The friendships that formed the conversations of the Harlem Renaissance and the complex ideas of the relationships between art and race were the vein of black literary life of the early twentieth century. As editor of the volume of letters, Remember Me to Harlem: The Correspondence of Langston Hughes and
What does it mean to be a prophet? In his new biography Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet, Donald Weinstein gives us one answer to this question, tracing the story of religious visionary Girolamo Savonarola from his early loss of faith in society to his later attempts
When Carla L. Peterson proposed a trip to the archives of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the hope of finding a record of her ancestors, her historian friends were skeptical. In fact, it was only by a lucky chance that Peterson discovered a scrapbook page onto
If you missed the debut of MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry Show this weekend, the network makes most of the episode available online. In her inaugural episode, Harris-Perry covers Mitt Romney and campaign psychology for candidates—including “Daddy Issues”, the GOP progress with Southern voters, union memberships and the middle class, women on
The people portrayed in Lucian Freud’s portraits are not passive, flawless models, stuck in the imagined world of a framed canvas. They have lived—endured—with evidence of years past in their rough, wrinkled, worn, and scarred skin. Like his psychoanalyst grandfather Sigmund Freud, Lucian Freud explores his subjects’ inner troubles and
This month, the blog “Forces of Geek” is giving away four copies of Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, a must-read for the cartoon aficionado. Using hand-drawn illustration accompanied by witty text, Brunetti guides the reader through the theory and terminology of cartooning and offers a series of easy lessons
Ralph Ellison has often been cited by literary scholars as one of the 20th century’s most tragic examples of writer’s block: after the immense success of 1952’s Invisible Man, the author lived for more than 40 years without ever publishing a second novel. Yet, in Ralph Ellison In Progress: From
While we typically associate slavery in America with the plantation economies of cotton, sugar, and tobacco, by the middle of the 19th century, Southern railroad companies were actually some of the region’s largest slaveholders. Indeed, men like Samuel Ballton, a slave born in Virginia in 1838, spent years of their
Come Friday night, most college students put down their books and put on their favorite jeans before heading out to parties where hip-hop music blares in crowded clubs and living rooms—Kanye or Lil Wayne’s rhymes making it necessary to shout in order to be heard. The next day, the more
Sarah Underwood— “Integration was one of the worst things to happen to black kids. We lost our community,” said a former student whose segregated Floridian high school closed in 1969. It’s nearly impossible to read that without feeling troubled. Weren’t black communities oppressed during Jim Crow? How could anyone feel