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Jazz (novel)

Jazz (novel)

Jazz is a novel by Toni Morrison set in 1926 in uptown Harlem. The book tells the story of Joe Trace, a door-to-door salesman of beauty products in his fifties, and how he murders his teenage lover, Dorcas. His wife, Violet, who is a hairdresser, then attempts to disfigure the body at the funeral. "Jazz is the story of a triangle of passion, jealousy, murder and redemption, of sex and spirituality, of slavery and liberation, of country and city, of being male and female, African American, and above all of being human. Like the music of its title, it is a dazzlingly lyric play on elemental themes, as soaring and daring as a Charlie Parker solo, as heartbreakingly powerful as the blues." (Back Cover) Category:American novels Category:1992 books

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison (born February 18, 1931) is one of the most prominent authors in world literature, having won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Through her writings and other works, Morrison was also instrumental in bringing recognition to the genre of African American literature. Several of her novels are included among the canon of American literature, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), and Song of Solomon. Her writings are known for dealing with epic themes, for Morrison's writing of dialogue, and for her detailed depictions of African Americans. In recent years, Morrison has published a number of children's books with her son, Slade Morrison. Beloved was adapted into the 1998 film Beloved by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions. Harpo Productions

Morrison's early years

Morrison was born as Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. Morrison was the second of four children in a working-class African American family. As a child Morrison read constantly (among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy). Morrison's father, George Wofford, a welder by trade, told her numerous folktales of the black community (a method of storytelling that would later work its way into Morrison's writings). In 1949 Morrison entered Howard University to study humanities. While there she changed her name from "Chloe" to "Toni," explaining that people found "Chloe" too difficult to pronounce. Morrison received a B.A. in English from Howard in 1953, then earned a Master of Arts degree from Cornell University in 1955.

Promoting black literature

After graduation, Morrison became an English instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas (from 1955-57) then returned to Howard to teach English. In 1958 she married Howard Morrison. They had two children and divorced in 1964. After the divorce she moved to Syracuse, New York, where she worked as a textbook editor. Eighteen months later she went to work as an editor at the New York City headquarters of Random House. As an editor Morrison played an important role in bringing African American literature into the mainstream. She edited books by such black authors as Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones. She also taught English at two branches of the State University of New York. In 1984 she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the State University of New York at Albany. Currently, Morrison is Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, a position she has held since 1989. At Princeton, she has conceived and developed the prestigious Princeton Atelier, a program that brings together talented students with critically acclaimed, world-famous artists. Together the students and the artists produce works of art that are presented to the public after a semester of collaboration. In her position at Princeton, Morrison uses her insights to encourage not merely new and emerging writers, but artists who are constantly trying to develop new forms of art through interdisciplinary play and cooperation.

Morrison's Novels

The Bluest Eye (1970)

Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, while raising two children and teaching at Howard University. The novel's protagonist is Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl who prays each night to become a blue-eyed beauty like Shirley Temple. Breedlove's family has numerous problems and she believes everything would be okay if only she had beautiful blue eyes. Through the course of the novel, the narrator, Claudia MacTeer, describes the destruction of Pecola's life. The novel is set in Lorain, Ohio, the town in which Morrison grew up. The novel is controversial not only in its subject matter, but also in its structure. In it, Morrison rejects a chronological structure and a single narrator, as she does in many of her works, in favour of a splintered and multifaceted approach.

Sula (1973)

Sula depicts two black woman friends and their community of Medallion, Ohio. It follows the lives of Sula, considered a threat against the community, and her cherished friend Nel, from their childhood to maturity and to death. The novel was nominated for the National Book Award.

Song of Solomon (1977)

Morrison's third novel, Song of Solomon, brought her national attention. The book was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club (the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1949). A family chronicle similar to Alex Haley's Roots, the novel follows the life of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, a black man living in an un named city in Michigan, from birth to adulthood. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Tar Baby (1981)

Tar Baby takes place at the Caribbean mansion of white millionaire Valerian Street and focuses on the themes of racial identity, sexuality, and family dynamics.

