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1729 - first recorded date. most popular type by late 1700s. typical 18th cent. concert.
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The Harlem Renaissance was an African American cultural movement that flourished in the 1920s and had Harlem in New York City as its symbolic capital. It was a time of great creativity in musical, theatrical, and visual arts but was perhaps most associated with literature; it is considered the most influential period in African American literary history. The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic flowering of the “New Negro” movement as its participants celebrated their African heritage and embraced self-expression, rejecting long-standing—and often degrading—stereotypes.
Read more below: Black heritage and American culture
Harlem
Read more about this historic New York neighborhood.
African American literature
Trace the development of African American literature.
The Harlem Renaissance was a phase of a larger New Negro movement that had emerged in the early 20th century and in some ways ushered in the civil rights movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The social foundations of this movement included the Great Migration of African Americans from rural to urban spaces and from South to North; dramatically rising levels of literacy; the creation of national organizations dedicated to pressing African American civil rights, “uplifting” the race, and opening socioeconomic opportunities; and developing race pride, including pan-African sensibilities and programs. Black exiles and expatriates from the Caribbean and Africa crossed paths in metropoles such as New York City and Paris after World War I and had an invigorating influence on each other that gave the broader “Negro renaissance” (as it was then known) a profoundly important international cast.
(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on "Monuments of Hope.")
Britannica Quiz
Art of the Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance is unusual among literary and artistic movements for its close relationship to civil rights and reform organizations. Crucial to the movement were magazines such as The Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Opportunity, published by the National Urban League; and The Messenger, a socialist journal eventually connected with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a Black labour union. Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, also played a role, but few of the major authors or artists identified with Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement, even if they contributed to the paper.
The renaissance had many sources in Black culture, primarily of the United States and the Caribbean, and manifested itself well beyond Harlem. As its symbolic capital, Harlem was a catalyst for artistic experimentation and a highly popular nightlife destination. Its location in the communications capital of North America helped give the “New Negroes” visibility and opportunities for publication not evident elsewhere. Located just north of Central Park, Harlem was a formerly white residential district that by the early 1920s was becoming virtually a Black city within the borough of Manhattan. Other boroughs of New York City were also home to people now identified with the renaissance, but they often crossed paths in Harlem or went to special events at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Black intellectuals from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other cities (where they had their own intellectual circles, theatres, and reading groups) also met in Harlem or settled there. New York City had an extraordinarily diverse and decentred Black social world in which no one group could monopolize cultural authority. As a result, it was a particularly fertile place for cultural experimentation.
Oct 29, 2009 · Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art. Great Migration
Feb 24, 2022 · Harlem’s growth into a cultural center was spurred by the Great Migration—a decades-long exodus of Black Southerners to northern metropolises that began around 1915.
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Native peoples had lived in the Americas for well over ten thousand years by the time Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492. Spread across a variety of ecosystems from Canada to South America, they spoke hundreds of different languages. Their societies ranged from small agricultural villages and hunting camps to large urban centers ...
