Download or read book Blacks at Harvard written by Werner Sollors and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1993-03 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of blacks at Harvard mirrors, for better or for worse, the history of blacks in the United States. Harvard, too, has been indelibly scarred by slavery, exclusion, segregation, and other forms of racist oppression. At the same time, the nation's oldest university has also, at various times, stimulated, supported, or allowed itself to be influenced by the various reform movements that have dramatically changed the nature of race relations across the nation. The story of blacks at Harvard is thus inspiring but painful, instructive but ambiguous—a paradoxical episode in the most vexing controversy of American life: the "race question." The first and only book on its subject, Blacks at Harvard is distinguished by the rich variety of its sources. Included in this documentary history are scholarly overviews, poems, short stories, speeches, well-known memoirs by the famous, previously unpublished memoirs by the lesser known, newspaper accounts, letters, official papers of the university, and transcripts of debates. Among Harvard's black alumni and alumnae are such illustrious figures as W.E.B. Du Bois, Monroe Trotter, and Alain Locke; Countee Cullen and Sterling Brown both received graduate degrees. The editors have collected here writings as diverse as those of Booker T. Washington, William Hastie, Malcolm X, and Muriel Snowden to convey the complex ways in which Harvard has affected the thinking of African Americans and the ways, in turn, in which African Americans have influenced the traditions of Harvard and Radcliffe. Notable among the contributors are significant figures in African American letters: Phyllis Wheatley, William Melvin Kelley, Marita Bonner, James Alan McPherson and Andrea Lee. Equally prominent in the book are some of the nation's leading historians: Carter Woodson, Rayford Logan, John Hope Franklin, and Nathan I. Huggins. A vital sourcebook, Blacks at Harvard is certain to nourish scholarly inquiry into the social and intellectual history of African Americans at elite national institutions and serves as a telling metaphor of this nation's past.
Download or read book The Harvard Guide to African American History written by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 968 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiles information and interpretations on the past 500 years of African American history, containing essays on historical research aids, bibliographies, resources for womens' issues, and an accompanying CD-ROM providing bibliographical entries.
Download or read book The Last Negroes at Harvard written by Kent Garrett and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2020 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of the Harvard class of '63, whose Black students fought to create their own identities on the cusp between integration and affirmative action. In the fall of 1959, Harvard recruited an unprecedented eighteen "Negro" boys as an early form of affirmative action. Four years later they would graduate as African Americans. Some fifty years later, one of these trailblazing Harvard grads, Kent Garrett, would begin to reconnect with his classmates and explore their vastly different backgrounds, lives, and what their time at Harvard meant. Garrett and his partner Jeanne Ellsworth recount how these eighteen youths broke new ground, with ramifications that extended far past the iconic Yard. By the time they were seniors, they would have demonstrated against national injustice and grappled with the racism of academia, had dinner with Malcolm X and fought alongside their African national classmates for the right to form a Black students' organization. Part memoir, part group portrait, and part narrative history of the intersection between the civil rights movement and higher education, this is the remarkable story of brilliant, singular boys whose identities were changed at and by Harvard, and who, in turn, changed Harvard.
Download or read book Blacks in Antiquity written by Frank M. Snowden and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1970 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the participation of black Africans, usually referred to as "Ethiopians," by the Greek and Romans, in classical civilization, concluding that they were accepted by pagans and Christians without prejudice.
Download or read book Making Black Scientists written by Marybeth Gasman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historically black colleges and universities are adept at training scientists. Marybeth Gasman and Thai-Huy Nguyen follow ten HBCU programs that have grown their student cohorts and improved performance. These science departments furnish a bold new model for other colleges that want to better serve African American students.
Download or read book Black Fiction written by Roger Rosenblatt and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1974 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this illuminating book Roger Rosenblatt offers both sensitive analyses of individual works and a provocative and compelling thesis. He argues that black fiction has a unity deriving not from any chronological sequence, or simply from its black authorship, but from a particular cyclical conception of history on which practically every significant black American novel and short story is based. Marked for oppression by an external physical characteristic, black characters struggle constantly against and within a hostile world. Rosenblatt's analysis of the way black protagonists try to break historical patterns provides an integrated and sustained interpretation of motives and methods in black fiction. The black hero, after starting on a circular track, may try to change direction by means of his youth, love, education, or humor; or he may try to escape into his own elusive and vague history. But, as Rosenblatt demonstrates, these attempts all fail. And the black hero discovers in the failure of his attempts that the society which caused all this failure is not only unattainable but undesirable. Neither a sociological study nor a routine survey, this is distinctly a work of literary criticism which concentrates on black fiction as literature.
