Within Our Gates

Within Our Gates
Author: Alan Gevinson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 1588
Release: 1997
Genre: Minorities in motion pictures
ISBN: 9780520209640

"[These volumes] are endlessly absorbing as an excursion into cultural history and national memory."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Oscar Micheaux and His Circle

Oscar Micheaux and His Circle
Author: Charles Musser
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2016-03-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0253021553

Oscar Micheaux—the most prolific African American filmmaker to date and a filmmaking giant of the silent period—has finally found his rightful place in film history. Both artist and showman, Micheaux stirred controversy in his time as he confronted issues such as lynching, miscegenation, peonage and white supremacy, passing, and corruption among black clergymen. In this important collection, prominent scholars examine Micheaux's surviving silent films, his fellow producers of race films who alternately challenged or emulated his methods, and the cultural activities that surrounded and sustained these achievements. The relationship between black film and both the stage (particularly the Lafayette Players) and the black press, issues of underdevelopment, and a genealogy of Micheaux scholarship, as well as extensive and more accurate filmographies, give a richly textured portrait of this era. The essays will fascinate the general public as well as scholars in the fields of film studies, cultural studies, and African American history. This thoroughly readable collection is a superb reference work lavishly illustrated with rare photographs.

Fire and Desire

Fire and Desire
Author: Jane Gaines
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2001-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780226278742

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsNote on Film DatesIntroduction - The "Race" in Race Movies1. "Green Like Me"2. Desiring Others3. Race Movies: All-Black Everything4. World-Improving Desires5. Fire and Desire6. The Body's Story7. Race/Riot/CinemaConclusion - Mixed-Race MoviesNotesIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

The Conquest

The Conquest
Author: Oscar Micheaux
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2022-01-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1513209973

The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913) is a novel by Oscar Micheaux. Before he became the first Black movie mogul in American history, Micheaux was a homesteader-turned novelist whose passion for storytelling and business acumen were born from a youth of hard work and struggle. The son of a former slave, Micheaux dedicated his life to countering the dominant narratives of American history while inspiring and empowering Black people around the world. “The heavy rains washed the loam from the hills and deposited it on these bottoms. Years ago, when the rolling lands were cleared, and before the excessive rainfall had washed away the loose surface, the highlands were considered most valuable for agricultural purposes, equally as valuable as the bottoms now are.” A Black homesteader named Oscar Devereaux reflects on a life of perseverance. Raised alongside twelve siblings in rural Illinois, he leaves home and family behind to seek a life of fortune and independence. Never one to set limits, Devereaux discovers that no dream is beyond his reach. Dedicated to educator and orator Booker T. Washington, The Conquest was described by its author as the “true story of a negro who was discontented and [of] the circumstances that were the outcome of that discontent.” With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Oscar Micheaux’s The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Range

Range
Author: David Epstein
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2021-04-27
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0735214506

The #1 New York Times bestseller that has all America talking—with a new afterword on expanding your range—as seen on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, Morning Joe, CBS This Morning, and more. “The most important business—and parenting—book of the year.” —Forbes “Urgent and important. . . an essential read for bosses, parents, coaches, and anyone who cares about improving performance.” —Daniel H. Pink Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you’ll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule. David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They’re also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see. Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range makes a compelling case for actively cultivating inefficiency. Failing a test is the best way to learn. Frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. The most impactful inventors cross domains rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. As experts silo themselves further while computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.

Straight Lick

Straight Lick
Author: J. Ronald Green
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2000-09-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0253109221

A critical examination of the films of Oscar Micheaux. One of the most original and successful filmmakers of all time, Oscar Micheaux was born into a rural, working-class, African-American family in mid-America in 1884, yet he created an impressive legacy in commercial cinema. Between 1913 and 1951 he wrote, directed, and distributed some forty-three feature films, more than any other black filmmaker in the world, a record of production that is likely to stand for a very long time. Micheaux's work was founded upon the concern for class mobility, or uplift, for African Americans. Uplift provided the context for Micheaux's extensive commentary on racist cinema, such as D. W. Griffith's 1915 blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation, which Micheaux "answered" with his very early films Within Our Gates and Symbol of the Unconquered. Uplift explains Micheaux's use of "negative images" of African Americans as well as his multi-pronged campaign against stereotype and caricature in American culture. His campaign produced a body of films saturated with a nuanced intertexual "signifying," boldly and repeatedly treating controversial topics that face white censorship time after time, topics ranging from white mob and Klan violence to light-skin-color fetish to white financing of black cultural productions.

Strangers Within Our Gates

Strangers Within Our Gates
Author: Young People's Forward Movement
Publisher: Franklin Classics
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2018-10-13
Genre:
ISBN: 9780342713882

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Writing Himself Into History

Writing Himself Into History
Author: Pearl Bowser
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2000
Genre: African American motion picture producers and directors
ISBN: 9780813528021

Bowser (specialist in African and African American film) and Louise Spence (media studies, Sacred Heart U.) define and describe the audiences for black films while examining African American film director Micheaux's unique vision and contribution as an artist and novelist and its relation to his work as a filmmaker. With a focus on the first decade of his career, they place his work firmly within his social and cultural milieu, and examine his family background and life experience. They also provide a close textual analysis of his surviving silent films and highlight the rivalry between production companies, dilemmas of assimilation versus a separate cultural identity, and gender and class issues. Contains several b&w photographs.Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Stony the Road

Stony the Road
Author: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0525559558

“Stony the Road presents a bracing alternative to Trump-era white nationalism. . . . In our current politics we recognize African-American history—the spot under our country’s rug where the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept. Stony the Road lifts the rug." —Nell Irvin Painter, New York Times Book Review A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, by the bestselling author of The Black Church and The Black Box. The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked "a new birth of freedom" in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the "nadir" of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance. Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans. Bringing a lifetime of wisdom to bear as a scholar, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a "New Negro" to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to America as it hurtled toward the modern age. The story Gates tells begins with great hope, with the Emancipation Proclamation, Union victory, and the liberation of nearly 4 million enslaved African-Americans. Until 1877, the federal government, goaded by the activism of Frederick Douglass and many others, tried at various turns to sustain their new rights. But the terror unleashed by white paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and a loss of Northern will, restored "home rule" to the South. The retreat from Reconstruction was followed by one of the most violent periods in our history, with thousands of black people murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation. An essential tour through one of America's fundamental historical tragedies, Stony the Road is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells fought to create a counter-narrative, and culture, inside the lion's mouth. As sobering as this tale is, it also has within it the inspiration that comes with encountering the hopes our ancestors advanced against the longest odds.