Beloved (1987)

Beloved is loosely based on the life and legal case of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave that killed her child to prevent the child from being taken back into slavery. The book's central figure is Sethe, an escaped slave that murdered her two-year-old daughter, Beloved, to save her from a life of slavery. The novel follows in the tradition of slave narratives but also confronts the more painful and taboo aspects of slavery, such as sexual abuse and violence. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. When the novel failed to win the National Book Award, a number of writers protested the omission. The novel was released in 1998 as the film Beloved starring Oprah Winfrey. Morrison later used Margaret Garner's life story again in the opera of the same name.

Jazz (1992)

Jazz is the story of love triangles and murder during the Jazz Age. The main character, Joe, kills someone in a fit of passion. The fragmented narrative follows the causes and consequences of the murder.

Paradise (1998)

Morrison's first novel since winning the Nobel Prize is set in Ruby, Oklahoma. The story revolves around an attack on a former girls' school nicknamed "the Convent," now occupied by unconventional women fleeing from abusive husbands and unhappy pasts. The attack comes from a nearby all-Black town populated by the descendants of freed slaves.

Love (2003)

Love is the story of Bill Cosey, a charismatic but dead hotel owner, and his widow and his granddaughter, who live in his mansion.

Politics

Morrison caused a stir when she called Bill Clinton "the first Black president", saying "Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas." She currently holds a place on the editorial board of The Nation magazine.

Works

Novels


- Love (2003)
- Paradise (1999)
- Jazz (1992)
- Beloved (1987)
- Tar Baby (1981)
- Song of Solomon (1977)
- Sula (1973)
- The Bluest Eye (1970)

Children's Literature (with Slade Morrison


- Who's Got Game?: The Mirror or the Glass? to be released in 2007)
- Who's Got Game?: The Ant or the Grasshopper?, The Lion or the Mouse?, Poppy or the Snake? (to be released in December 2005)
- Who's Got Game?: Poppy or the Snake?, (2004)
- Who's Got Game?: The Ant or the Grasshopper, (2003)
- Who's Got Game?: The Lion or the Mouse?, (2003)
- The Book of Mean People, (2002)
- The Big Box, (2002)

Short Stories


- Recitatif (1983)

Plays


- Dreaming Emmet (performed 1986)

Libretto


- Margaret Garner (first performed May 2005)

Non-fiction


- Remember:The Journey to School Integration (April 2004)
- Playing in the Dark (1993)
- The Black Book (1974)

See also


- African American literature

External links


- [http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3214 Literary Encyclopedia biography]
- [http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/morrison_toni.html Voices from the Gaps biography]
- [http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1993/ The Nobel Prize in Literature 1993]
- [http://wiredforbooks.org/tonimorrison/ 1987 audio interview by Don Swaim of CBS Radio, 31 min 2 s, RealAudio] Morrison, Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison, Toni ja:トニ・モリソン

1926

1926 (MCMXXVI) was a common year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar).

Events

January-April


- January 1 - Ireland's first regular radio service, 2RN (later Radio Éireann), begins broadcasting.
- January 1, Turkey switches to the Gregorian calendar after reforms set by Kamal Ataturk
- January 8 - Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud is crowned King of Hejaz
- January 12 - Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll premiere their radio program Sam 'n' Henry, in which the two white performers portrayed two black characters from Harlem looking for extra money during the Depression. It was a precursor to Gosden and Correll's more popular later program, Amos 'n' Andy.
- January 16 – BBC radio play about worker's revolution causes a panic in London
- January 26 - John Logie Baird demonstrates a mechanical television system.
- January 31 - British and Belgian troops leave Cologne
- February 9 - Flooding on London suburbs
- February 12 - Irish minister for Justice, Kevin O'Higgins, appoints the Committee on Evil Literature
- March 6 - The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon is destroyed by fire
- March 16 - Robert Goddard launches the first liquid-fueled rocket, at Auburn, Massachusetts
- April 7 - Failed assassination attempt against Mussolini
- April 12 - By a vote of 45 to 41, the United States Senate unseats Iowa Senator Smith W. Brookhart and seats Daniel F. Steck, after Brookhart had already served for over one year.
- April 16 - Train crash in San Jose, Costa Rica - 178 dead
- April 21 - Princess Elizabeth born in London
- April 25 - Reza Khan is crowned Shah of Iran under the name "Pahlevi."

