars that illuminate key points.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

786

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

1610698320

ISBN 13

9781610698320

Middle Passages

African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005

By: James T. Campbell

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Middle Passages

African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005

By: James T. Campbell

Penguin announces a prestigious new series under presiding editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the "middle passage," but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In Middle Passages, award-winning historian James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, including the experiences of such extraordinary figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. A truly groundbreaking work, Middle Passages offers a unique perspective on African Americans' ever-evolving relationship with their ancestral homeland, as well as their complex, often painful relationship with the United States.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

577

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

1440649413

ISBN 13

9781440649417

Thinking Through Crisis

Depression-Era Black Literature, Theory, and Politics

By: James Edward Ford

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Thinking Through Crisis

Depression-Era Black Literature, Theory, and Politics

By: James Edward Ford

Winner, 2020 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association Honorable Mention, MSA First Book Prize In Thinking Through Crisis, James Edward Ford III examines the works of Richard Wright, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes during the 1930s in order to articulate a materialist theory of trauma. Ford highlights the dark proletariat’s emergence from the multitude apposite to white supremacist agendas. In these works, Ford argues, proletarian, modernist, and surrealist aesthetics transform fugitive slaves, sharecroppers, leased convicts, levee workers, and activist intellectuals into protagonists of anti-racist and anti-capitalist movements in the United States. Thinking Through Crisis intervenes in debates on the 1930s, radical subjectivity, and states of emergency. It will be of interest to scholars of American literature, African American literature, proletarian literature, black studies, trauma theory, and political theory.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

311

Publisher

Fordham University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823286924

ISBN 13

9780823286928

Talking at the Gates

A Life of James Baldwin

By: James Campbell

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Talking at the Gates

A Life of James Baldwin

By: James Campbell

This literary biography takes its title from a slave novel that Baldwin planned but never finished. Elegantly written, candid, and original, Talking at the Gates is a comprehensive account of the life and work of a writer who believed that "the unexamined life is not worth living.""--BOOK JACKET.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

368

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520231309

ISBN 13

9780520231306

Remembering Scottsboro

The Legacy of an Infamous Trial

By: James A. Miller

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Remembering Scottsboro

The Legacy of an Infamous Trial

By: James A. Miller

How one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in the United States continues to haunt the nation’s racial psyche In 1931, nine black youths were charged with raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama. Despite meager and contradictory evidence, all nine were found guilty and eight of the defendants were sentenced to death—making Scottsboro one of the worst travesties of justice to take place in the post-Reconstruction South. Remembering Scottsboro explores how this case has embedded itself into the fabric of American memory and become a lens for perceptions of race, class, sexual politics, and justice. James Miller draws upon the archives of the Communist International and NAACP, contemporary journalistic accounts, as well as poetry, drama, fiction, and film, to document the impact of Scottsboro on American culture. The book reveals how the Communist Party, NAACP, and media shaped early images of Scottsboro; looks at how the case influenced authors including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Harper Lee; shows how politicians and Hollywood filmmakers invoked the case in the ensuing decades; and examines the defiant, sensitive, and savvy correspondence of Haywood Patterson—one of the accused, who fled the Alabama justice system. Miller considers how Scottsboro persists as a point of reference in contemporary American life and suggests that the Civil Rights movement begins much earlier than the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. Remembering Scottsboro demonstrates how one compelling, provocative, and tragic case still haunts the American racial imagination.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

298

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400833221

ISBN 13

9781400833221

The Shoulders of Giants

By: Ken Chapman,Anthony James

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Shoulders of Giants

By: Ken Chapman,Anthony James

Every young person needs a role model, coach, mentor or friend who believes in them and insists that they believe in themselves. Authors Anthony James and Ken Chapman share the stories of twenty-eight outstanding African-Americans who faced head on the challenges of realizing their potential and chose to make a difference in the lives of their families, their communities, and their world. Their stories, struggles, and strengths will inspire and empower a younger generation to discipline themselves and act with decisiveness to better our world. These African-American leaders often acted in unexpected ways and their examples challenge adults to provide a "shoulder" for a young to stand on.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

