Part of the Times, Personally and Professionally

2019 ◽  
pp. 175-187
Author(s):  
Andy Propst
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Middle Part ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Times ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Arthur Laurents

During the early and middle part of the 1960s Betty Comden and Adolph Green were no longer splitting their time between working on shows for Broadway and movies in Hollywood, and as a result they were able to dedicate more time to their personal lives. And while they might have been spending time with the elite of New York’s society, they were not unaware of the issues facing the country. This informed a pair of stand-alone songs they penned with Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein as well as their next musical, Hallelujah, Baby! Featuring a book by Arthur Laurents, the show chronicled the African-American experience during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Leslie Uggams was the star of what was ultimately an unconventional tuner that had music by Jule Styne and went on to win a Tony Award as best musical

The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Weems
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Large Body ◽  
American Business ◽  
Insurance Company ◽  
Life Insurance Company ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Apparent Reason

Anthony Overton is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most significant African American entrepreneurs. Overton, at his peak, presided over a Chicago-based financial empire that included a personal care products company (Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company) a bank (Douglass National Bank), an insurance company (Victory Life Insurance Company) a popular periodical (the Half-Century Magazine), and a newspaper (Chicago Bee). This impressive business portfolio contributed to Overton being the first businessman to win the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1927, as well as him currently being acknowledged in the Harvard University Business School’s database of “American Business Leaders of the Twentieth Century” as the first African American to head a major business conglomerate. Nevertheless, despite Overton’s noteworthy entrepreneurial accomplishments, he remains a mysterious figure. The most readily apparent reason for this is the unavailability of his business records and personal papers. Still, because of Anthony Overton’s prominence, a large body of scattered alternative primary and secondary sources were available to construct this biography. Along with examining Anthony Overton and his accomplishments, this book places his activities in the context of larger societal occurrences in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Moreover, by recounting Overton’s life story, this biography seeks to more fully illuminate the role of business and entrepreneurship in the African American experience.

Lift Every Voice and Swing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vaughn A. Booker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Black Popular Culture ◽  
Duke Ellington ◽  
American Protestantism

In the twentieth century, jazz professionals became race representatives who also played an important part in shaping the religious landscape of twentieth-century African American Protestantism. They wielded the power to both define their religious communities and craft novel religious voices and performances. These music celebrities released religious recordings and put on religious concerts, and they became integral to the artistry of African American religious expression. This book argues that with the emergence of new representatives in jazz, religious authority for African Americans found a place and spokespeople in popular culture beyond traditional Afro-Protestant institutions and religious life. It examines jazz musicians’ expressions of belief, practice, and unconventional positions of religious authority. It demonstrates that these jazz professionals enacted theological beliefs and religious practices that echoed, contested with, and diverged from the predominant African American religious culture. The lives and work of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams anchor this book’s narrative of racial and religious representations as well as of religious beliefs and practices in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Through these African American jazz women and men, this book illuminates the significant Afro-Protestant cultural presence that informed, surrounded, and opposed their professional and personal lives while also contributing significantly to their artistry. This book’s focus on jazz musicians offers a novel rethinking of African American religious history by bringing the significant artistic dimensions of Afro-Protestant religion into focus as it impacted black popular culture in the twentieth century.

Staging Public Blackness in Mid-Twentieth-Century Peru: The Repertoires of Pancho Fierro and Cumanana

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-230
Author(s):  
Heidi Carolyn Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Santa Cruz ◽  
Dance Company ◽  
Lasting Impression ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Katherine Dunham ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Performance

In 1951, Victoria (1922–2014) and Nicomedes Santa Cruz (1925–92) attended a performance at Lima's Teatro Municipal (Municipal Theatre) by the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. Dunham (1909–2006), an African American choreographer and anthropologist, pioneered a “research-to-performance” method to study African-derived dances in the Caribbean and stage them in stylized choreographies. Elite Lima patrons walked out of the theatre during the danced African fertility rite in Dunham's “Rites de Passage,” but the performance left a lasting impression on the Santa Cruzes. Nicomedes Santa Cruz later described the event as the first positive staged demonstration of blackness in Peru—and Victoria Santa Cruz stated that, when they saw Katherine Dunham's production, they knew they had to do something similar. The Santa Cruzes went on to lead a revival of Afro-Peruvian arts in the 1960s and 1970s.

“Neighborliness Is Nonspatial”: Howard Thurman and the Search for Integration and Common Ground

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 1206-1221
Author(s):  
Peter Eisenstadt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Racial Conflict ◽  
Spatial Understanding ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Howard Thurman ◽  
Life Career

This article, by looking at the life, career, and thought of Howard Thurman, one of the most significant African American religious thinkers of the twentieth century, argues that one way to understand the call for racial integration by Thurman and others in the mid-century is through the demand to restructure urban space in less exclusive ways. The failure to realize this, in the 1960s, led to calls for defending “black space” in cities, although this too proved to be a failure. Thurman’s spatial understanding of integration is a still relevant intervention in understanding the complexities of race and racial conflict in urban areas.

scholarly journals The African-American Poets' Struggle for the Rights of People: A Study in Claude McKay's Selected Poems

