Category: Biography

  • The Black Prince of Florence: A Medici Mystery University of York Room K/133, King’s Manor York, United Kingdom Tuesday, 2016-10-18, 19:00 BST (Local Time) Black History Month Lecture Catherine Fletcher is a historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe. Her first book, The Divorce of Henry VIII, was published in 2012 and brought to life…

  • Black Journalist T. Thomas Fortune Prophetically Predicts Today’s Political Climate African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) 2016-09-24 Shawn Leigh Alexander, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and Director of the Langston Hughes Center University of Kansas Newspaper editor and former slave T. Thomas Fortune formed the National Afro-American League, heralded as the first major…

  • Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians by Angela Pulley Hudson (review) The Journal of the Civil War Era Volume 6, Number 3, September 2016 pages 439-442 DOI: 10.1353/cwe.2016.0058 Adam Pratt, Assistant Professor of History University of Scranton, Scranton, Pennsylvania Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White…

  • Becoming Creole, Becoming Black: Migration, Diasporic Self-Making, and the Many Lives of Madame Maymie Leona Turpeau de Mena Women, Gender, and Families of Color Volume 4, Number 2 (Fall 2016) pages 171-195 DOI: 10.5406/womgenfamcol.4.2.0171 Courtney Desiree Morris, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Pennsylvania State University This article examines…

  • The Strange and Ironic Fates of Jefferson’s Daughters The Daily Beast 2016-09-17 Sally Cabot Gunning Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero/The Daily Beast Martha Jefferson was Virginia elite. Her half-sister Harriet, though seven-eighths white, was deemed a slave at birth. No one could have predicted their fates. Martha Jefferson was born in 1772, just as Monticello…

  • Trying to remedy racism on its own intellectual terrain is like trying to extinguish a fire by striking another match. The fiction must be unbelieved, the fire stamped out.

  • The love story that shocked the world BBC News 2016-09-14 When an African prince and a white middle-class clerk from Lloyd’s underwriters got married in 1948, it provoked shock in Britain and Africa. Seretse Khama met Ruth Williams while he was a student at Oxford University. After his studies, he was supposed to go home…

  • Toronto Film Review: ‘Barry’ Variety 2016-09-10 Owen Gleiberman, Chief Film Critic Devon Terrell in Barry. Courtesy of TIFF Set in 1981, a canny and absorbing drama paints a highly convincing portrait of Barack Obama when he was a 20-year-old college student in New York, still piecing together who he was. In the movie world, there…

  • Herriman: Cartoonist who equalled Cervantes The Telegraph 2007-07-07 Sarah Boxer Sarah Boxer marvels at the world of George Herriman, the creator of the ludicrously imaginative comic strip Krazy Kat We call him “Cat,” We call him “Crazy” yet is he neither. – George Herriman on the title character of Krazy Kat There is no comic…

  • Modern American Spiritualism blossomed in the 1850s and continued as a viable faith into the 1870s. Because of its diversity and openness to new cultures and religions, New Orleans provided fertile ground to nurture Spiritualism, and many séance circles flourished in the Creole Faubourgs of Tremé and Marigny as well as the American sector of…