185

Publisher

iUniverse

Published Date

ISBN 10

0595340865

ISBN 13

9780595340866

The Word Made Plain

The Power and Promise of Preaching

By: James H. Harris

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Word Made Plain

The Power and Promise of Preaching

By: James H. Harris

Preaching mediates the word of God into a cultural matrix. And no American preaching has done so more effectively and powerfully than African American preaching, claims noted homiletician James Harris. Known for its rhetorical strength, social-justice orientation, and dead-on connection to the community's lived experience, black preaching is here analyzed and proposed as a model for all preaching. Harris grounds black preaching in the self-understanding of the historic black church and its most prominent preachers, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Samuel Proctor. Harris also explores the hermeneutical and aesthetic dimensions of preaching, especially at the intersection of sacred text and the broader culture. He then lays out the specific distinguishing characteristics of black preaching, including verbal cadence and rhythm, use of gestures, and, most thoroughly, the narrative model of the sermon. His last chapter, ''Preaching Plainly,'' provides specific instructions on how to put the sermon together employing this model.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

182

Publisher

Fortress Press

ISBN 10

145141045X

ISBN 13

9781451410457

Away Down South

A History of Southern Identity

By: James C. Cobb

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Away Down South

A History of Southern Identity

By: James C. Cobb

From the seventeenth century Cavaliers and Uncle Tom's Cabin to Civil Rights museums and today's conflicts over the Confederate flag, here is a brilliant portrait of southern identity, served in an engaging blend of history, literature, and popular culture. In this insightful book, written with dry wit and sharp insight, James C. Cobb explains how the South first came to be seen--and then came to see itself--as a region apart from the rest of America. As Cobb demonstrates, the legend of the aristocratic Cavalier origins of southern planter society was nurtured by both northern and southern writers, only to be challenged by abolitionist critics, black and white. After the Civil War, defeated and embittered southern whites incorporated the Cavalier myth into the cult of the "Lost Cause," which supplied the emotional energy for their determined crusade to rejoin the Union on their own terms. After World War I, white writers like Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner and other key figures of "Southern Renaissance" as well as their African American counterparts in the "Harlem Renaissance"--Cobb is the first to show the strong links between the two movements--challenged the New South creed by asking how the grandiose vision of the South's past could be reconciled with the dismal reality of its present. The Southern self-image underwent another sea change in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, when the end of white supremacy shook the old definition of the "Southern way of life"--but at the same time, African Americans began to examine their southern roots more openly and embrace their regional, as well as racial, identity. As the millennium turned, the South confronted a new identity crisis brought on by global homogenization: if Southern culture is everywhere, has the New South become the No South? Here then is a major work by one of America's finest Southern historians, a magisterial synthesis that combines rich scholarship with provocative new insights into what the South means to southerners and to America as well.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

417

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198025017

ISBN 13

9780198025016

The New Era of the 1920s

Key Themes and Documents

By: James S. Olson,Mariah Gumpert

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The New Era of the 1920s

Key Themes and Documents

By: James S. Olson,Mariah Gumpert

This invaluable resource covers all aspects of 1920s political, artistic, popular, and economic culture in America, supporting the AP U.S. history curriculum through topical and biographical entries, primary documents, sample documents-based essay questions, and period-specific learning objectives. The 1920s, despite President Harding's "return to normalcy," were a time of both great cultural and social advancement as well as various forms of oppression in the United States. Bookended in history by two world wars, this period saw the rise of tabloid journalism and mass media; the banning and reinstatement of alcohol; the advent of voting rights for women and Native Americans; movements such as the Red Scare, labor strikes, the Harlem Renaissance, and racial protests; and the global reorganization that occurred as the major powers fumbled their way through postwar foreign policy and the League of Nations. Almost no element of U.S. society was untouched. The New Era of the 1920s: Key Themes and Documents provides high school students taking the Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. history course and undergraduates taking a lower level American history survey course with an invaluable study guide and targeted test preparation material. Much more than just an AP test-taking study guide, this new title in ABC-CLIO's Unlocking American History series is a true reference source for the societal, political, and economic history of a specific period covered in the AP U.S. history course. Readers will also benefit from features designed for student exam preparation, such as a sample documents-based essay question and period-specific learning objectives that are in alignment with the 2014 AP U.S. History Curriculum Framework.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

