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By Max Saunders

One definition of a classic book is a work which inspires repeated metamorphoses. Romeo and Juliet, Gulliver’s Travels, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Great Gatsby don’t just wait in their original forms to be watched or read, but continually migrate from one medium to another: painting, opera, melodrama, dramatization, film, comic-strip. New technologies inspire further reincarnations. Sometimes it’s a matter of transferring a version from one medium to another — audio recordings to digital files, say. More often, different technologies and different markets encourage new realisations: Hitchcock’s Psycho re-shot in colour; French or German films remade for American audiences; widescreen or 3D remakes of classic movies or stories.

Cinema is notoriously hungry for adaptations of literary works. The adaptation that’s been preoccupying me lately is the BBC/HBO version of Parade’s End, the series of four novels about the Edwardian era and the First World War, written by Ford Madox Ford. Ford was British, but an unusually cosmopolitan and bohemian kind of Brit. His father was a German émigré, a musicologist who ended up as music critic for the London Times. His mother was an artist, the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. Ford was educated trilingually, in French and German as well as English. When he was introduced to Joseph Conrad at the turn of the century, they decided to collaborate on a novel, and went on over a decade to produce three collaborative books. He also got to know Henry James and Stephen Crane at this time — the two Americans were also living nearby, on the Southeast coast of England. Americans were to prove increasingly important in Ford’s life. He moved to London in 1907, and soon set up the literary magazine that helped define pre-war modernism: the English Review. He had a gift for discovering new talent, and was soon publishing D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis alongside James and Conrad. But it was Ezra Pound, who he also met and published at this time, who was to become his most important literary friend after Conrad.

Ford served in the First World War, getting injured and suffering from shell shock in the Battle of the Somme. He moved to France after the war, where he soon joined forces with Pound again, to form another influential modernist magazine, the transatlantic review, which published Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys. Ford took on another young American, Ernest Hemingway, as his sub-editor. Ford held regular soirees, either in a working class dance-hall with a bar that he’d commandeered, or in the studio he lived in with his partner, the Australian painter Stella Bowen. He found himself at the centre of the (largely American) expatriate artist community in the Paris of the 20s. And it was there, and in Provence in the winters, and partly in New York, that he wrote the four novels of Parade’s End, that made him a celebrity in the US. He spent an increasing amount of time in the US through the 20s and 30s, based on Fifth Avenue in New York, becoming a writer in residence in the small liberal arts Olivet College in Michigan, spending time with writer-friends like Theodore Dreiser and William Carlos Williams, and among the younger generation, Robert Lowell and e. e. cummings.

Parade’s End (1924-28) has been dramatized for TV by Sir Tom Stoppard. It has to be one of the most challenging books to film; but Stoppard has the theatrical ingenuity, and experience, to bring it off. It’s a classic work of Modernism: with a non-linear time-scheme that can jump around in disconcerting ways; dense experimental writing that plays with styles and techniques. Though it includes some of the most brilliant conversations in the British novel, and its characters have a strong dramatic presence, much of it is inherently un-dramatic and, you might have thought, unfilmable: long interior monologues, descriptions of what characters see and feel; and — perhaps hardest of all to convey in drama — moments when they don’t say what they feel, or do what we might expect of them. Imagine T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, populated by Chekhovian characters, but set on the Western Front.

I’ve worked on Ford for some years, yet still find him engaging, tantalising, often incomprehensibly rewarding, so I was watching Parade’s End with fascination. [Warning: Spoilers ahead.]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stoppard and the director, Susanna White, have done an extraordinary job in transforming this rich and complex text into a dramatic line that is at once lucid and moving. Sometimes where Ford just mentions an event in passing, the adaptation dramatizes the scene for us. The protagonist is Christopher Tietjens, a man of high-Tory principle — a paradoxical mix of extreme formality and unconventional intelligence – is played outstandingly by Benedict Cumberbatch, with a rare gift to convey thought behind Tietjens’ taciturn exterior. In the novel’s backstory, Christopher has been seduced in a railway carriage by Sylvia, who thinks she’s pregnant by another man. The TV version adds a conversation as they meet in the train; then cuts rapidly to a sex scene. It’s more than just a hook for viewers unconcerned about textual fidelity, though. What it establishes is what Ford only hints at through the novel, and what would be missed without Tietjen’s brooding thoughts about Sylvia: that her outrageousness turns him on as much as it torments him. In another example, where the novelist can describe the gossip circulating like wildfire in this select upper-class social world, the dramatist needs to give it a location; so Stoppard invents a scene at an Eton cricket match for several of the characters to meet, and insult Valentine Wannop, while she and Tietjens are trying not to have the affair that everyone assumes they are already having. Valentine is an ardent suffragette. In the novel, she and Tietjens argue about women and politics and education. Stoppard introduces a real historical event from the period — a Suffragette slashing Velasquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’ in the National Gallery — as a way of saying it visually; and then complicating it beautifully with another intensely visual interpolated moment. In the book Ford has Valentine unconcsciously rearranging the cushions on her sofa as she waits to see Tietjens the evening before he’s posted back to the war. When she becomes aware that she’s fiddling with the cushions because she’s anticipating a love-scene with him, the adaptation disconcertingly places Valentine nude on her sofa in the same position as the ‘Rokeby Venus’ — in a flash both sexualizing her politics and politicizing her sexuality.

