The Great Depression had a profound psychological effect on many Americans, shaking their faith in capitalist ideology. The notions that opportunity was equal and unlimited and that success was assured for energetic, hardworking, talented individuals no longer seemed valid. In… Read More ›
The early post–Civil War promise of equal protection and increased civil rights for African Americans was eviscerated by decades of Jim Crow laws, culminating in the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that sanctioned legalized racial segregation. This… Read More ›
The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s has been recognized globally as the most transformative social movement of twentieth-century America. Likewise, the Black Power movement that grew out of it in the 1960s is also viewed… Read More ›
Between 1919 and 1934 African-American artists flocked to New York City, specifically to Harlem. This era was to become one of the most prolific periods of African-American writing. What Alain Locke called in 1925 a “New Negro Movement” was later… Read More ›
Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 – May 22, 1967) records in The Big Sea: An Autobiography (1940) his feelings upon first seeing Africa: “when I saw the dust-green hills in the sunlight, something took hold of me inside. My Africa,… Read More ›
Whiteness studies investigates the parameters of white racial identity, locating its scope and function in systems of representation. This field of study takes as its founding premise the constructed nature of identity, a poststructuralist concept heralded by race theorists who… Read More ›
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