370

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

1440860254

ISBN 13

9781440860256

Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940

By: James V. Hatch

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940

By: James V. Hatch

A valuable contribution to African American literary and theatrical scholarship, this volume is a compilation of sixteen plays written during the Harlem Renaissance, brought together for the first time and set in a historical context.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

472

Publisher

Wayne State University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

081433833X

ISBN 13

9780814338339

The City

A Dictionary of Quotable Thoughts on Cities and Urban Life

By: James A. Clapp

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The City

A Dictionary of Quotable Thoughts on Cities and Urban Life

By: James A. Clapp

The City is the best, funniest, saddest, and most thought-provoking compilation ever assembled on the urban scene. James A. Clapp has arranged more than three thousand quotations—epigrams, epithets, verses, proverbs, scriptural references, witticisms, lyrics, literary references, and historical observations—on urban life from antiquity until the present. These quotes are drawn from the written and spoken words of more than one thousand writers throughout history. This volume, with contributions from speakers, poets, song writers, politicians philosophers, scientists, religious leaders, historians, social scientists, humorists, architects, journalists, and travelers from and to many lands is designed to be used by writers, speechmakers, students, and scholars on cities and urban life. Clapp’s text is striking for its sharp contrasts of urban and rural life and the urbanization process in different historical times and geographical areas. This second edition includes four hundred new entries, updated birth dates and occupations of quoted authors, and an expanded and updated introduction and preface. Clapp also added new introduction pages for each section containing pictures and unique quotations. The indexes have also been expanded to include more subjects and cities. The scope of this book is international, including entries on most major and many minor cities of the world. It is noteworthy for its pleasures as well as its insights.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

459

Publisher

Transaction Publishers

Published Date

ISBN 10

1412850703

ISBN 13

9781412850704

Claude McKay

The Making of a Black Bolshevik

By: Winston James

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Claude McKay

The Making of a Black Bolshevik

By: Winston James

Finalist, Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, African American Intellectual History Society Shortlisted, 2023 Historical Nonfiction Legacy Award, Hurston / Wright Foundation One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. McKay’s life and writing were defined by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, shaped by his experiences growing up in colonial Jamaica as well as his early career as a writer in Harlem and then London. Dedicated to confronting both racism and capitalist exploitation, he was a critical observer of the Black condition throughout the African diaspora and became a committed Bolshevik. Winston James offers a revelatory account of McKay’s political and intellectual trajectory from his upbringing in Jamaica through the early years of his literary career and radical activism. In 1912, McKay left Jamaica to study in the United States, never to return. James follows McKay’s time at the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University, as he discovered the harshness of American racism, and his move to Harlem, where he encountered the ferment of Black cultural and political movements and figures such as Hubert Harrison and Marcus Garvey. McKay left New York for London, where his commitment to revolutionary socialism deepened, culminating in his transformation from Fabian socialist to Bolshevik. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, James offers a rich and detailed chronicle of McKay’s life, political evolution, and the historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped him.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

727

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231509774

ISBN 13

9780231509770

Encyclopedia of the Jazz Age: From the End of World War I to the Great Crash

From the End of World War I to the Great Crash

By: James Ciment

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Encyclopedia of the Jazz Age: From the End of World War I to the Great Crash