Download or read book From Slave Ship to Harvard written by James H. Johnston and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A true story of six generations of an African American family in Maryland. Based on paintings, photographs, books, diaries, court records, legal documents, and oral histories, the book traces Yarrow Mamout and his in-laws, the Turners, from the colonial period through the Civil War to Harvard and finally the present day.
Download or read book Racial Innocence written by Robin Bernstein and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2013 Book Award Winner from the International Research Society in Children's Literature 2012 Outstanding Book Award Winner from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education 2012 Winner of the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize presented by the New England American Studies Association 2012 Runner-Up, John Hope Franklin Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association 2012 Honorable Mention, Distinguished Book Award presented by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series Beginning in the mid nineteenth century in America, childhood became synonymous with innocence—a reversal of the previously-dominant Calvinist belief that children were depraved, sinful creatures. As the idea of childhood innocence took hold, it became racialized: popular culture constructed white children as innocent and vulnerable while excluding black youth from these qualities. Actors, writers, and visual artists then began pairing white children with African American adults and children, thus transferring the quality of innocence to a variety of racial-political projects—a dynamic that Robin Bernstein calls “racial innocence.” This phenomenon informed racial formation from the mid nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Racial Innocence takes up a rich archive including books, toys, theatrical props, and domestic knickknacks which Bernstein analyzes as “scriptive things” that invite or prompt historically-located practices while allowing for resistance and social improvisation. Integrating performance studies with literary and visual analysis, Bernstein offers singular readings of theatrical productions from blackface minstrelsy to Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; literary works by Joel Chandler Harris, Harriet Wilson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett; material culture including Topsy pincushions, Uncle Tom and Little Eva handkerchiefs, and Raggedy Ann dolls; and visual texts ranging from fine portraiture to advertisements for lard substitute. Throughout, Bernstein shows how “innocence” gradually became the exclusive province of white children—until the Civil Rights Movement succeeded not only in legally desegregating public spaces, but in culturally desegregating the concept of childhood itself. Check out the author's blog for the book here.
Download or read book Becoming African Americans written by Clare Corbould and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2000, the United States census allowed respondents for the first time to tick a box marked “African American” in the race category. The new option marked official recognition of a term that had been gaining currency for some decades. Africa has always played a role in black identity, but it was in the tumultuous period between the two world wars that black Americans first began to embrace a modern African American identity. Following the great migration of black southerners to northern cities after World War I, the search for roots and for meaningful affiliations became subjects of debate and display in a growing black public sphere. Throwing off the legacy of slavery and segregation, black intellectuals, activists, and organizations sought a prouder past in ancient Egypt and forged links to contemporary Africa. In plays, pageants, dance, music, film, literature, and the visual arts, they aimed to give stature and solidity to the American black community through a new awareness of the African past and the international black world. Their consciousness of a dual identity anticipated the hyphenated identities of new immigrants in the years after World War II, and an emerging sense of what it means to be a modern American.
Download or read book The Black Columbiad written by Werner Sollors and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After a long and painful transatlantic passage, African captives reached a continent they hadn't even known existed, where they were treated in ways that broke every law of civilization as they understood it. This was the discovery of America for a good number of our ancestors, one quite different from the "paradise" Columbus heralded but no less instrumental in shaping the country's history. What finding the New World meant to those who never sought it, and how they made the hostile, unfamiliar continent their own, is the subject of this volume, the first truly international collection of essays on African American literature and culture. Distinguished scholars, critics, and writers from around the world gather here to examine a great variety of moments that have defined the African American experience. What were the values, images, and vocabulary that accompanied African "explorers" on their terrifying Columbiad, and what new forms did they develop to re-invent America from a black perspective? How did an extremely heterogeneous group of African pioneers remake themselves as African Americans? The authors search out answers in such diverse areas as slavery, the transatlantic tradition, urbanization, rape and lynching, gender, Paris, periodicals, festive moments, a Berlin ethnologist, Afrocentrism, Mark Twain, Spain, Casablanca, orality, the 1960s, Black-Jewish relations, television images, comedy, and magic. William Wells Brown, Frank Webb, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Etheridge Knight, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Charles Johnson are among the many writers they discuss in detail. The result, a landmark text in African American studies, reveals, within a broader context than ever before, the great and often unpredictable variety of complex cultural forces that have been at work in black America.
