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Articles 1 - 30 of 90
Full-Text Articles in American Studies
Recipes For Life: Black Women, Cooking, And Memory, Elspeth Mckay
Recipes For Life: Black Women, Cooking, And Memory, Elspeth Mckay
The Great Lakes Journal of Undergraduate History
This paper examines cookbooks written by Black women from the mid eighteenth to late twentieth centuries. As cookbooks, these texts are practical and instructional, while also offering insights into the transnational development of food as an expression of cultural history through the Indigenous, African, and European influences evident within the cuisine. African Americans, and more specifically Black women, have contributed to the food history of the Southern United States by developing a distinct African American cuisine. As the author, I reflect on what it means for me – as a white Canadian woman in a border city – to be …
Effects Of Stereotypes On Black Women Audiences, Darian M. Shorts
Effects Of Stereotypes On Black Women Audiences, Darian M. Shorts
LSU Master's Theses
This study focuses on the effects that televised racial stereotypes have on the self-perception of viewers who identify as Black women. This paper lists three commonly used stereotypes for Black women in television and provides detailed background and analysis of each. There were three goals that I wanted to achieve with this study. The first goal of this study was to measure the amount of stereotyped entertainment these specific viewers consume. The second goal of this study was to understand the positive and negative effects that racial stereotypes have on Black women. The last goal of this study was to …
A Black Prometheus Among The Gods: Illuminating African American Literary Tradition In Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Kenneth L. Rainey Iii
A Black Prometheus Among The Gods: Illuminating African American Literary Tradition In Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Kenneth L. Rainey Iii
Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects
In his hard-hitting novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door Sam Greenlee aims to help his target African American audience to succeed and thrive as their true selves with the novel functioning as a guide to resisting the ever-present physical and spiritual threat faced daily. On the one hand the novel functions as a manual for civil uprising, but underneath that surface, Greenlee argues that true African American resistance comes through nurturing self-determination, self-love, and self-esteem. This project also argues that Spook ought to be located closer to the center of the African American literary canon and provides comparisons …
Copper Sun, Countee Cullen
Copper Sun, Countee Cullen
Zea E-Books Collection
Poet, playwright, novelist, graduate of DeWitt Clinton High, New York University, and Harvard University, Countee Cullen (1903–1946) emerged as a leading literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Copper Sun, his second book of poetry, explores the emotional consequences of being black, Christian, bisexual, and a poet in Jazz Age America—such as in the following “Confession”:
If for a day joy masters me,
Think not my wounds are healed;
Far deeper than the scars you see,
I keep the roots concealed.
They shall bear blossoms with the fall;
I have their word for this,
Who tend my roots with rains of …
Caroling Dusk: An Anthology Of Verse By Negro Poets, Countee Cullen , Editor
Caroling Dusk: An Anthology Of Verse By Negro Poets, Countee Cullen , Editor
Zea E-Books Collection
CONTENTS:
FOREWORD
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR • Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes • Death Song • Life • After the Quarrel • Ships that Pass in the Night • We Wear the Mask • Sympathy • The Debt
JOSEPH S. COTTER, SR • The Tragedy of Pete • The Way-side Well
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON • From the German of Uhland • The Glory of the Day Was in Her Face • The Creation • The White Witch • My City
WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT Du BOIS • A Litany of Atlanta
WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE • Scintilla • Rye …
Evaluating The Stigma Toward Counseling In The African American Community, Jamaica Chapman
Evaluating The Stigma Toward Counseling In The African American Community, Jamaica Chapman
Doctoral Projects
Self-stigma is an important factor that hinders help seeking through the use of mental health services. “Self-stigma is the reduction of an individual’s self-esteem or self-worth caused by the individual self-labeling herself or himself as someone who is socially unacceptable” (Vogel et al., 2006, p. 325). Attitudes have suggested both men and women struggle with depression in this population, and that they are reluctant to addressing psychological problems. Most are overly concerned about the stigma associated with mental illness. Though some are open to seeking treatment through mental health services, religious coping in this community is the most preferred method …
African American History Since Emancipation, Laurie Woodard
African American History Since Emancipation, Laurie Woodard
Open Educational Resources
This syllabus is designed for a lecture course on Post-Emancipation African American history.