Twejer ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 821-866
Author(s):  
Hameed Abdullah Mustafa ◽  
◽  
Sherzad Shafi'h Barzani
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This study scrutinizes selected protest poems written by the prominent black poet of the Harlem Renaissance Claude McKay (1889-1948). McKay is considered as a key literary figure of the Negro movement who played a significant role in struggling for and awakening his own people to demand their rights. His major aspiration was to end all forms of prejudice and oppression against blacks portrayed in his poems during the most effective movement in African American literary history comprising the times between 1920 to almost the mid-1930s. McKay established himself as a powerful literary voice for social justice during the Harlem Renaissance constantly struggling for people's identity and rights against the widespread prejudice, segregation, and racism against blacks in America and worldwide along with his pride in his black race and culture. These central issues had different impacts on the Harlem Renaissance and on the lives and works of those who participated in that movement; depicting how both race and racism could define the African American experience in the early twentieth century, as well. McKay, skillfully combined traditional forms and political protest in many of his sonnets. He took the old poetic genre and made it new and relevant to his own project by examining within its bounds unconventional and contemporary subjects. Along with his poetic diction and imagery, he juxtaposes contrasting images to show the hypocritic nature of America, showing his inevitable faith in the country. McKay's enthusiasm for and belief in the authority of intellectuals was strengthened by his understanding of America's deep-rooted racism. He closes many of his sonnets with gloomy observations of blacks' sufferings. The clear conclusion of his struggle was the fact that negro writers succeeded in showcasing the sufferings of people, incited blacks to demand their legal rights, and proved they are capable of everything and as genius as whites. Keywords: McKay, Struggles, Racism, identity, prejudice, rights.

Written Out of History: Black Square Dance Traditions

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 168-173
Author(s):  
Susan Eike Spalding
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Movement Analysis ◽  
African American Community ◽  
National Society ◽  
Appalachian Region ◽  
Community Based ◽  
University Of Illinois ◽  
The 1960S

Old time square dancing (in a big circle) was an early-twentieth-century home- and community-based recreation among all ethnicities in the Central Appalachian region. It disappeared in most places by the 1940s, re-emerging in white rural communities in the 1960s. By contrast, one Virginia African American community continued square dancing until the early 1970s, much longer than others. Their last dances were held just as square dancing again became popular in white communities. The movement of the dance itself, its context and meaning to the dancers, and elements of regional and national society and culture may have contributed both to its longevity and to its demise. The presentation is based on interviews and movement analysis as well as on bibliographic research. It is based upon research for the author's book Appalachian Dance: Creativity and Continuity in Six Communities (University of Illinois Press, 2014).

The Rain Calls of Frogs and the Reigning Paradigm of American Herpetology

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Gordon L. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Animal Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Breeding Sites ◽  
Gradual Disappearance ◽  
The Times ◽  
Traditional Natural ◽  
Breeding Seasons ◽  
The Comparative Study

American zoologists and herpetologists during the past fifty years have successfully deciphered the mating calls of frogs and toads with ever increasing precision and sophistication. However, the vocalizations most commonly termed “rain calls,” which typically occur beyond both normal breeding seasons and breeding sites, have remained a persistent puzzle. This article traces the gradual disappearance of rain calls, along with a corresponding decline in any mention of emotional states, from herpetological studies of anuran vocalizations in the United States from the middle of the twentieth century to the present and examines the historical roots of this disappearance. This evaporation of rain calls is indicative of a much larger change in the scientific climate of the times involving the transition from traditional natural history to the Neo-Darwinian, adaptationist paradigm of contemporary biology. Rain calls thus increasingly became anomalous, thereby eliminating a possibly fruitful line of inquiry in the comparative study of human-animal communication, in this case with evolution's earliest vocalizers. The contours and benefits of a more encompassing paradigm, envisioned by some leading early twentieth-century zoologists, are briefly discussed.

Studying Modern Arabic Literature

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Teaching And Research ◽  
The Face ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Modern Arabic

This book is devoted to the life and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi who transformed the study of modern Arabic literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1960s the study of Arabic literature, both classical and modern, had barely been emancipated from the academic approaches of orientalism. The appointment of Badawi as Oxford University's first lecturer in modern Arabic literature changed the face of this subject as Badawi showed, through his teaching and research, that Arabic literature was making vibrant contributions to global culture and thought. Part biography, part collection of critical essays, this book celebrates Badawi's immense contribution to the field and explores his role as a public intellectual in the Arab world and the west.

cAbdullah Yūsuf cAlī & Muhammad Asad: Two Approaches to the English Translation of the Qur'an

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muzaffar Iqbal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
British India ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Political Milieu ◽  
The Times

This article attempts to present a comparative study of the role of two twentieth-century English translations of the Qur'an: cAbdullah Yūsuf cAlī's The Meaning of the Glorious Qur'ān and Muḥammad Asad's The Message of the Qur'ān. No two men could have been more different in their background, social and political milieu and life experiences than Yūsuf cAlī and Asad. Yūsuf 'Alī was born and raised in British India and had a brilliant but traditional middle-class academic career. Asad traversed a vast cultural and geographical terrain: from a highly-disciplined childhood in Europe to the deserts of Arabia. Both men lived ‘intensely’ and with deep spiritual yearning. At some time in each of their lives they decided to embark upon the translation of the Qur'an. Their efforts have provided us with two incredibly rich monumental works, which both reflect their own unique approaches and the effects of the times and circumstances in which they lived. A comparative study of these two translations can provide rich insights into the exegesis and the phenomenon of human understanding of the divine text.

Rewriting the Narrative

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Nicolas G. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Mixed Media ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
The 1960S

A vibrant American Indian art scene developed in California from the 1960s to the 1980s, with links to a broader indigenous arts movement. Native American artists working in the state produced and exhibited paintings, prints, sculptures, mixed media, and other art forms that validated and documented their cultures, interpreted their history, asserted their survival, and explored their experiences in modern society. Building on recent scholarship that examines American Indian migration, urbanization, and activism in the twentieth century, this article charts these developments and argues that American Indian artists in California challenged and rewrote dominant historical narratives by foregrounding Native American perspectives in their work.

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