Category: Articles

  • Yale College’s first black grad: it’s not who you think Yale Alumni Magazine 2014-02-28 Carole Bass ’83, ’97MSL Mark Alden Branch ’86 In 1874, Edward Bouchet became the first African American to graduate from Yale College. Or so the university’s histories tell us—and we’ve reported it ourselves more than once. Yet that very year, a…

  • Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the Making of the African Diaspora in Europe by Tina M. Campt (review) Callaloo Volume 37, Number 1, Winter 2014 pages 169-171 DOI: 10.1353/cal.2014.0006 Nicosia Shakes Brown University Campt, Tina M., Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012) In Image Matters, Tina…

  • We Are all Mutants: Uncovering humanity’s vast diversity The Chronicle Review The Chronicle of Higher Education 2014-03-24 Paul Voosen, Senior Reporter On the hunt for disease genes, researchers uncover humanity’s vast diversity The first people to set foot on Barbados, a wind-battered eastern spur of the Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles, came from the south, and relatively…

  • One’s nationality can be determined by where you were born, where your parents are from, where you hold citizenship – politics, geography, circumstance and even choice. There is nothing complicated about where I am from, until I’m challenged to prove it.

  • Toni Morrison and the Burden of the Passing Narrative African American Review Volume 35, Number 2 (Summer, 2001) pages 205-217 Juda Bennett, Associate Professor of English The College of New Jersey Passing for white, a phenomenon that once captivated writers as diverse as Charles Chesnutt, Sinclair Lewis, Nella Larsen, and Mark Twain, no longer seems…

  • ‘Stretching out the categories’: Chinese/European narratives of mixedness, belonging and home in Singapore Ethnicities Volume 14, Number 2 (April 2014) pages 279-302 DOI: 10.1177/1468796813505554 Zarine L. Rocha, Research Scholar Department of Sociology National University of Singapore Racial categorization is important in everyday interactions and state organization in Singapore. Increasingly, the idea of ‘mixed race’ and…

  • U.S. Census looking at big changes in how it asks about race and ethnicity Pew Research Center 2014-03-14 Jens Manuel Krogstad, Writer/Editor at the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer at the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project The Census Bureau has embarked on a years-long research project intended…

  • The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World by Emily Clark (review) [Wright] Early American Literature Volume 49, Number 1, 2014 page 257-262 DOI: 10.1353/eal.2014.0015 Nazera Sadiq Wright, Assistant Professor of English University of Kentucky The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in…

  • Discovery Leads Yale to Revise a Chapter of Its Black History The New York Times 2014-03-28 Ariel Kaminer On the campus of Yale University, Edward Bouchet has long been a venerated name. Hailed as the first African-American to graduate from Yale College, in 1874, he went on to be the first African-American to earn a…

  • New Contenders Emerge in Quest to Identify Yale’s First African-American Graduate The New York Times 2014-03-16 Ariel Kaminer For Richard Henry Green, recently declared to have been Yale College’s first known African-American graduate, fame, or at least the certainty of his claim on history, was fleeting. Just last month, an Americana specialist at the Swann…