Such changes cause a double-take in viewers who know the novels. But they’re never gratuitous, and always respond to something genuine in the writing.

Perhaps the most striking transformation comes during one of the most amazing moments in the second volume, No More Parades. Tietjens is back in France, stationed at a Base Camp in Rouen, struggling against the military bureaucracy to get drafts of troops ready to be sent to the Front Line. Sylvia, who can’t help loving Tietjens though he drives her mad, has somehow managed to get across the Channel and pursue him to his Regiment. She has been unfaithful, and he is determined not to sleep with her; but because his principles won’t let a man divorce a woman, he feels obliged to share her hotel room so as not to humiliate her publicly. She is determined to seduce him once more; but has been flirting with other officers in the hotel, two of whom also end up in their bedroom in a drunken brawl. It’s an extraordinary moment of frustration, hysteria, terror (there has been a bombardment that evening), confusion, and farce. In the book we sense Sylvia’s seductive power, and that Tietjens isn’t immune to it, even though by then in love with Valentine. He resists. But in the film version, they kiss passionately before being interrupted.

Valentine and Christopher. Adelaide Clemens and Benedict Cumberbatch in Parade’s End. (c) BBC/HBO.

The scene may have been changed to emphasize the power she still has over Tietjens: as if, paradoxically, he needs to be seen to succumb for a moment to make his resistance to her the more heroic. The change that’s going to exercise enthusiasts of the novels, though, is the way three of the five episodes were devoted to the first novel, Some Do Not…; and roughly one each to the second and third; with very little of the fourth volume, Last Post, being included at all. The third volume, A Man Could Stand Up — ends where the adaptation does, with Christopher and Valentine finally being united on Armistice night, a suitably dramatic and symbolic as well as romantic climax. Last Post is set in the 1920s and deals with post-war reconstruction. One can see why it would have been the hardest to film: much of it is interior monologue, and though Tietjens is often the subject of it he is absent for most of the book. Some crucial scenes from the action of the earlier books is only supplied as characters remember them in Last Post, such as when Syliva turns up after the Armistice night party lying to Christopher and Valentine that  she has cancer in an attempt to frustrate their union. Stoppard incorporates this into the last episode, but he writes new dialogue for it to give it a kind of closure the novels studiedly resist. Valentine challenges her as a liar, and from Tietjens’ reaction, Sylvia appears to recognize the reality of his love for her and gives her their blessing.

Rebecca Hall, playing Sylvia, has been so brilliantly and scathingly sarcastic all the way through that this change of heart — moving though it is — might seem out of character: even the character the film gives her, which is arguably more sympathetic than the one most readers find in the novel. Yet her reversal is in Last Post. But what triggers it there, much later on, is when she confronts Valentine but finds her pregnant. Even the genius of Tom Stoppard couldn’t make that happen before Valentine and Christopher have been able to make love. But there are two other factors, which he was able to shift from the post-war time of Last Post into the war’s endgame of the last episode. One is that Sylvia has focused her plotting on a new object. Refusing the role of the abandoned wife of Tietjens, she has now set her sights on General Campion, and begun scheming to get him made Viceroy of India. The other is that she feels she has already dealt Tietjens a devastating blow, in getting the ‘Great Tree’ at his ancestral stately home of Groby cut down. In the book she does this after the war by encouraging the American who’s leasing it to get it felled. In the film she’s done it before the Armistice; she’s at Groby; Tietjens visits there; has a Stoppard scene with Sylvia arranged in her bed like a Pre-Raphaelite vision in a last attempt to re-seduce him, which fails partly because of his anger over the tree. In the books the Great Tree represents the Tietjens family, continuity, even history itself. Ford writes a sentence about how the villagers “would ask permission to hang rags and things from the boughs,” but Stoppard and White make that image of the tree, all decorated with trinkets and charms, a much more prominent motif, returning to it throughout the series, and turning it into a symbol of superstition and magic. But then Stoppard characteristically plays on the motif, and has Christopher take a couple of blocks of wood from the felled tree back to London. One he gives to his brother, in a wonderfully tangible and taciturn gesture of renouncing the whole estate and the history it stands for. The other he uses in his flat, throwing whisky over it in the fireplace to light a fire to keep himself and Valentine warm. That gesture shows how it isn’t just Sylvia who is saying ‘Goodbye to All That’, but all the major characters are anticipating the life that, though the series doesn’t show it, Ford presents in the beautifully elegiac Last Post.