From the End of World War I to the Great Crash

By: James Ciment

This illustrated encyclopedia offers in-depth coverage of one of the most fascinating and widely studied periods in American history. Extending from the end of World War I in 1918 to the great Wall Street crash in 1929, the Jazz age was a time of frenetic energy and unprecedented historical developments, ranging from the League of Nations, woman suffrage, Prohibition, the Red Scare, the Ku Klux Klan, the Lindberg flight, and the Scopes trial, to the rise of organized crime, motion pictures, and celebrity culture."Encyclopedia of the Jazz Age" provides information on the politics, economics, society, and culture of the era in rich detail. The entries cover themes, personalities, institutions, ideas, events, trends, and more; and special features such as sidebars and photos help bring the era vividly to life.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

1465

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1317471644

ISBN 13

9781317471646

The Stability of Laughter

The Problem of Joy in Modernist Literature

By: James Nikopoulos

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Stability of Laughter

The Problem of Joy in Modernist Literature

By: James Nikopoulos

A "sad and corrupt" age, a period of "crisis" and "upheaval"—what T.S. Eliot famously summed up as "the panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Modernism has always been characterized by its self-conscious sense of suffering. Why, then, was it so obsessed with laughter? From Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Bergson and Freud to Pirandello, Beckett, Hughes, Barnes, and Joyce, no moment in cultural history has written about laughter this much. James Nikopoulos investigates modernity’s paradoxical relationship with mirth. Why was the gesture we conventionally associate with happiness deemed the only sensible way of responding to a world, as Max Weber wrote, that had been "disenchanted of its gods?" In answering these questions, Nikopoulos also delves into our ongoing relationship with laughter. He looks to contemporary research in emotion and evolutionary theory, as well as to the two-thousand-plus-year history of the philosophy of humor, in order to propose a novel way of understanding laughter, humor, and their complicated relationships with modern life. The Stability of Laughter explores how art unsettles the simplifications we revert to in our attempts to make sense of human history and social interaction.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

416

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

042963966X

ISBN 13

9780429639661

Scripting Empire

Broadcasting, the BBC, and the Black Atlantic

By: James Procter

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Scripting Empire

Broadcasting, the BBC, and the Black Atlantic

By: James Procter

A volume on the literary and cultural history of West Indian and West African writing at the BBC. The volume covers over 40 different radio programmes which appeared within the 'Calling West Africa' and 'Calling West Indies' schedules between 1941 and 1965 and brings together a wide range of uncatalogued archive materials.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

305

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198894171

ISBN 13

9780198894179

Holding aloft the Banner of Ethiopia

Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America

By: Winston James

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Holding aloft the Banner of Ethiopia

Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America

By: Winston James

Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Stokely Carmichael, Louis Farakhan-the roster of immigrants from the Caribbean who have made a profound impact on the development of radical politics in the United States is extensive. In this magisterial and lavishly illustrated work, Winston James focuses on the twentieth century's first waves of immigrants from the Caribbean and their contribution to political dissidence in America. This diligently researched, wide-ranging and sophisticated book will be welcomed by all those interested in the Caribbean and its migrs, the Afro-American current within America's radical tradition, and the history, politics, and culture of the African diaspora.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

482

Publisher

Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1788736990

ISBN 13

9781788736992

Who Is Black?

One Nation's Definition

By: F. James Davis

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Who Is Black?

One Nation's Definition

By: F. James Davis

This volume is the Tenth Anniversary Edition of a book that was honored in 1992 as an "Outstanding Book" by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the United States. Reprinted many times since its first publication in 1991, Who Is Black? has become a staple in college classrooms throughout the United States, helping students understand this nation's history of miscegenation and the role that the "one-drop rule" has played in it. In this special anniversary edition, the author brings the story up to date in an epilogue. There he highlights some revealing responses to Who Is Black? and examines recent challenges to the one-drop rule, including the multiracial identity movement and a significant change in the census classification of racial and ethnic groups.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