Aa Ms 19 Eugene Jackson Papers, Emily Margaret Newell
Aa Ms 19 Eugene Jackson Papers, Emily Margaret Newell
Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)
This collection is comprised of family photographs, photo albums, bibles, hymnals, and newspaper from the early 20th century onward. The collection is organized into three series:
Series 1: Photographs
This series includes the personal photographs of Eugene Jackson’s friends and family as far back as the early 1900s. The most common themes and activities found in these photographs are leisure activities such as trips to the beach or the mountains, family get-togethers, professional portraits, and Christmas greeting cards.
Subseries 1.1: Loose Photographs
Loose photographs are organized into topical folders.
Subseries 1.2: Ruby Family Photograph Album
The photograph album includes black-and-white …
Why So Negative? Street Literature And Its Negative Effects On The African American Psyche, Lilly Lamia Simone
Why So Negative? Street Literature And Its Negative Effects On The African American Psyche, Lilly Lamia Simone
Theses (2016-Present)
Urban literature, more widely known as street lit is a genre of literature that glorifies and exaggerates drugs, violence, and sex in the lives of its African American characters. Through Street lit readers are introduced to the black man as a figure of power through illegal activity in his community, and black women as either overly aggressive or figures in need of protection. These novels choose loyalty over family, drugs, and athleticism over education, and money and power over morality. These novels and their glorifications cause African American people to see dream lives in goals that are not only unattainable …
Review Of Liberia, South Carolina: An African American Appalachian Community, By John M. Coggeshall, Cicero Fain
Review Of Liberia, South Carolina: An African American Appalachian Community, By John M. Coggeshall, Cicero Fain
History Faculty Research
Examining 150 years of history of a small, rural African American community, John M. Coggeshall’s Liberia, South Carolina: An African American Appalachian Community, contributes to recent studies elevating Black Appalachian voices, perspectives, and cultures previously historically elided. Located in Pickens County in the Blue Ridge region of western South Carolina, Liberia, like a lot of rural communities, exists less “as a legally defined entity and more a culturally defined area of recognized neighborly ties.”
The Evolution Of Protest And Social Movements In The National Basketball Association From The Mid-20th Century To The Present Day, Luke Messersmith
The Evolution Of Protest And Social Movements In The National Basketball Association From The Mid-20th Century To The Present Day, Luke Messersmith
Honors Theses
For my thesis, I focus on the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the evolution of how its personnel—players, coaches, refs, owners, etc.—navigated racism, politics, social injustice, platform utilization, and other pressing topics from the mid-1900s to the present day. Monumental players that used their platform in the NBA to inspire change include Bill Russell (1960s), Kareem-Abdul Jabaar (1970s), Craig Hodges (1990s), and LeBron James (2010s). These men and many others risked their images, and in some cases, their NBA careers, in order to protest, march, boycott, and kneel for causes they believed in, such as the civil rights movement and …
The Evolution Of Protest And Social Movements In The National Basketball Association From The Mid-20th Century To The Present Day, Luke Messersmith
The Evolution Of Protest And Social Movements In The National Basketball Association From The Mid-20th Century To The Present Day, Luke Messersmith
Honors Theses
For my thesis, I focus on the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the evolution of how its personnel—players, coaches, refs, owners, etc.—navigated racism, politics, social injustice, platform utilization, and other pressing topics from the mid-1900s to the present day. Monumental players that used their platform in the NBA to inspire change include Bill Russell (1960s), Kareem-Abdul Jabbar (1970s), Craig Hodges (1990s), and LeBron James (2010s). These men and many others risked their images, and in some cases, their NBA careers, in order to protest, march, boycott, and kneel for causes they believed in, such as the civil rights movement and …