May-July


- May 1 - Coal miner's strike begins in Britain
- May 3 - General strike begins in support of the coal strike
- May 9 - Martial law in Britain because of the general strike
- May 9 - French navy bombards Damascus because of Druze riots
- May 9 - Admiral Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett claim to have flown over the North Pole (later discovery of his diary seems to indicate that this did not happen).
- May 10 - Talks between government and strikers begins in UK
- May 12 - March 15 - Military coup by Jozef Pilsudski succeeds in Poland
- May 12 - UK general strike called off
- May 12 - Roald Amundsen flies over north pole
- May 12 - UK General Strike 1926: In the United Kingdom, a general strike by trade unions ends (the strike began on May 3).
- May 18 - Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappears while visiting a Venice, California beach.
- May 26 - Rifkabyl rebels surrender in Morocco
- May 28 - 1926 coup d'état commanded by Manuel Gomes da Costa in Portugal that installed the Ditadura Nacional (National Dictatorship) that would be followed be António de Oliveira Salazar's Estado Novo.
- June 4 - Ignacy Moscicki becomes president of Poland
- June 29 - Arthur Meighen returns to office as Prime Minister of Canada.
- July 1 - Kuomingtang begins a campaign in the northern China for unification
- July 9 - New military coup in Portugal, now by general Antonio Carmona
- July 12 - Lightning strike destroys an ammunition depot in Dover, New Jersey
- July 15 - BEST buses make its début in Mumbai.
- July 23 - Fox Film buys the patents of the Movietone sound system for recording sound onto film.

August-October


- August 1 - Failed assassination attempt against Miguel Primo de Rivera in Barcelona
- August 6 - Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim the English Channel from France to England
- August 6 - In New York, the Warner Brothers' Vitaphone system premieres with the movie Don Juan starring John Barrymore.
- August 18 - British miner's union begins negotiations with the government
- August 18 - A weather map is televised for the first time, sent from NAA Arlington to the Weather Bureau Office in Washington, D.C.
- August 22 - In Greece, Georgios Konfylis ousts Theodoros Pangalos
- August 25 - Pavlos Kountouriotis announces that dictatorship is finished in Greece and becomes a president
- September 11 - Spain leaves the League of Nations
- September 11 - Aloha Tower is officially dedicated at Honolulu Harbor in the Territory of Hawai'i
- September 18 - Great Miami Hurricane: A strong hurricane devastates Miami, Florida, leaving over 100 dead and caused several hundred million dollars in damage; equal to nearly $100 billion dollars today.
- September 20 - Twelve cars full of gangsters open fire at the Hawthorne Inn, headquarters of Al Capone in Chicago. Only one of Capone's men is wounded
- September 25 - William Lyon Mackenzie King returns to office as Prime Minister of Canada.
- October 2 - Jozef Pilsudski becomes prime minister of Poland
- October 12 - British miners agree to end their strike
- October 20 - Hurricane kills 650 in Cuba
- October 23 - Decree in Italy bans women from holding public office
- October 31 - Magician Harry Houdini dies of gangrene and peritonitis that developed after his appendix ruptured.

November-December


- November 10 - In San Francisco, California, a necrophiliac serial killer named Earle Nelson (dubbed "Gorilla Man") kills and then rapes his 9th victim, a boardinghouse landlady named Mrs. William Edmonds.
- November 10 - Michinomiya Hirohito is crowned the 124th Emperor of Japan
- November 15 - The NBC radio network opens with 24 stations (it was formed by Westinghouse, General Electric and RCA).
- November 24 - The village of Rocquebillier in French Riviera is almost destroyed in a massive hail
- November 25 - Death penalty re-established in Italy
- November 27 - Vesuvius erupts
- November 27 - In Williamsburg, Virginia, the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg begins.
- December 2 - British prime minister Stanley Baldwin ends the martial law that had been declared due to general strike
- December 3 - Agatha Christie disappears from her home in Surrey; on December 14 she is found in Harrogate hotel
- December 18 - Turkey converted to Gregorian calendar making 'tomorrow' January 1 1927
- December 25 - In Japanese History, end of the Taishō period and beginning of the Shōwa era and the period of Japanese expansionism

Unknown dates


- League of Nations Slavery Convention abolishes all types of slavery.
- Afghanistan declares monarchy.
- Lebanon becomes a republic.
- Eamon de Valera organizes Fianna Fáil.
- The short-lived Western Australian Secession League is founded.
- International African Institute is founded.
- Raymond Pearl publishes landmark book, Alcohol and Longevity.

