Race and Ethnicity
To Make a New Race
Jean Toomer's adamant stance against racism and his call for a raceless society were far more complex than the average reader of works from the Harlem Renaissance might believe. In To Make a New Race ...
Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution
Under the leadership of Samuel Adams, patriot propagandists deliberately and conscientiously kept the issue of slavery off the agenda as goals for freedom were set for the American Revolution.
By comparing ...
The Cry Was Unity
The Communist Party was the only political movement on the left in the late 1920s and 1930s to place racial justice and equality at the top of its agenda and to seek, and ultimately win, sympathy among ...
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), one of the indisputably great writers of the twentieth century, was born in Buenos Aires. Never having been awarded the Nobel Prize, which his readers worldwide believed ...
The Jim Dilemma
Especially in academia, controversy rages over the merits or evils of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in particular its portrayal of Jim, the runaway slave. Opponents disrupt classes and ...
The Color of Jazz
Although now sometimes called “America's classical music,” jazz has not always been accorded favorable appellations. Accurate though these encomiums may be, they obscure the complex and fractious ...
Me
Ironically, Winnifred Eaton published most of her works under a Japanese-sounding name, Onoto Watanna, but she was of Chinese ancestry. In Me: Book of Rembrance her narrator is called Nora Ascouth, but ...
Civil Rights Chronicle
In more ways than one, Clarice T. Campbell was a friend of the civil rights movement. An indefatigable campaigner for desegregation, Campbell was also an inveterate letter-writer; the fact that many of ...
Conversations with N. Scott Momaday
When his first novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969, N. Scott Momaday was virtually unknown. Today he is the most acclaimed Native American writer, working at the ...
Lords of Misrule
Mardi Gras remains one of the most distinctive features of New Orleans. Although the city has celebrated Carnival since its days as a French and Spanish colonial outpost, the rituals familiar today were ...