Max Saunders is author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (OUP, 1996/2012), and editor of Some Do Not . . ., the first volume of Ford’s Parade’s End (Manchester: Carcanet, 2010) and Ford’s The Good Soldier (Oxford: OUP, 2012). He was interviewed by Alan Yentob for the Culture Show’s ‘Who on Earth was Ford Madox Ford’ (BBC 2; 1 September 2012), and his blog on Ford’s life and work can be read on the OUPblog and New Statesman.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credits: (1) Portrait of Ford Madox Ford (Source: Wikimedia Commons); (2) Still from BBC2 adaption of Parade’s End. (Source: bbc.co.uk).

The post Ford Madox Ford and unfilmable Modernism appeared first on OUPblog.

By Finn Fordham

Joyce was obsessed with birthdays.  Today, February 2^nd, is his. An emerging secular saint’s day, it will be remembered and alluded to round the world – especially in Dublin — in the corners of newspapers and pubs, in blogs (like this one), tweets and the odd talk. Born in 1882, Joyce’s cake — if he could have one, let alone eat it — would have a hundred and thirty one candles; a hundred years ago, therefore, he would have been celebrating his 31^st birthday. The image of candles is suitable, since Joyce’s birthday fell on ‘Candlemas’, a holy day which commemorates Christ’s first appearance in a synagogue with his mother, forty days after his birth, in part by the lighting of candles. Mary was following the Mosaic law which says that, after giving birth, a mother is not clean for forty days, at which point she is to be purified through sacrifice. 

‘Celebrating’, however, might be too strong a word: in 1913, Joyce was, artistically, in something of a lull, and life might well have been frustrating. He was teaching English in Trieste, with two small children, aged 5 and 7. He was struggling to get Dubliners past timid publishers and printers; A Portrait…, begun some nine years before, was unfinished; Ulysses was not yet begun. He was writing the odd bit of journalism, but the high artistic ambitions he had cherished as a young man had taken a battering. He’d spent his twenty-first in Paris, receiving a letter written by his father John Joyce, which he would carefully keep wherever he went:

My dear Jim, May I be permitted to offer you my best wishes for your future which I, at one time, fancied may have been more rosey on your attaining your majority [i.e becoming 21]… I hope you will beleive [sic] me that I am only now, under I may tell you, very trying times, endeavouring to do my little best, but Jim you are my eldest Son I have always looked up to your being a fitting representative of our family one that my father would be proud of. I now only hope that you may carry out his ideas through your life and if you do, you may be sure you will not do anything unbecoming a gentleman.

John Joyce, here and in general, was, like Simon Dedalus in Ulysses, strong and open in his expression of emotion. He is not the stereotypical cold and detached Victorian father. On the other hand, the complexity of his warmth borders on ambiguity, and its intensity must have brought some pressure to the young and, by all accounts, lonely Joyce: the father feels responsible for failing his son, but implies that his son was failing, or in danger of doing so; he seeks forgiveness while sending his son on a guilt trip; he says he looks up to him, while also establishing a role model in his own father, thus reaffirming the patriarchal hierarchy of genealogy. Self-pityingly unable to help materially, he adopts the role of civic mentor — urging him to behave like a gentleman, as Polonius did to Laertes when the latter was about to go to Paris (and its fleshpots).  Larkin’s term for such ambivalence was ‘sloppy-stern’.