236

Publisher

Penn State Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0271044632

ISBN 13

9780271044637

Footprints in New York

Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

By: James Nevius,Michelle Nevius

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Footprints in New York

Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

By: James Nevius,Michelle Nevius

NYC tour guides and authors James and Michelle Nevius explore the lives of 20 iconic New Yorkers—from Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant to Alexander Hamilton, park architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.—and use them to guide the reader through four centuries of the city’s story. Beginning with the oldest standing building in the city, , a 1652 farmhouse in Brooklyn, and journeying all the way to the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, the book follows in the footsteps of these iconic New Yorkers. The authors tell the stories of everyone from slave traders and long-forgotten politicians to the movers and shakers of Gilded Age society and the Greenwich Village folk scene. One part history and one part personal narrative, Footprints in New York creates a different way of looking at the past, exploring new connections and forgotten chapters in the story of America’s greatest metropolis. Visit www.footprintsinny.com for more.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

325

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1493008404

ISBN 13

9781493008407

Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill

Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries

By: Davida Siwisa James

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill

Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries

By: Davida Siwisa James

Explores four centuries of colonization, land divisions, and urban development around this historic landmark neighborhood in West Harlem It was the neighborhood where Alexander Hamilton built his country home, George Gershwin wrote his first hit, a young Norman Rockwell discovered he liked to draw, and Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man. Through words and pictures, Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill traces the transition of this picturesque section of Harlem from lush farmland in the early 1600s to its modern-day growth as a unique Manhattan neighborhood highlighted by stunning architecture, Harlem Renaissance gatherings, and the famous residents who called it home. Stretching from approximately 135th Street and Edgecombe Avenue to around 165th, all the way to the Hudson River, this small section in the Heights of West Harlem is home to so many significant events, so many extraordinary people, and so much of New York’s most stunning architecture, it’s hard to believe one place could contain all that majesty. Author Davida Siwisa James brings to compelling literary life the unique residents and dwelling places of this Harlem neighborhood that stands at the heart of the country’s founding. Here she uncovers the long-lost history of the transitions to Hamilton Grange in the aftermath of Alexander Hamilton’s death and the building boom from about 1885 to 1930 that made it one of Manhattan’s most historic and architecturally desirable neighborhoods, now and a century ago. The book also shares the story of the La Guardia High School of Music & Art, one of the first in the nation to focus on arts and music. The author chronicles the history of the Morris-Jumel Mansion, Manhattan’s oldest surviving residence and famously known as George Washington’s headquarters at the start of the American Revolution. By telling the history of its vibrant people and the beautiful architecture of this lovely, well-maintained historic landmark neighborhood, James also dispels the misconception that Harlem was primarily a ghetto wasteland. The book also touches upon The Great Migration of Blacks leaving the South who landed in Harlem, helping it become the mecca for African Americans, including such Harlem Renaissance artists and luminaries as Thurgood Marshall, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

435

Publisher

Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

153150616X

ISBN 13

9781531506162

Some of These Days

Black Stars, Jazz Aesthetics, and Modernist Culture

By: James Donald

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Some of These Days

Black Stars, Jazz Aesthetics, and Modernist Culture

By: James Donald

With peerless talent and unrivalled international presence, few stars shone brighter in the heady firmament of the Jazz Age than Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson. Electric, charismatic, and unforgettable, both ignited the modern imaginations of cosmopolitan centers across Europe. Unabashedly themselves, they inspired poets, architects, novelists, and filmmakers across London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna with their indomitable artistic energy. But Some of These Days extends beyond pure dual biography to recreate the rich community of artists who interacted with-and were influenced by-Baker and Robeson. James Donald highlights how the sense of excitement and artistic renewal ushered in with the 'New Negro Movement' reverberated far beyond Harlem. Throughout this chronicle, Donald underscores the relationship of African American aesthetics to the modernist movement that flourished from the 1920s until the end of World War II. Vivid portraits of artists like T. S. Eliot, HD, Carl Van Vechten, Marlene Dietrich, Jean Gabin, and Adolf Loos, among others, animate the study. Traversing countries and artforms, Some of These Days illustrates the immense cross-cultural collaboration of film, song, dance, and literature that coalesced to create modernist culture-where the new rhythms of the machine age were gleefully embraced, allowing art to consider the new possibilities of cosmopolitanism in a modern world. Engagingly written and lavishly illustrated, Some of These Days recovers not just the romance, excitement, and uncertainty of Baker and Robeson's storied rise to stardom but also the political and cultural legacy of the movement that they embodied.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