A World Of Infinite Possibilities: Recoding Popular Culture In Modern U.S. Ethnic Fiction, Todd Martinez
A World Of Infinite Possibilities: Recoding Popular Culture In Modern U.S. Ethnic Fiction, Todd Martinez
UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones
This project examines how the U.S. ethnic authors Ralph Ellison, Maxine Hong Kingston and Junot Díaz reflect the dynamic, reciprocal process of transculturation by decoding popular cultural forms. Using strategies made available by cultural studies, hemispheric theory and neoMarxism, critical attention will be directed to each author’s major literary work: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, and Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This dissertation further analyzes a hitherto overlooked area of U.S. multiethnic literary studies: the ethnic subject’s relationship to encoded popular culture forms and how they impact dentity formation. Recent scholarship has focused on the ethnic …
Race Youth In Twentieth-Century American Literature And Culture, Claire E. Lenviel
Race Youth In Twentieth-Century American Literature And Culture, Claire E. Lenviel
Theses and Dissertations--English
Race Youth in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture argues for the centrality of black youth, both real and literary, to the trajectories of African American literature and its repudiation of white supremacy. Drawing on research into the rise of the adolescent and teenager as distinct social categories, I argue that age-based subjectivity should inform how we read race-based subjectivity. My first chapter explores how early twentieth-century black periodicals push back against white supremacist theories of human development in an explicit appeal to what I call “race youth,” the children and adolescents who would take up the mantle of racial uplift. …
Green Thumbs: Cultivating Greenery And Personal Freedoms In Miné Okubo’S Citizen 13660 And Lorraine Hansberry’S A Raisin In The Sun, Akasha L. Khalsa
Green Thumbs: Cultivating Greenery And Personal Freedoms In Miné Okubo’S Citizen 13660 And Lorraine Hansberry’S A Raisin In The Sun, Akasha L. Khalsa
Conspectus Borealis
In her classic 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry explores the impacts of generations of violence, exploitation, and discrimination on an African American family in Chicago’s Southside. Throughout the play, a family house plant comes to symbolize the matriarch's hopes for her children, and her ability to nourish the plant reflects on her ability to fulfil her own modest dreams and provide for the dreams of her progeny. Similarly, we see plants fulfilling the same role in another tale of American racial injustice, namely Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660, an illustrated personal account of the artist’s experience …
African American Sacred Music And The Romantic Aesthetic, Brooksie Harrington
African American Sacred Music And The Romantic Aesthetic, Brooksie Harrington
English Faculty Working Papers
Gospel music affects every aspect of African American culture, and the similarities between the African American sacred music aesthetic and the Romantic aesthetic share a theme of religiosity that is contained in the correlative of the mythopoetic “seam.” This seam meshes together analysis that explores the natural sublime, as suggested in the writings of such scholars as William Wordsworth, Pierre Proudhon, Samuel Coleridge, James Weldon Johnson, Henry L. Gates, and Anthony Heilbut.
The Impacts Of Incarceration On The Wellbeing Of Family Members Of African American Males Who Experience The U.S Prison System: A Phenomenological Study, Tremaine N. Leslie
The Impacts Of Incarceration On The Wellbeing Of Family Members Of African American Males Who Experience The U.S Prison System: A Phenomenological Study, Tremaine N. Leslie
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
African Americans encounter a high rate of imprisonment, and the social, economic, mental and other effects of imprisonment are extended to their families and communities (Roberts, 2004). In addition to separating individuals from their families and communities, incarceration maximizes the probability for fractured relationships, fragmented communities, and encumbers the public service systems (DeHart, Shapiro & Clone, 2018).Therefore, the purpose of this phenomenological inquiry was to explore the mental health effects of incarceration on the family members of African American males who experience the U.S prison system.