Births

January


- January 3 - George Martin, English producer of The Beatles
- January 8 - Evelyn Lear, American soprano
- January 8 - Hanae Mori, Japanese fashion designer
- January 8 - Soupy Sales, American comedian
- January 11 - Lev Demin, cosmonaut (d. 1998)
- January 12 - Ray Price, American singer
- January 14 - Maria Schell, Austrian actress (d. 2005)
- January 14 - Tom Tryon, American actor and novelist (d. 1991)
- January 17 - Moira Shearer, Scottish actress and dancer
- January 19 - Fritz Weaver, American actor
- January 20 - Patricia Neal, American actress
- January 20 - David Tudor, American pianist and composer (d. 1996)
- January 21 - Steve Reeves, American actor (d. 2000)
- January 27 - Fritz Spiegl, Austrian journalist (d. 2003)
- January 29 - Abdus Salam, Pakistani physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1996)

February


- February 2 - Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, President of France
- February 6 - Haskell Wexler, American cinematographer
- February 7 - Konstantin Feoktistov, cosmonaut
- February 8 - Neal Cassady, American writer (d. 1968)
- February 8 - Audrey Meadows, American actress (d. 1996)
- February 11 - Paul Bocuse, French chef
- February 11 - Alexander Gibson, British conductor and founder of the Scottish Opera
- February 11 - Leslie Nielsen, Canadian actor
- February 12 - Paul Kurtz, American philosopher
- February 16 - John Schlesinger, British film director (d. 2003)
- February 20 - Richard Matheson, American author
- February 20 - Bob Richards, American track and field athlete
- February 22 - Kenneth Williams, English actor (d. 1988)
- February 27 - David H. Hubel, Canadian neuroscientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- February 28 - Svetlana Alliluyeva, Russian author

March


- March 1 - Pete Rozelle, American commissioner of the National Football League (d. 1996)
- March 2 - Murray Rothbard, American economist (d. 1995)
- March 3 - James Merrill, American poet (d. 1995)
- March 6 - Alan Greenspan, American economist and Chairman of the Federal Reserve
- March 6 - Andrzej Wajda, Polish film director
- March 8 - Sultan Salahuddin (d. 2001)
- March 13 - Carlos Roberto Reina, President of Honduras (d. 2003)
- March 15 - Norm Van Brocklin, American football player (d. 1983)
- March 16 - Jerry Lewis, American comedian
- March 16 - Charles Goodell, American politician (d. 1987)
- March 17 - Siegfried Lenz, German writer
- March 18 - Peter Graves, American actor
- March 24 - Dario Fo, Italian author, Nobel Prize laureate
- March 26 - László Papp, Hungarian boxer (d. 2003)
- March 30 - Ingvar Kamprad, Swedish businessman
- March 31 - John Fowles, English writer (d. 2005)

April


- April 1 - Charles Bressler, American tenor
- April 1 - Anne McCaffrey, American author
- April 2 - Jack Brabham, Australian race car driver
- April 3 - Gus Grissom, astronaut (d. 1967)
- April 6 - Sergio Franchi, Italian tenor and actor (d. 1990)
- April 6 - Gil Kane, Latvian-born cartoonist (d. 2000)
- April 6 - Ian Paisley, British politician
- April 7 - Dame Joan Sutherland, Australian soprano
- April 9 - Hugh Hefner, American magazine editor
- April 17 - Gerry McNeil, Canadian hockey player (d. 2004)
- April 21 - Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom
- April 22 - James Stirling, Scottish architect (d. 1992)
- April 24 - Thorbjörn Fälldin, Prime Minister of Sweden
- April 26 - Michael Mathias Prechtl, German illustrator (d. 2003)
- April 30 - Cloris Leachman, American actress

