Search Term: african american national biography

Cape Verdean music and musicians

By Terza S. Lima-Neves
For a relatively unknown small island nation in West Africa with a population of half a million people, Cape Verde enjoys a rich and lively music scene. This archipelago of ten islands and former Portuguese colony is a nation historically affected by drought and famine, leading to a very sizable global immigrant community. Many of Cape Verde’s musicians either live abroad or were born in countries such as Portugal or the United States, the host country of the largest community of Cape Verdeans outside of Cape Verde.

Opposing narratives of success in politics

Stephanie Li
While our presidential candidates are known far in advance of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, party conventions remain intriguing spectacles for the kind of human detail they offer about the men who aspire to the Oval Office. Every four years pundits and political commentators observe that conventions have become increasingly scripted affairs that lack the spontaneity of times past, but party conventions serve to present individual narratives as much as specific policy positions.

The Oxford Companion to the London 2012 Opening Ceremony

By Alice Northover

Many questioned how the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games Opening Ceremony was going to make a mark after the spectacular Beijing Olympics only four years earlier. While Beijing presented the Chinese people moving as one body — dancing, marching, and presenting a united front to the world — the British answer was a chaotic and spirited ceremony, shifting from cricket matches to coordinated dance routines, Mr Bean’s comedic dream to a 100-foot Lord Voldemort.

Writing and recording with scrapbooks

By Ellen Gruber Garvey
May 5 is National Scrapbooking Day. Like National Fig Newton Day or National Golf Month, its purpose is mainly commercial. It was unsurprisingly started by an album company. Scrapbook making is hugely popular and profitable. Stores that sell scrapbooking supplies use the day to sponsor scrapping gatherings or crops where scrapbookers — nearly all women — get together to spread their projects out at tables with equipment for diecutting, embossing, distressing paper to make it look old, and sharing tips about layout and technique as they paste family pictures and memorabilia into their scrapbooks.

“The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Tweet Today is the 55th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ infamous stand sit during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Her daring refusal to move to the back of the bus was not a decision made lightly because she was simply “too tired.” “The only tired I was,” Parks wrote in Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), “was tired […]

Suffering for Suffrage, 90 Years Since

I have a younger brother, so as a little girl, I was the boss. The authority I exerted was based on age and size, so it never occurred to me that gender could be an influencing factor. I think it was actually School House Rock or Mary Poppins that taught me women had to fight […]

Mark Twain and World Literature

Shelley Fisher Fishkin looks at the international impact of Mark Twain in honor the centennial of Twain’s death, the 175th anniversary of his birth, and the 125th anniversary of the U.S. publication of his most celebrated book.

“I am Tarzan, King of the Apes, mighty hunter, mighty fighter”

Jason Haslam on the Tarzan as cultural icon.