289

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199354030

ISBN 13

9780199354030

Behold the Land

The Black Arts Movement in the South

By: James Smethurst

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Behold the Land

The Black Arts Movement in the South

By: James Smethurst

In the mid-1960s, African American artists and intellectuals formed the Black Arts movement in tandem with the Black Power movement, with creative luminaries like Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gil Scott-Heron among their number. In this follow-up to his award-winning history of the movement nationally, James Smethurst investigates the origins, development, maturation, and decline of the vital but under-studied Black Arts movement in the South from the 1960s until the early 1980s. Traveling across the South, he chronicles the movement's radical roots, its ties to interracial civil rights organizations on the Gulf Coast, and how it thrived on college campuses and in southern cities. He traces the movement's growing political power as well as its disruptive use of literature and performance to advance Black civil rights. Though recognition of its influence has waned, the Black Arts movement's legacy in the South endures through many of its initiatives and constituencies. Ultimately, Smethurst argues that the movement's southern strain was perhaps the most consequential, successfully reaching the grassroots and leaving a tangible, local legacy unmatched anywhere else in the United States.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

245

Publisher

UNC Press Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1469663058

ISBN 13

9781469663050

The Playbook

A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War

By: James Shapiro

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Playbook

A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War

By: James Shapiro

A brilliant and daring account of a culture war over the place of theater in American democracy in the 1930s, one that anticipates our current divide, by the acclaimed Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro From 1935 to 1939, the Federal Theatre Project staged over a thousand productions in 29 states that were seen by thirty million (or nearly one in four) Americans, two thirds of whom had never seen a play before. At its helm was an unassuming theater professor, Hallie Flanagan. It employed, at its peak, over twelve thousand struggling artists, some of whom, like Orson Welles and Arthur Miller, would soon be famous, but most of whom were just ordinary people eager to work again at their craft. It was the product of a moment when the arts, no less than industry and agriculture, were thought to be vital to the health of the republic, bringing Shakespeare to the public, alongside modern plays that confronted the pressing issues of the day—from slum housing and public health to racism and the rising threat of fascism. The Playbook takes us through some of its most remarkable productions, including a groundbreaking Black production of Macbeth in Harlem and an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s anti-fascist novel It Can’t Happen Here that opened simultaneously in 18 cities, underscoring the Federal Theatre’s incredible range and vitality. But this once thriving Works Progress Administration relief program did not survive and has left little trace. For the Federal Theatre was the first New Deal project to be attacked and ended on the grounds that it promoted “un-American” activity, sowing the seeds not only for the McCarthyism of the 1950s but also for our own era of merciless polarization. It was targeted by the first House un-American Affairs Committee, and its demise was a turning point in American cultural life—for, as Shapiro brilliantly argues, “the health of democracy and theater, twin born in ancient Greece, have always been mutually dependent.” A defining legacy of this culture war was how the strategies used to undermine and ultimately destroy the Federal Theatre were assembled by a charismatic and cunning congressman from East Texas, the now largely forgotten Martin Dies, who in doing so pioneered the right-wing political playbook now so prevalent that it seems eternal.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

240

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

0593490215

ISBN 13

9780593490211

Snaps

The Original Yo' Mama Joke Book

By: James Percelay

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Snaps

The Original Yo' Mama Joke Book

By: James Percelay

Snaps is the first book ever to present the funniest, rudes, most creative insults from a unique African-American comic art form. Also known as signifying, joning, and playing the dozens, snapping is as old as the blues and as cutting-edge as hip hop and rap. The book features more than 450 snaps direct from the streets as well as from celebritites. This book will make you laugh out loud--and give you verbal ammunition for the next time someone tries to snap on you.

Average ratings

N/A