Birthdays may be a universal convention, but they are not universally liked.  One pressure that birthdays bring is the inevitability, almost the duty, of self-reflection — a pressure which the Joyces, father and son, must have been aware of in 1903. The attention of others — fathers, mothers, friends, colleagues, wishing us well, presenting a gift, raising a glass — may exacerbate processes of self-examination and even pernicious comparison. Relative to where we were, or where we hoped to be, relative to our peers, or where our role models once were — where have we got to, or to what have we sunk?  Birthdays are ciphers that multiply whatever condition we’re in. The potential trauma of birthdays repeats, perhaps compulsively, the trauma of the day of birth. The twitching nervous checking during labour of the condition of mother and child – how are they doing, what are their heart rates? — becomes a twitching nervous checking on birthdays of whether one has yet become oneself.

For an ambitious person, for someone intent on establishing a mythology of themselves, for someone superstitious, birthdays, especially their own, and other anniversaries are crucial. And so they were for Joyce, for these very reasons. He habitually made awkward deadlines for himself and his publishers, by wanting his books to appear on his birthday or, failing that, his father’s. The day on which Ulysses is set (itself the day of the troubled birth, though fictional, of Mortimer Edward Purefoy), is supposed to be the day of Joyce’s first date with Nora Barnacle, though their encounter is not in fact recorded in the fiction.

Through the cyclical repetition of dates, days become haunted, charged with the meaning of the events of the past, implicit in their dates: Armistice Day, Guy Fawkes, the Battle of the Boyne. The different calendars of the global village, now shared in multi-cultural societies, show the space of the year as an environment that is densely built up with official anniversaries which are the signs and the foundations of institutions, of nations, states, religions, organisations, movements.

Anniversaries seem inevitable because of the cycle of the year, but they are not guaranteed: different anniversaries can coincide on the same day, so that one feast day ousts another; secular festivals push out saints’ days. Joyce cheekily engineered such a coincidence in the birthday of Molly Bloom, which was September the 8^th, the same day as the Virgin Mary’s birthday. Joyce’s love of birthdays is in part a wish to appropriate this map, a symptom of an eternal struggle he identified between the individual and society: ‘the state is concentric; man is concentric. Thence arise an eternal struggle.’

We have a Bloomsday, on which the institution of Joyce studies (and Joycolatry) are built. But there is no Wake-day: Finnegans Wake does not seem to happen on a single day, though for one critic it is a dream dreamt on 28 March 1938. For others the events of the Wake happen everyday and anyday. Unlike Ulysses, it has not been so easily institutionalised. Either way, it is certainly worth celebrating and lighting candles for: and Joyce’s birthday is as good as any to do so.

Dr Finn Fordham is Reader in 20th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Along with Robbert-Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet, he has edited the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Finnegans Wake is a book that reinvents the novel and plays fantastic games with the language to tell the story of one man’s fall and resurrection; in the intimate drama of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and his wife Anna Livia, the character of Ireland itself takes form. Joyce called time and the river and the mountains the real heroes of his book, and its organic structure and extraordinary musicality embody his vision. It is both an outrageous epic and a wildly inventive comedy that rewards its readers with never-ending layers of meaning.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: By Paweł Cieśla Staszek_Szybki_Jest (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The post James Joyce and birthdays appeared first on OUPblog.

By Denis Sampson

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road.” It is one of the most celebrated of all fictional beginnings, evoking the essence and tradition of narrative itself, telling a first story to a child, and at the same time the beginning of a very sophisticated kind of biographical fiction, the childhood and youth of an artist. Joyce’s self-portrait in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man absorbed and reinforced a Romantic tradition that assumes the artist’s life is determined by childhood and inevitably grows out of those earliest experiences. It was Baudelaire who proclaimed that “genius is the power to recover childhood” so it is hardly surprising that the shape of the artist’s life is so often set down chronologically, as if it is uniquely and inescapably defined by its starting point and its familial contexts.

Literary biographers, and often the memoirs of artists, have usually reinforced this pattern. Richard Ellmann begins his justly acclaimed biography of Joyce with a chapter entitled “The Family Before Joyce” and comments: “Stephen Dedalus said the family was a net which he would fly past, but James Joyce chose rather to entangle himself and his works in it.” Ellmann takes his cue, then, from Joyce, but it is not only Romantic paradigms and the artists themselves that influenced the shape of literary biography in the twentieth century; perhaps even more important were psychological paradigms, and the idea that biography is a branch of history played a part.