May


- May 5 - Ann B. Davis, American actress
- May 8 - Don Rickles, American comedian and actor
- May 15 - Peter Shaffer, English playwright
- May 26 - Miles Davis, American jazz trumpeter (d. 1991)

June


- June 1 - Andy Griffith, American actor
- June 1 - Marilyn Monroe, American actress (d. 1962)
- June 3 - Allen Ginsberg, American poet (d. 1997)
- June 6 - Klaus Tennstedt, German conductor (d. 1998)
- June 11 - Frank Plicka, Czech-born photographer
- June 21 - Conrad Hall, Tahitian-born cinematographer (d. 2003)
- June 25 - Ingeborg Bachmann, Austrian writer (d. 1973)
- June 28 - Mel Brooks, American entertainer
- June 30 - Paul Berg, American chemist, Noble Prize laureate

July


- July 1 - Robert Fogel, American economist, Nobel Prize laureate
- July 1 - Hans Werner Henze, German composer
- July 4 - Alfredo Di Stefano, Argentine-born footballer
- July 8 - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Swiss-born psychiatrist (d. 2004)
- July 9 - Ben Roy Mottelson, American-born physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
- July 15 - Leopoldo Galtieri, Argentine dictator (d. 2003)
- July 16 - Stanley Clements, American actor (d. 1981)
- July 16 - Irwin Rose, American biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- July 28 - Walt Brown, American Presidential candidate

August


- August 3 - Tony Bennett, American singer
- August 3 - Anthony Sampson, British journalist and biographer (d. 2004)
- August 11 - Aaron Klug, Lithuanian-born chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
- August 14 - René Goscinny, French comic book writer (d. 1977)
- August 19 - Arthur Rock, American venture capitalist

September


- September 7 - Don Messick, American voice actor (d. 1997)
- September 15 - Jean-Pierre Serre, French mathematician
- September 16- John Knowles, American author (d. 2001)
- September 21 - Donald A. Glaser, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
- September 21 - Noor Jehan, Pakistani and Indian actress (she could have been born in 1929)
- September 23 - John Coltrane, American jazz saxophonist (d. 1967)
- September 26 - Masatoshi Koshiba, Japanese physicist, Nobel Prize laureate

October


- October 15 - Michel Foucault, French philosopher (d. 1984)
- October 15 - Karl Richter, German conductor (d. 1981)
- October 18 - Chuck Berry, American musician
- October 25 - Galina Vishnevskaya, Russian soprano
- October 29 - Jon Vickers, Canadian tenor

November


- November 2 - Tsung-Dao Lee, Chinese physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
- November 3 - Valdas Adamkus, President of Lithuania
- November 20 - Andrzej W. Schally, Polish-born endocrinologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- November 23 - Sri Satya Sai Baba, Indian guru
- November 23 - R.L. Burnside, American musician
- November 25 - Poul Anderson, American author (d. 2001)

December


- December 9 - Henry Way Kendall, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1999)
- December 13 - George Rhoden, Jamaican athlete
- December 16 - James McCracken, American tenor (d. 1988)
- December 17 - Allan V. Cox, American geologist (d. 1987)
- December 20 - Sir Geoffrey Howe, British politician
- December 21 - Joe Paterno, American football coach
- December 23 - Robert Bly, American poet

