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 ›
Women’s social movements in the United States can be divided into three “waves” (although these divisions are not strictly chronological or oppositional). First-wave feminism emerged from the involvement of women activists in the antislavery, temperance, and women’s-suffrage movements in the… Read More ›
Appearing in Story magazine and traditionally considered Zora Neale Hurston’s most accomplished story, “The Gilded Six-Bits” had a favorable reception that helped call Hurston to the attention of critics and publishers and resulted in the publication of her first novel,… 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 ›
A distinctive literature about childhood has existed since the Victorian era, but not so about adolescence as a stage of life with its own integrity, concerns, and distinct problems. Teachers, librarians, and parents argue that the classics of world literature… Read More ›
Feminist long fiction features female characters whose quest for self-agency leads to conflict with a traditionally masculinist and patriarchal society. These novels have been harshly criticized and dismissed—and even ridiculed—for their nontraditional female characters. Feminist ideology in the Western world… Read More ›
Ethnic Studies, the theoretical study of race and cultural pluralism, began in the US with the work of African American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. African American studies has revealed the theoretical richness of African American… Read More ›
For much of her career, Zora Neale Hurston (1891 –1960) was dedicated to the presentation of black folk culture. She introduced readers to hoodoo, folktales, lying contests, spirituals, the blues, sermons, children’s games, riddles, playing the dozens, and, in general,… Read More ›
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