Download or read book Blacks In and Out of the Left written by Michael C. Dawson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The radical black left that played a crucial role in twentieth-century struggles for equality and justice has largely disappeared. Michael Dawson investigates the causes and consequences of the decline of black radicalism as a force in American politics and argues that the conventional left has failed to take race sufficiently seriously as a historical force in reshaping American institutions, politics, and civil society. African Americans have been in the vanguard of progressive social movements throughout American history, but they have been written out of many histories of social liberalism. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the Black Power movement, Dawson examines successive failures of socialists and Marxists to enlist sympathetic blacks, and white leftists’ refusal to fight for the cause of racial equality. Angered by the often outright hostility of the Socialist Party and similar social democratic organizations, black leftists separated themselves from these groups and either turned to the hard left or stayed independent. A generation later, the same phenomenon helped fueled the Black Power movement’s turn toward a variety of black nationalist, Maoist, and other radical political groups. The 2008 election of Barack Obama notwithstanding, many African Americans still believe they will not realize the fruits of American prosperity any time soon. This pervasive discontent, Dawson suggests, must be mobilized within the black community into active opposition to the social and economic status quo. Black politics needs to find its way back to its radical roots as a vital component of new American progressive movements.
Download or read book Who s Black and Why written by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2023 PROSE Award in European History “An invaluable historical example of the creation of a scientific conception of race that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.” —Washington Post “Reveals how prestigious natural scientists once sought physical explanations, in vain, for a social identity that continues to carry enormous significance to this day.” —Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People “A fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins of racism.” —Publishers Weekly “To read [these essays] is to witness European intellectuals, in the age of the Atlantic slave trade, struggling, one after another, to justify atrocity.” —Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States In 1739 Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of “blackness.” What is the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what is the cause of Black degeneration, the contest announcement asked. Sixteen essays, written in French and Latin, were ultimately dispatched from all over Europe. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why. Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic by the time the contest was announced. The essays themselves represent a broad range of opinions, which nonetheless circulate around a common theme: the search for a scientific understanding of the new concept of race. More important, they provide an indispensable record of the Enlightenment-era thinking that normalized the sale and enslavement of Black human beings. These never previously published documents survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux’s municipal library. Translated into English and accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, each essay included in this volume lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West.
Download or read book Race Work and Leadership written by Laura Morgan Roberts and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking How to Build Inclusive Organizations Race, Work, and Leadership is a rare and important compilation of essays that examines how race matters in people's experience of work and leadership. What does it mean to be black in corporate America today? How are racial dynamics in organizations changing? How do we build inclusive organizations? Inspired by and developed in conjunction with the research and programming for Harvard Business School's commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the HBS African American Student Union, this groundbreaking book shines new light on these and other timely questions and illuminates the present-day dynamics of race in the workplace. Contributions from top scholars, researchers, and practitioners in leadership, organizational behavior, psychology, sociology, and education test the relevance of long-held assumptions and reconsider the research approaches and interventions needed to understand and advance African Americans in work settings and leadership roles. At a time when--following a peak in 2002--there are fewer African American men and women in corporate leadership roles, Race, Work, and Leadership will stimulate new scholarship and dialogue on the organizational and leadership challenges of African Americans and become the indispensable reference for anyone committed to understanding, studying, and acting on the challenges facing leaders who are building inclusive organizations.