Deaths


- January 21 - Camillo Golgi, Italian physician, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1843)
- February 21 - Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Dutch physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1853)
- March 5 - Clément Ader, French engineer and inventor, airplane pioneer (b. 1841)
- April 30 - Bessie Coleman, American pilot (b. 1892)
- May 16 - Mehmed VI, last Ottoman Sultan (b. 1861)
- May 26 - Simon Petlyura, Ukrainian independence fighter (b. 1879)
- June 10 - Antoni Gaudí, Catalan architect (b. 1852)
- June 14 - Mary Cassatt, American artist (b. 1844)
- July 12 - Gertrude Bell, English archaeologist, writer, spy, and administrator known as the "Uncrowned Queen of Iraq" (b. 1868)
- July 26 - Robert Todd Lincoln, American statesman and businessman (b. 1843)
- August 22 - Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard University (b. 1834)
- August 23 - Rodolfo Valentino, Italian actor (b. 1895)
- September 15 - Rudolf Christoph Eucken, German writer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1846)
- September 21 - Leon Charles Thevenin, French telegraph engineer (b. 1857)
- October 20 - Eugene V. Debs, American labor and political leader (b. 1855)
- October 31 - Harry Houdini, Hungarian-born magician (b. 1874)
- October 31 - Charles Vance Millar, Canadian businessman (b. 1853)
- December 4 - Ivana Kobilca, Slovenian painter (b. 1861)
- December 5 - Claude Monet, French painter (b. 1840)
- December 25 - Emperor Taisho, 123rd Emperor of Japan (b. 1879)
- December 29 - Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian poet (b. 1875)

Nobel Prizes


- Physics - Jean Baptiste Perrin
- Chemistry - Theodor Svedberg
- Physiology or Medicine - Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger
- Literature - Grazia Deledda
- Peace - Aristide Briand, Gustav Stresemann
- ko:1926년 ms:1926 ja:1926年 simple:1926 th:พ.ศ. 2469

Harlem

:This article is about the Harlem neighborhood in New York City. For other places named Harlem, see Harlem (disambiguation). Harlem is a neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, long known as a major African American cultural and business center. Although the name is sometimes reckoned as comprising the whole of upper Manhattan, traditionally Harlem is bound by 155th Street to the north, and the Harlem River to the east; it has a somewhat erratic southern boundary with the Upper East Side, where Harlem is demarcated above 96th Street from the East River to Third Avenue, 98th Street from Third Avenue through Madison Avenue, and about 104th Street on Fifth Avenue. From Fifth Avenue to Eighth Avenue it is bounded on the south by Central Park at 110th Street, and by 125th Street west of Eighth Avenue where it meets Morningside Heights, a section of the Upper West Side. Finally, the western boundary of Harlem is the Hudson River, which additionally serves as a city, county, and state line. Harlem has various subsections with their own landmarks and identities. Harlem is comprised of three main sections, Central, East, and West, each with their own sections as follows:
- Central Harlem (between 5th Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue)
  - Sugar Hill
  - Mount Morris Park
  - Strivers' Row
- West Harlem (west of St. Nicholas Avenue)
  - Hamilton Heights
  - Manhattanville
- East Harlem (east of 5th Avenue, also called Spanish Harlem) The commonly accepted definition of Harlem has changed over time. Ralph Ellison explained this succintly by observing "Wherever Negroes live uptown is considered Harlem." Ralph Ellison

History

The first European settlement in what is now Harlem was by Dutch settlers and was formalized in 1658 as Nieuw Haarlem (or New Haarlem), after the Dutch city of Haarlem. The Indian trail to Harlem's lush bottomland meadows was rebuilt by the Dutch West India Company's black slaves and eventually developed into the Boston Post Road. In 1664, the English took control of the New Netherland colony and anglicized the name of the town to Harlem. On September 16, 1776, the Battle of Harlem Heights (also called the Battle of Harlem or Battle of Harlem Plain) was fought in western Harlem around the Hollow Way (now West 125th St.), with conflicts on Morningside Heights to the south and Harlem Heights to the north. In the 19th century, Harlem was a place of farms, such as James Roosevelt's, east of Fifth Avenue between 110th and 125th Streets, now the heart of Spanish (actually Latin-American) Harlem. Country estates were largely on the heights overlooking the Hudson to the west of Harlem. Service connecting the suburb of Harlem with New York was by steamboat on the East River, an hour and a half's passage, sometimes interrupted when the river froze in winter, or else by stagecoach along the Boston Post Road, which descended from McGown's Pass (now in Central Park) and skirted the saltmarshes around 110th Street, to pass through Harlem. The New York and Harlem Railroad was incorporated in 1831, to better link the city with the suburb, starting at a depot at East 23rd Street. It was extended 127 miles north to a railroad junction in Columbia County at Chatham, New York by 1851. Harlem was developing into an extensive, somewhat ramshackle suburb. Elevated railroads were extended to Harlem in 1880. With the construction of the els, urbanized development occurred very rapidly, with townhouses, apartments, and tenements springing up practically overnight. Early entrepreneurs had grandiose schemes for Harlem: Polo was actually played at the original Polo Grounds (later to become home of the New York Giants baseball team) and Oscar Hammerstein I opened the Harlem Opera House on East 125th Street in 1889. But by the early 1900s, Harlem's population was German, German Jewish, and Eastern European Jewish. In common with many other Jewish neighborhoods, Jewish Harlem was an ephemeral entity. By 1930, only 5,000 Jews remained, down from a 1917 peak population of 150,000. The area of Harlem by the East River, now known as Spanish Harlem, became occupied by Italians. Italian Harlem is gone as well, though it lasted longer than Jewish Harlem (traces of Italian Harlem lasted into the 1970s, in the area around Pleasant Avenue). The number of blacks residents increased rapidly in the early 20th century, and Central Harlem was essentially entirely black by 1920. There was little investment in private homes or businesses in the neighborhood between 1911 and the 1990s. However, the unwillingness of landlords elsewhere in the city to rent to black tenants, together with a significant increase in the black population of New York, meant that rents in Harlem were for many years higher than rents elsewhere in the city, even as the housing stock decayed. In the late 1920s, for example, a typical white working class family in New York paid $6.67 per month per room, while blacks in Harlem paid $9.50 for the same space. The high cost of space forced people to live in close quarters, and the population density of Harlem in these years was stunning — over 215,000 per square mile. By comparison, Manhattan as a whole had a population density under 70,000 per square mile in 2000. Inadequate housing contributed to racial unrest and health problems. However, the lack of development also preserved buildings from the 1870-1910 building boom, and Harlem as a result has many of the finest original townhouses in New York. This includes work by many significant architects of the day, including McKim, Mead, and White, James Renwick, Charles Buek, and Francis Kimball. As the building stock decayed, landlords converted many buildings into "single room occupancies," or SROs, essentially private homeless shelters. In many cases, the income from these buildings could not support the fines and city taxes charged to their owners, or the houses suffered damage that would have been expensive to fix, and the buildings were abandoned. In the 1970s, this process accelerated to the point that Harlem, for for the first time since before WWI, had a lower population density than the rest of Manhattan. By the 1980s, 60% of the buildings in Harlem were owned by the City of New York, and many had become empty shells, convenient centers for drug dealing and other antisocial activity. The lack of habitable buildings and falling population reduced tax rolls and made the neighborhood even less attractive to residential and retail investment. After years of false starts, Harlem began to see rapid gentrification in the late 1990s. This was driven by changing federal and city policies, including fierce crime-fighting and a concerted effort to develop the retail corridor on 125th Street. Starting in 1994, the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone funneled money into new developments including the Harlem USA retail complex. Finally, wealthier New Yorkers, having gentrified every other part of Manhattan and much of Brooklyn, had nowhere else to go. The number of housing units in Harlem increased 14% between 1990 and 2000 and the rate of increase has been much more rapid in recent years. Property values in Central Harlem increased nearly 300% during the 1990s, while the rest of the City saw only a 12% increase. Even empty shells of buildings in the neighborhood were, as of 2005, routinely selling for nearly $1,000,000 each. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton rented office space at 55 West 125th Street after completing his second term in the White House in 2001. The neighborhood has been the setting for several movies, including Across 110th Street in 1972 and the recent The Royal Tenenbaums.

