Category: Biography

  • A Breezy Chameleon, Blurring Social Borders The New York Times 2014-02-16 Jennifer Schuessler, Staff Editor When the literary scholar George Hutchinson was in the archives at Howard University one afternoon a decade ago, he thought he knew which story of a neglected African-American woman writer he was chasing. He was at work on a biography…

  • Race as freedom: how Cedric Dover and Barack Obama became black Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 37, Issue 2 pages 222-240 DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.715661 Nico Slate, Associate Professor of History Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Born across racial lines, Cedric Dover and Barack Obama both came to identify with the African American community. By contrasting the lives…

  • In “Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe,” Matthew Pratt Guterl brings out a little known side of the celebrated personality, showing how her ambitions of later years were even more daring and subversive than the youthful exploits that made her the first African American superstar.

  • Stuart Hall obituary The Guardian 2014-02-10 David Morley and Bill Schwarz Influential cultural theorist, campaigner and founding editor of the New Left Review When the writer and academic Richard Hoggart founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964, he invited Stuart Hall, who has died aged 82, to join him as…

  • Grafton Tyler Brown—whose heritage was likely one-eighth African American—finessed his way through San Francisco society by passing for white. Working in an environment hostile to African American achievement, Brown became a successful commercial artist and businessman in the rough-and-tumble gold rush era and the years after the Civil War. Best known for his bird’s-eye cityscapes,…

  • Stuart Hall – obituary The Telegraph London, England 2014-02-11 Stuart Hall was a cultural theorist who coined the term ‘Thatcherism’ and profoundly influenced New Labour Stuart Hall, who has died aged 82, came to Britain from his native Jamaica in 1951 and established himself as a leading cultural theorist and as a hero of the…

  • The Life And Times Of Adella Hunt Logan: Educator, Mother, Wife, And Suffragist, 1863-1915 Florida State University November 2012 Daria Willis Adella Hunt Logan was a woman trapped between two worlds. She was a mulatto who suffered from the pressures and injustices of Jim Crow America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The…

  • At age 38, Jennifer Teege happened to pluck a library book from the shelf—and discovered a horrifying fact: Her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the vicious Nazi commandant depicted in Schindler’s List. Reviled as the “butcher of Płaszów,” Goeth was executed in 1946. The more Teege learned about him, the more certain she became: If her…

  • Rite Of “Passing” CBS News 2007-10-28 Russ Mitchell For 23 years Bliss Broyard was white, living in tony Greenwich, Conn., isolated from people of color and influenced by the racial attitudes of her surroundings, reports CBS News’ Russ Mitchell. Asked if she used to tell black jokes, Broyard said: “I did, in high school and…

  • Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist by G. Reginald Daniel (review) Hispanic Review Volume 82, Number 1, Winter 2014 pages 116-119 DOI: 10.1353/hir.2014.0008 Mércia Santana Flannery, Lecturer of Portuguese Romance Languages Department University of Pennsylvania G. Reginald Daniel, Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist, 336 pages, hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-05246-5.…