At any rate, common sense seems to endorse this way of beginning and contributes to the expectation that a biography should begin at birth and also sketch the genetic or historical inheritance. We observe people around us growing into adulthood and away from or towards the patterns of behaviour they have known in their childhood.  Recollection is always affecting, especially childhood memories, in conversation or in reading. Yet it is selective recollection, and we do not really remember chronologically.In the second half of a lifespan, especially, as we move further away from childhood and may no longer have parents alive, we become aware of many other ways of finding order in a life. We realize, for instance, that there are many beginnings and endings, or phases that seem to break away from, or repeat, earlier patterns.

If we ask when a writing life begins, it may make more sense to focus less on chronology or childhood and more on the moment that allows us to map the beginning of significant accomplishment. For instance, both Proust and Beckett spent fifteen years dithering before they really began the work on which their fame rests; the work that came before would be forgotten without that new beginning. It was in 1909, when Proust composed the essays in Contre Sainte Beuve, that he really discovered the focus and energy that allowed him to begin A la recherche du temps perdu. The five years that followed the end of World War II gave Beckett The Trilogy, Waiting for Godot, and other work of a new stylistic beginning. It might even be said that he began again about the age of forty and that this was the true beginning of his work. Conrad’s decision to write in English may be the decisive moment in his career.

In the end, and in the beginning, it is how people gather tog

Can anyone truly doubt that had the technology existed, James Joyce would have written Ulysses as an illustrated web comic?

Megan Branch, Intern

Operas are always full of intrigue, suspense, drama, romance—and characters with really great names like Figaro, Egisto, and Gorislava. In Who Married Figaro? A Book of Opera Characters, Joyce Bourne, co-author of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, has written over 2,500 entries about the people behind all of those funny-sounding names. Yesterday, we posted a quiz about some of opera’s figures. The answers are below. How did you do?

1. Concepción,from Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole, would invite her lovers over while Torquemada was out of the house and suggest that “they hide in large clocks and when he finds them she passes them off as customers.”

2. Erda, featured in the Wagner operas Das Rheingold and Siegfried, was the mother of three Norns and nine Valkyries. “She rises from the earth only when she sees impending disaster.”

3. The Golden Cockerel from Rimsky-Korsakov’s play of the same name was only a fair-weather friend of the Tsar: the Cockerel “later pecks him on the head and kills him.”

4. Noye, from Noye’s Fludde, was the father of Sem, Ham, and Jaffett. Noye was told by God to “build an ark in which all his family and animals ride out the storm.” Noye’s Fludde also incorporates hymns sung by the audience.

5. Prunier “reads Magda’s hand and tells her that she may, like the swallow (la rondine) find a bright future, but there is also tragedy in store. Prunier is secretly in love with Magda’s maid Lisette.

6. Sportin’ Life sold dope to Bess “and, under its influence, she leaves for New York while Porgy is being questioned by the police.”

7. Tito Vespasiano,from La Clemenza di Tito, was “anxious that his people see him not as a dictator but as a clement ruler.”

8. Zoroastro “resolves the complications of the relationships between Orlando and his former love Angelica.”

9. Spalanzani invented the doll, Olympia, with whom Hoffmann later fell in love.

10. Nick Shadow from Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress took Tom Rakewell away from his fiancé, Anne, and led him “to a life of debauchery. When all Tom’s money is gone, they play cards” for Tom’s soul. Tom wins and “in anger Shadow condemns him to a life of insanity.”

Megan Branch, Intern

Operas are always full of intrigue, suspense, drama, romance—and characters with really great names like Figaro, Egisto, and Gorislava. In Who Married Figaro? A Book of Opera Characters, Joyce Bourne, co-author of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, has written over 2,500 entries about the people behind all of those funny-sounding names. Here’s a quiz about some of opera’s  figures. Go ahead and see if you can get all the answers right in the comments. Be sure to check back tomorrow for the answers.

1. The clockmaker’s wife hid her many lovers inside of clocks to conceal them from her husband, Torquemada.

2. This earth goddess, mother of twelve, only leaves the earth to deal with disaster.

3. This very special bird has the job of warning Tsar Dodon of enemies.

4. The title character from the Britten opera that incorporates an audience sing-along and a well-known story from the Bible.