Download or read book Black Jacks written by W. Jeffrey. Bolster and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few Americans, black or white, recognize the degree to which early African American history is a maritime history. W. Jeffrey Bolster shatters the myth that black seafaring in the age of sail was limited to the Middle Passage. Seafaring was one of the most significant occupations among both enslaved and free black men between 1740 and 1865. Tens of thousands of black seamen sailed on lofty clippers and modest coasters. They sailed in whalers, warships, and privateers. Some were slaves, forced to work at sea, but by 1800 most were free men, seeking liberty and economic opportunity aboard ship.Bolster brings an intimate understanding of the sea to this extraordinary chapter in the formation of black America. Because of their unusual mobility, sailors were the eyes and ears to worlds beyond the limited horizon of black communities ashore. Sometimes helping to smuggle slaves to freedom, they were more often a unique conduit for news and information of concern to blacks.But for all its opportunities, life at sea was difficult. Blacks actively contributed to the Atlantic maritime culture shared by all seamen, but were often outsiders within it. Capturing that tension, Black Jacks examines not only how common experiences drew black and white sailors together--even as deeply internalized prejudices drove them apart--but also how the meaning of race aboard ship changed with time. Bolster traces the story to the end of the Civil War, when emancipated blacks began to be systematically excluded from maritime work. Rescuing African American seamen from obscurity, this stirring account reveals the critical role sailors played in helping forge new identities for black people in America.An epic tale of the rise and fall of black seafaring, Black Jacks is African Americans' freedom story presented from a fresh perspective.
Download or read book Uncompromising Activist written by Katherine Reynolds Chaddock and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-09-27 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost forgotten until his papers were discovered in a Chicago attic, Richard Greener was a pioneer who broke educational and professional barriers for black citizens. He was also a man caught between worlds. Richard Theodore Greener (1844–1922) was a renowned black activist and scholar. In 1870, he was the first black graduate of Harvard College. During Reconstruction, he was the first black faculty member at a southern white college, the University of South Carolina. He was even the first black US diplomat to a white country, serving in Vladivostok, Russia. A notable speaker and writer for racial equality, he also served as a dean of the Howard University School of Law and as the administrative head of the Ulysses S. Grant Monument Association. Yet he died in obscurity, his name barely remembered. His black friends and colleagues often looked askance at the light-skinned Greener’s ease among whites and sometimes wrongfully accused him of trying to “pass.” While he was overseas on a diplomatic mission, Greener’s wife and five children stayed in New York City, changed their names, and vanished into white society. Greener never saw them again. At a time when Americans viewed themselves simply as either white or not, Greener lost not only his family but also his sense of clarity about race. Richard Greener’s story demonstrates the human realities of racial politics throughout the fight for abolition, the struggle for equal rights, and the backslide into legal segregation. Katherine Reynolds Chaddock has written a long overdue narrative biography about a man, fascinating in his own right, who also exemplified America’s discomfiting perspectives on race and skin color. Uncompromising Activist is a lively tale that will interest anyone curious about the human elements of the equal rights struggle.
Download or read book Before Color Prejudice written by Frank M. Snowden and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this account of black-white contacts from the Pharaohs to the Caesars, Snowden shows that the ancients did not discriminate against blacks because of their color. He sheds light on the reasons for the absence in antiquity of virulent color prejudice and for the difference in attitudes of whites toward blacks in ancient and modern societies.
Download or read book The Privileged Poor written by Anthony Abraham Jack and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NPR Favorite Book of the Year Winner of the Critics’ Choice Book Award, American Educational Studies Association Winner of the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award Winner of the CEP–Mildred García Award for Exemplary Scholarship “Eye-opening...Brings home the pain and reality of on-campus poverty and puts the blame squarely on elite institutions.” —Washington Post “Jack’s investigation redirects attention from the matter of access to the matter of inclusion...His book challenges universities to support the diversity they indulge in advertising.” —New Yorker “The lesson is plain—simply admitting low-income students is just the start of a university’s obligations. Once they’re on campus, colleges must show them that they are full-fledged citizen.” —David Kirp, American Prospect “This book should be studied closely by anyone interested in improving diversity and inclusion in higher education and provides a moving call to action for us all.” —Raj Chetty, Harvard University The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors—and their coffers—to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to admit these students? In this bracing exposé, Anthony Jack shows that many students’ struggles continue long after they’ve settled in their dorms. Admission, they quickly learn, is not the same as acceptance. This powerfully argued book documents how university policies and campus culture can exacerbate preexisting inequalities and reveals why some students are harder hit than others.