The theoretical framework utilized for this study was the critical race theory (CRT) immersed …
Toni Morrison: Biography, A Yęmisi Jimoh, Phd
Issues Of Modernity In Russian And U.S. Southern Discourse: Literary And Cinematic Crosscurrents, Zachary John Killebrew
Issues Of Modernity In Russian And U.S. Southern Discourse: Literary And Cinematic Crosscurrents, Zachary John Killebrew
Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations
This dissertation traces formulations of modernity, national and regional identity, and economy in the literature and film of Russia and the U.S. South from serfdom to the Second World War. Studying serf and slave narratives, Russian Realist and Southern Renaissance novels such as The Brothers Karamazov (1879), Demons (1872), The Sound and the Fury (1929), Tobacco Road (1932), and Wise Blood (1952), and American and Soviet films such as Volga, Volga (1938) and Cabin in the Sky (1943), this examination locates within Russo-Southern discourses a shared interest in striking out against Western or Northern epistemologies to assert a “peripheral” modernity …
The Tortured Pre-History Of Urban Blight: African American St. Louis And The Politics Of Public Health, 1877-1940, Taylor Desloge
The Tortured Pre-History Of Urban Blight: African American St. Louis And The Politics Of Public Health, 1877-1940, Taylor Desloge
Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation is a long history of the contested legal and environmental category of blight, especially in its racialized dimensions, in tandem with the African American experience of living in blighted urban spaces and forging a black politics of public health and welfare. Rethinking the conventional view that identifies blight as simply a preoccupation of post-World War II planners, this dissertation relocates its roots in a politics of public health that emerged a hundred years earlier, in the Post-Reconstruction Era, when black migration to the city and the rise of industrial capitalism raised new questions over both the social needs …
Black And White Notes: Segregation, Integration, And Urban Renewal Through Pittsburgh's Locals 60 And 471, Nathan Seeley
Black And White Notes: Segregation, Integration, And Urban Renewal Through Pittsburgh's Locals 60 And 471, Nathan Seeley
FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation explores Pittsburgh’s Locals 60, 471, and 60-471 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) from the late nineteenth century to the mid-1960s. Local 60 was founded in 1896 for white musicians and Local 471 in 1908 for black musicians. While other studies of the AFM take a “top-down” approach, this study examines these Locals from the “bottom-up.” In doing so, it re-examines the causal relationship between music/musicians and the social, political, and economic conditions intersecting with them. This dissertation is built upon seventy-two interviews conducted between former Local 471 members in the 1990s, photographs from Teenie Harris Collection …
"A Dark, Abiding, Signing Africanist Presence" In Walker Percy’S Dr. Tom More Novels, David Withun
"A Dark, Abiding, Signing Africanist Presence" In Walker Percy’S Dr. Tom More Novels, David Withun
The Coastal Review: An Online Peer-reviewed Journal
Many of the tropes, commonplaces, symbols, and values used and reflected by American literary works written by white authors, as Toni Morrison writes, are “in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence.” The black/white racial binary and racial différance that mark this presence inform the use of racialized characters as signifiers in the novels of Walker Percy. In the Dr. Tom More novels Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy adopts racial symbolism as a means toward his critique of the American notion of “the pursuit of happiness.” In Love in the Ruins, Percy …
Nuanced Narratives: Reporting With Critical Race And Feminist Standpoint Theories, Emily Margaret Pelland
Nuanced Narratives: Reporting With Critical Race And Feminist Standpoint Theories, Emily Margaret Pelland
Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports
The Google Expedition titled WWI Era Through the Eyes of the Chicago Defender explores African American experiences during the early years of the Great Migration (1910-1970). Conventional journalism relies on the false idea that journalists are meant to be, and can be, objective, outside observers. This report provides tools for journalists to create more nuanced, thorough storytelling endeavors. This report describes the theoretical framework and intent of the Virtual Reality (VR) project for students in grades 8 and above. It utilizes Feminist Standpoint Theory (FST) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) to cultivate a VR experience that acknowledges particular, overlooked aspects …
Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging And Kinships In African American Men’S Literature, 1953-1971, Debarati Biswas
Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging And Kinships In African American Men’S Literature, 1953-1971, Debarati Biswas
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging and Kinships in African American Men’s Literature, 1953-1971 builds on the work of women-of-color feminists since the late 1960s and queer-of-color critique in the works of José Esteban Muñoz, Robert Reid-Pharr, Roderic Ferguson, and Nadia Ellis, in order to chronicle the emergence of a queer tradition in mid twentieth century African American men’s literature. Through literary analysis and archival research on marginal figures of African American culture during this period, this dissertation proposes that the black pulp novels of Chester Himes, Robert Deane Pharr, Clarence Cooper Jr., and Iceberg Slim perform a queer critique of and …
