Attracted to remote lands by his interest in the postcolonial struggle, Richard Wright (1908-1960) became one of the few African Americans of his time to engage in travel writing. He went to emerging ...

“Within the short period of a year, she was a bride, a beloved wife and companion, a mother, a corpse,” reported The National Intelligencer on the death of Elizabeth Buchanan in 1838.

Such obituaries ...

The late African American novelist Chester Himes (1909-1984) is well known both in America and Europe for his moving depictions of black men destroyed by a pervasive racism and for darkly humorous stories ...

What is it about affirmative action that makes this public policy one of the most contentious political issues in the United States today?

The answer to this question cannot be found by studying the recent ...

Leslie Marmon Silko, one of America's best known Native authors, was born in 1948 and grew up at Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, of mixed Laguna, Mexican, and white ancestry. Her early short stories, poems, ...

The family of musical styles known as jazz came into being around 1900 as several popular black musical idioms coalesced. This free-flowing, spontaneous music based in improvisation emerged primarily ...

Through his comic strip Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz (1922–2000) has left his signatures on American culture—Lucy's fake hold for the kickoff, Linus's security blanket, Charlie Brown's baseball team ...

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 ...

A biography that charts the boom and bust of America's first celebrity author, once Mark Twain's chief rival in American literature

In this first scholarly biography of Bret Harte in nearly seventy years, ...

In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani, a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands ...