Dan Burley's Jive

Dan Burley's Jive
Author: Dan Burley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN:

Dan Burley's Original Handbook of Harlem Jive (1944) includes a history of and definition for jive, followed by examples of folktales, poetry, and Shakespeare "translated" into jive, as well as a jive glossary for easy reference. Diggeth Thou? (1959) includes more stories told in jive.

Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance

Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance
Author: Steven C. Tracy
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 538
Release: 2011-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0252093429

Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance comprehensively explores the contours and content of the Black Chicago Renaissance, a creative movement that emerged from the crucible of rigid segregation in Chicago's "Black Belt" from the 1930s through the 1960s. Heavily influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago Renaissance of white writers, its participants were invested in political activism and social change as much as literature, art, and aesthetics. The revolutionary writing of this era produced some of the first great accolades for African American literature and set up much of the important writing that came to fruition in the Black Arts Movement. The volume covers a vast collection of subjects, including many important writers such as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry as well as cultural products such as black newspapers, music, and theater. The book includes individual entries by experts on each subject; a discography and filmography that highlight important writers, musicians, films, and cultural presentations; and an introduction that relates the Harlem Renaissance, the White Chicago Renaissance, the Black Chicago Renaissance, and the Black Arts Movement. Contributors are Robert Butler, Robert H. Cataliotti, Maryemma Graham, James C. Hall, James L. Hill, Michael Hill, Lovalerie King, Lawrence Jackson, Angelene Jamison-Hall, Keith Leonard, Lisbeth Lipari, Bill V. Mullen, Patrick Naick, William R. Nash, Charlene Regester, Kimberly Ruffin, Elizabeth Schultz, Joyce Hope Scott, James Smethurst, Kimberly M. Stanley, Kathryn Waddell Takara, Steven C. Tracy, Zoe Trodd, Alan Wald, Jamal Eric Watson, Donyel Hobbs Williams, Stephen Caldwell Wright, and Richard Yarborough.

Womb of Monsters

Womb of Monsters
Author: Thomas Aiello
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2001-11-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0595206654

In the late sixties, a rogue psychiatrist created a gated community of mental patients called Yesterday, utilizing some revolutionary mental health techniques. When Orson Littlefield is sent to the Yesterday mental facility, he is introduced to a new medication that makes his delusions come to life. His next door neighbor, who is actually just another part of his delusion, becomes enraged when Orson kicks yet another figment of his imagination into her yard. She then promptly murders him with a nuclear warhead. Meanwhile, the antichrist, a Louisiana bunny rabbit, rises to power and seduces the world. One testament later, a high school football star takes on the persona of savior for a sports starved small town. His life is naturally replete with miracles, disciples, a donkey, and plenty of sex. Interspersed throughout are the author’s own attempts to come to terms with the fact that all the characters in his story are just figments of his imagination. Newspapers come to life, girlfriends evaporate, and various characters throughout are stricken with stigmata. A social commentary, religious satire, and absurdist comedy that examines the fine line between imagination and reality: come look inside the womb of monsters.

Bayou Classic

Bayou Classic
Author: Thomas Aiello
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2010-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807138029

The annual clash in New Orleans between the Grambling State University Tigers and the Southern University Jaguars represents the fiercest and most anticipated in-state football rivalry in Louisiana. The most significant national game to feature historically black colleges and universities is more than a contest; the Bayou Classic is a lavish event, featuring celebrities, a fan festival, and a halftime "Battle of the Bands" that offers an intensity equal to that of the gridiron. In Bayou Classic, Thomas Aiello chronicles the history of the game and explores the two schools' broader significance to Louisiana, to sports, and to the black community. When the Southern University Bushmen football team traveled to Monroe, Louisiana, to play the Tigers of Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute for the first time on Armistice Day, 1932, few realized they were witnessing the birth of a phenomenon. Aiello recounts Southern's early dominance over the smaller, two-year institution; Southern's acceptance into the Southwestern Athletic Conference; Grambling's hiring of the legendary Eddie Robinson, who would lead the Tigers to 408 wins between 1941 and 1997; Grambling's first victory over Southern; and years of alternating home and away games. In 1974, the rivalry found a neutral site in New Orleans -- first at Tulane Stadium and then the Superdome -- and became the "Bayou Classic." An NBC television contract introduced the Bayou Classic to a nationwide audience and completed the transformation of the game into a major event. The Bayou Classic remains the only nationally broadcast game between two historically black schools. Aiello supplements his colorful narrative with period photographs and informative appendices providing game results, statistics, and all-star teams from every year the schools have played. "To appreciate the rivalry," Coach Eddie Robinson once noted, "you have to realize Grambling and Southern fans are close friends, as well as relatives." Bayou Classic offers a splendid history for fans, friends, and those who want to know more about this special game.

The Devil's Messages

The Devil's Messages
Author: Thomas Aiello
Publisher: Cognella Academic Publishing
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2013-01-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781621315650

This book is a collection of essays that examines instances of definitional difference, of contested meaning. Each essay is exemplary of historical points where disagreements over language create contested space.

Model Airplanes are Decadent and Depraved

Model Airplanes are Decadent and Depraved
Author: Thomas Aiello
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2015-08-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1609091787

Model Airplanes are Decadent and Depraved tells the story of the American glue-sniffing epidemic of the 1960s, from the first reports of use to the unsuccessful crusade for federal legislation in the early 1970s. The human obsession with inhalation for intoxication has deep roots, from the oracle at Delphi to Judaic biblical ritual. The discovery of nitrous oxide, ether, and chloroform in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the later development of paint thinners, varnishes, lighter fluid, polishes, and dry-cleaning supplies provided a variety of publicly available products with organic solvents that could be inhaled for some range of hallucinogenic or intoxicating effect. Model airplane glue was one of those products, but did not appear in warnings until the first reports of problematic behavior appeared in 1959, when children in several western cities were arrested for delinquency after huffing glue. Newspaper coverage both provided the initial shot across the bow for research into the subject and convinced children to give it a try. This "epidemic" quickly spread throughout the nation and the world. Though the hobby industry began putting an irritant in its model glue products in 1969 to make them less desirable to sniff, that wasn't what stopped the epidemic. Just as quickly as it erupted, the epidemic stopped when the media coverage and public hysteria stopped, making it one of the most unique epidemics in American history. The nation's focus drifted from adolescent glue sniffing to the countercultural student movement, with its attendant devotion to drug use, opposition to the Vietnam War, southern race policies, and anti-bureaucracy in general. This movement came to embody a tumultuous era fraught with violence, civil disobedience, and massive sea changes in American life and law—glue sniffing faded by comparison.

Paul Morphy

Paul Morphy
Author: David Lawson
Publisher: University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2010
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 9781887366977

"Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess" is the only full-length biography of Paul Morphy, the antebellum chess prodigy who launched United States participation in international chess and is still generally acknowledged as the greatest American chess player of all time. But Morphy was more than a player. He was a shy, retiring lawyer who had been taught that such games were no way to make a living. The strain of his fame and the pull of his domineering family led Morphy to set another precedent: chess madness. Morphy's mental descent after retiring from chess became a part of his lore, made all the more magnanimous by a spate of twentieth-century examples. "The Pride and Sorrow of Chess" tells the full known story of the life of Paul Morphy, from his privileged upbrining in New Orleans to his dominance of the chess world, to the later tragedy of his demise. This new edition of David Lawson's seminal work, still the principal source for all Morphy biographical presentations, also includes new biographical material about the biographer himself, telling the story of the author, his opus, and the previously unknown life that brought him to the research.

Saint Norman

Saint Norman
Author: Thomas Aiello
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2002
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0595258522

Ruth Messier had been sitting in a special care hospital strapped to a chair for twenty-five years. She couldn't see or hear. She couldn't smell or taste or feel. She had no arms and no legs. Ruth Messier was a bowling ball. Unbeknownst to the torso, a gun-toting teenager killed fourteen patrons of the Thrifty Mart, a gas station just across the street from Ruth's special care hospital. At the same time, a woman ran out on her alcoholic boyfriend and their two cats. Enter Saint Norman, the patron saint of bowling balls. Saint Norman, looking down on the Lanes of Life from his snack bar in the sky. From the author of Womb of Monsters comes a hilarious satirical novel where saints play poker, trees are used to communicate with the dead, and nurses have ninja ability. In this new work, Thomas Aiello takes on religious dogma, the judicial system, and the media as events quickly spiral to a dramatic conclusion. Saint Norman is tragicomedy at its finest.

Affect and Power

Affect and Power
Author: David J. Libby
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2009-09-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1604730625

In 1968, Winthrop D. Jordan published his groundbreaking work White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 and opened up new avenues for thinking about sex, slavery, race, and religion in American culture. Over the course of a forty-year career at the University of California and the University of Mississippi, he continued to write about these issues and to train others to think in new ways about interactions of race, gender, faith, and power. Written by former students of Jordan, these essays are a tribute to the career of one of America's great thinkers and perhaps the most influential American historian of his generation. The book visits historical locales from Puritan New England and French Louisiana to nineteenth-century New York and Mississippi, all the way to Harlem swing clubs and college campuses in the twentieth century. In the process, authors listen to the voices of abolitionists and white supremacists, preachers and politicos, white farm women and black sorority sisters, slaves, and jazz musicians. Each essay represents an important contribution to the collection's larger themes and at the same time illustrates the impact Jordan exerted on the scholarly life of each author. Collectively, these pieces demonstrate the attentiveness to detail and sensitivity to sources that are hallmarks of Jordan's own work.