5. This character, from Puccini’s La Rondine, was a palm reader in love with a maid.

6. Gershwin’s seller of ‘happy-dust’ in Porgy and Bess.

7. Mozart’s Roman emperor who didn’t want to seem like a dictator.

8. The magician who helped to smooth over relationship complications in Handel’s Orlando.

9. This inventor made the mechanical doll that Hoffmann fell in love with in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann.

10. This ‘shadowy’ character was the devil in disguise, stole a soul after a lost game of cards and his signature aria is “I burn! I freeze!”.

Two lovers of Joyce's brilliant Ulysses have taken chapter 10, "Wandering Rocks" and adapted it to Twitter. They chose the chapter because it follows 19 Dubliners going about their daily activities.

...have dubbed their performance "Twittering Rocks," a play on the chapter's title that could also mean Twittering is awesome. They have registered 54 of the novel's key characters as Twitter users, and Bogost built a software program that tweets their first-person utterances at the correct moments in the chapter.

Colin Grant is the son of Jamaican parents who moved to Britain in the late 1950s. He spent 5 years studying medicine before turning to the stage. He has written and produced numerous plays and is currently a producer for BBC Radio. In his new book, Negro with a a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey Grant looks at one of the most controversial figures in African-American history. Both worshiped and despised, Garvey led an extraordinary life as the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association which had branches in more than 40 countries. In honor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s birthday, which is tomorrow, Grant has taken a closer look at the relationship between Du Bois and Garvey.

A great excitement swirled around the garden reception for W.E.B Du Bois in the grounds of the royal governor of Jamaica’s official residence. On 3 May 1915, the island’s representative men assembled to honor the Harvard-educated African American, feted by the local papers as a scholar who certainly ‘belonged to the aristocracy of intellect in America’. A stocky dark-skinned black man was one of the last in line to extend a proud hand of welcome. Du Bois later recalled his ‘remarkable intensity’ but other than that, little impression was made on him by the man who was destined, over the next decade, to become his nemesis: Marcus Garvey. (more…)

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After a decade of work, on February 4th Oxford University Press and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute will publish the African American National Biography(AANB). The AANB is the largest repository of black life stories ever assembled with more than 4,000 biographies. To celebrate this monumental achievement we have invited the contributors to this 8 volume set to share some of their knowledge with the OUPBlog. Over the next couple of months we will have the honor of sharing their thoughts, reflections and opinions with you.

To kick things off we have AANB contributor Dr. Marybeth Gasman, an Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Gasman’s has published several books, including Charles S. Johnson: Leadership beyond the Veil in the Age of Jim Crow, Supporting Alma Mater: Successful Strategies for Securing Funds from Black College Alumni, and Uplifting a People: African American Philanthropy and Education. In addition to these works, Dr. Gasman recently finished a book entitled Envisioning Black Colleges: A History of the United Negro College Fund (Johns Hopkins University Press). Recently Dr. Gasman was awarded the Promising Scholar/Early Career Award by the Association for the Study of Higher Education for her body of scholarship.  In the article below Gasman looks at criticism of Historically Black Colleges.

Public discussions of Black colleges’ troubles are often distorted by the tendency to attribute one institution’s shortcomings to the entire group. Furthermore, I have noticed that critics often base their critique on anecdote rather than evidence. As someone who works with and studies Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) on a daily basis, I find this practice to be deeply troubling. Let me offer a few examples. (more…)

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David Domke is Professor of Communication and Head of Journalism at the University of Washington. Kevin Coe is a doctoral candidate in Speech Communication at the University of Illinois. They are authors of the The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. To learn more about the book check out their handy website here, to read more posts by them click here. Below Domke and Coe look at the effects of MLK’s legacy on the Democratic primaries.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day has now come and gone, but King’s presence is still being felt in the Democratic primary. (more…)

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Colin Grant is the son of Jamaican parents who moved to Britain in the late 1950s. He spent 5 years studying medicine before turning to the stage. He has written and produced numerous plays and is currently a producer for BBC Radio. In his new book, Negro with a a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey Grant looks at one of the most controversial figures in African-American history. Both worshiped and despised, Garvey led an extraordinary life as the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association which had branches in more than 40 countries. In the article below Grant looks at Garvey through a modern lens, comparing him to Barack Obama.