Langston Hughes In Turkestan: Poems, Photos, And Notebooks 1932–1933, Zahera Z. Saed
Langston Hughes In Turkestan: Poems, Photos, And Notebooks 1932–1933, Zahera Z. Saed
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In June 1932, Langston Hughes landed in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) with a group of mainly African American artists, writers, craftsmen, and activists, to participate in the Soviet propaganda film, Black and White, by Mezhrabpom. When the film project fell apart, Hughes asked permission for the group to visit Central Asia, a request that, as he documents in his essay, “South to Samarkand,” was met with “a pause” by Soviet authorities since tourists and journalists were not permitted to enter Central Asia. He rode on the Trans-Siberian Rail with hanging lamps lighting the small compartment and simple wooden chairs, …
The Fluid Pastoral: African American Spiritual Waterways In The Urban Landscapes Of Harlem Renaissance Poetry, Maren E. Loveland
The Fluid Pastoral: African American Spiritual Waterways In The Urban Landscapes Of Harlem Renaissance Poetry, Maren E. Loveland
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
In 1921 Langston Hughes penned, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” in his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (Hughes 1254). Weaving the profound pain of the African American experience with the symbolism of the primordial river, Hughes recognized the inherent power of water as a means of spiritual communication and religious significance. Departing from the traditional interpretation of the American pastoral as typified by white poets such as Robert Frost and Walt Whitman, the African American poets emerging from the Harlem Renaissance established a more nuanced pastoral landscape embedded within urban cultures, utilizing water in particular as …
Spirituality Among Black Americans: A Hierarchical Classification Of The Family Strengths Model, Genese Clark
Spirituality Among Black Americans: A Hierarchical Classification Of The Family Strengths Model, Genese Clark
College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
There is a need for disaggregate data pertaining to the perceived strengths of Black American families. This study identified which traits are salient and dominant among African-American families according to the Family Strengths Model. Utilizing this model, a mixed methods study was conducted among Black Americans living in Connecticut who identify with belonging to a family (N=59) to investigate the importance of six family strength domains. Results found the hierarchical rank (from most important to least important) to be commitment, spirituality/ spiritual wellbeing, appreciation and affection, positive communication, time together, and the ability to manage stress and crisis effectively. Additionally, …
We Are Roses From Our Mothers' Gardens: Black Feminist Visuality In African American Women's Art, Kelli Morgan
We Are Roses From Our Mothers' Gardens: Black Feminist Visuality In African American Women's Art, Kelli Morgan
Doctoral Dissertations
ABSTRACT WE ARE ROSES FROM OUR MOTHERS’ GARDENS: BLACK FEMINIST VISUALITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S ART MAY 2017 KELLI MORGAN, B.A., WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERISTY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Manisha Sinha We Are Roses From Our Mothers' Gardens posits that in differing historical periods African American women visual artists employed various media and create from individual political thoughts, intellectual views, and aesthetic interests to emphasize the innate unification of a Black woman’s race, gender, sexuality, class, and selfhood and how this multifaceted dynamic of Black women’s identity and material reality produces a …
The Afroethnic Impulse And Renewal: African American Transculturations In Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 To 2013, Trent Masiki
The Afroethnic Impulse And Renewal: African American Transculturations In Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 To 2013, Trent Masiki
Doctoral Dissertations
Until now, there has been little sustained critical attention to the way African American literature, history, culture, and politics influence transculturation and ethnoracial identity formation in Afro-Latino bildung narratives. This dissertation addresses that oversight. The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal: African American Transculturations in Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 to 2013, examines a long, but often neglected, history of intercultural affinities and literary encounters between African Americans and Afro-Latinos from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. In The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal, I explore African American literary and cultural influences in the personal essays, memoirs, and autobiographically inspired fiction of …
Rose’S Gift: Slavery, Kinship, And The Fabric Of Memory, Mark J. Auslander
Rose’S Gift: Slavery, Kinship, And The Fabric Of Memory, Mark J. Auslander
All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences
One of the most evocative objects in the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture is an embroidered cloth bag that has come to be known as “Ashley’s Sack”. Stitch-work on the bag, signed “Ruth Middleton”, recounts the bag’s painful history, as a gift presented by an enslaved woman, Rose, to her daughter Ashley, when Ashley was sold at age nine in South Carolina. This paper explores ‘Ashley’s sack’ as an object of history, memory, ritual action, and aesthetic creativity.