During an outbreak of the unique American pastime of lynching in the 1920s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sent for its secret weapon: Walter White. The NAACP operative was so fair-skinned that he could travel to the South incognito, infiltrate the lynch mobs and investigate their actions without fear of molestation or loss of life. Nonetheless, this unenviable task exacted a psychological toll on his delicate mind. In his later years, White would recall how petrified he was of being uncovered by hateful, bigoted Southerners who had refined their own pseudo-scientific tests for unmasking blacks ‘passing’ for whites. Caught in conversation with one such man, White was bid to hold out his hands so that his finger nails might be examined: ‘Now if you had nigger blood,’ said the smiling Southerner, ‘it would show here on your half-moons.’ Walter White survived the inquisition; his cuticles did not betray him.

In some regards, Barack Obama has pulled off a similar coup. (more…)

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Unfortunately for many, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is simply a day off. This day off though, celebrates one of the most important men in American history, and we thought we would take a moment on the OUPblog to recognize his achievements. In the post below we have excerpted President Lyndon B. Johnson speech which announced the death of MLK Jr. to the American public, from our online resource the African American Studies Center.

Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Chief Justice, my fellow Americans:

Once again, the heart of America is heavy—the spirit of America weeps—for a tragedy that denies the very meaning of our land.

The life of a man who symbolized the freedom and faith of America has been taken. But it is the fiber and the fabric of the Republic that is being tested. (more…)

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Dave Gelly, author of Being Prez: The Life and Music of Lester Young is the weekly jazz critic for The Observer and contributes to many other British periodicals. He was invested with the MBE by HM The Queen in 2005 and is also a professional saxophonist. In his book Gelly follows Lester Young through his life in a rapidly changing world, showing how the music of this exceptionally sensitive man was shaped by his experiences. Watch the clip below and then read Gelly’s explanation of why he picked it as emblematic of Young.

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Michael J. Klarman, won the Bancroft Prize in 2005 for From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement, is an abridged, paperback edition of his original masterpiece, which focuses around one major case, Brown v. Board of Education. In the original essay below Klarman, who is the James Monroe Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Virginia, explores political backlash.

While we ordinarily think of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) as contributing to the creation of the modern civil rights movement, Brown’s more immediate effect was to crystallize the resistance of southern whites to progressive racial change, radicalize southern politics, and create a climate ripe for violence. Indeed, prominent Court decisions interpreting the U.S. Constitution have often produced political backlashes that undermine the causes that the rulings seem to promote. (more…)

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Exciting news at OUP! James McPherson has won the The Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. The award recognizes and honors the lifetime contributions of a living author for a body of work dedicated to enriching the understanding of American military history including military affairs.

Echoing all of our feelings Niko Pfund, Vice President and Publisher, Oxford University Press said, “Oxford University Press warmly congratulates Jim McPherson on his receipt of the first Pritzker Military Library Lifetime Achievement in Military Literature Award. Few scholars more consistently combine first-rate scholarship with accessible historical writing, and few authors are more of a pleasure to publish. We are delighted that so richly deserving a writer and thinker has been chosen to inaugurate this prestigious award.”

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Mitch Kachun is Associate Professor of History at Western Michigan University. He recently edited, along with William L. Andrews, The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride. The Curse of Caste is the first novel ever published by a black American woman. Kachun, who also authored, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915, will speak at a Juneteenth celebration in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, on June 23, 2007.

I first learned about Juneteenth while I was in graduate school in the early 1990s. I had expressed to a fellow student my interest in researching the history of African American emancipation celebrations in the 19th century, and she said, “Oh, you mean like Juneteenth?” And I said, “Huh?”
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Nell Painter, author of Creating Black Americans: African-American History & Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present was a winner of the 22nd annual Myers Outstanding Book Awards, which recognize exemplary works that challenge social injustices, erase histories, and the pessimism that says change is impossible. Below is Painter’s acceptance letter.

This article first appeared in the Gustavus Myers Center’s Winter 2007 newsletter. (more…)

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James McCune Smith was one of the foremost black intellectuals in America, the first to receive a medical degree and the most educated African American before W. E. B. Du Bois. McCune Smith publicly advocated the use of “black” rather than “colored” as a self-description and he, like James Weldon Johnson and other successors, treated racial identities as social constructions and argued that American literature, music, and dance would be shaped and defined by blacks.

John Stauffer, the editor of The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist, has organized McCune Smith’s writings around genre and chronology. Stauffer, along with three other distinguished historians will discuss Smith’s life, work, and legacy at The New York Historical Society on Wednesday, April 18th at 6:30 pm. Below is a video from The Historical Society’s current exhibition “New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War.” The video is of letters written by McCune Smith read by the actor Danny Glover. (more…)

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