As African American center

Small groups of blacks lived in Harlem as early as 1880, especially in the area around 125th Street and "Negro tenements" on West 130th Street. The mass migration of blacks into the area began in 1904, thanks to the leadership of a black real estate entrepreneur named Philip Payton, Jr. His company, the Afro-American Realty Company, was almost single-handedly responsible for migration of blacks from their previous neighborhoods, the Tenderloin, San Juan Hill in the Upper West Side, and Hell's Kitchen (today sometimes called Clinton) in the west 40s and 50s. By 1907, black churches began to move uptown. By 1920, central Harlem was predominently black and by 1930, blacks lived as far south as Central Park, at 110th Street. The expansion was fueled primarily by an influx of blacks from the West Indies and the southern U.S. states, especially Virginia, South and North Carolina, and Georgia. As blacks moved in, white residents left; between 1920 and 1930, 118,792 white people left the neighborhood and 87,417 blacks arrived. Some white residents of Harlem resisted the neighborhood's change, especially once the swelling black population pressed west of Lenox Avenue, which served as an informal color line until the early 1920s. They tried to buy property and evict black tenants, but the Afro-American Realty Company retaliated by buying other property and evicting whites. They also attempted to convince banks to deny mortgages to black buyers, but soon gave up. In the 1920s, Harlem was the center of a flowering of African American culture that became known as the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a time of amazing artistic production, but ironically, many blacks were excluded from viewing what they were creating. Many jazz venues, like Small's Paradise and the Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington played, were restricted to whites only. Though this period of Harlem's history has been romanticized, the 1920s were the time in which the neighborhood became a slum, and some of the storied traditions of the Harlem Renaissance were driven by poverty, crime, or other social ills. For example, in this period, Harlem became known for "rent parties," informal gatherings in which bootleg alcohol was served, and music played. Neighbors paid to attend, and thus enabled the host to make his or her monthly rent. Though picturesque, these parties were thrown out of necessity. Further, over a quarter of black households in Harlem made their monthly rent by taking in lodgers, who sometimes brought bad habits or even crime that disrupted the lives of respectable families. Urban reformers campaigned to eliminate the "lodger evil" but the problem got worse before it got better; in 1940, 40% of black families in Harlem were taking in lodgers. The Apollo Theater opened on 125th Street on January 26, 1934, in a former burlesque house. The Savoy Ballroom, on Lenox Avenue, was a renowned venue for swing dancing, and was immortalized in a popular song of the era, Stompin' At The Savoy. In the 1920s and 1930s, between Lenox and Seventh avenues in central Harlem, over 125 entertainment places operated, including speakeasies, cellars, lounges, cafes, taverns, supper clubs, rib joints, theaters, dance halls, and bars and grills. In the post-World War II era, Harlem ceased to be home to a majority of NYC's blacks, but it remained the cultural and political capital of black New York, and possibly black America. The character of the community changed in the years after the war, as middle class blacks left for the outer boroughs (primarily Queens and Brooklyn) and suburbs. Though students in Harlem's school's generally perform poorly in standardized tests and other measures, the community is home to the Harlem Boys Choir, a famous touring choir of young boys, mostly African American. Since 1987, the managers of the choir (and its less celebrated female version) have run a school called the Choir Academy which claims high success rates in getting students admitted to college. Since the arrival of blacks in Harlem, the neighborhood has suffered from unemployment rates higher than the New York average, and high mortality rates as well. In both cases, the numbers for men have been consistently worse than the numbers for women. In 1940, infant mortality in Harlem was 5% (one black infant in twenty would die) and the death rate from disease generally was twice that of the rest of New York; tuberculosis was the main killer. A 1996 study reported that 15-year-old black women in Harlem had a 65% chance of surviving to age 65, about the same as women in India. Black men in Harlem, on the other hand, had only a 37% chance of surviving to age 65, about the same as men in Angola. Infectious diseases and diseases of the circulatory system were to blame, with a variety of contributing factors including the deep-fried foods traditional to the neighborhood, which may contribute to heart disease.

Criminality

Not surprisingly, as a neighborhood with a long history of marginalization and economic deprivation, Harlem has long been associated with crime. In the 1920s, the white mafia (both Jewish and Italian) played a major role in running the whites-only nightclubs in the neighborhood, and the speakeasies that catered to a white audience. Mobster "Dutch" Schultz controlled all liquor production and distribution in Harlem in the 1920s. Rather than compete with the established mobs, black gangsters concentrated on the "policy racket", also called "bolito", or the Numbers Game. This was gambling scheme similar to a lottery that could be played, illegally, from countless locations around Harlem. According to Francis Ianni, "By 1925 there were thirty black policy banks in Harlem, several of them large enough to collect bets in an area of twenty city blocks and across three or four avenues." The bosses who ran the numbers operations became financial powerhouses, providing capital for loans and investment for those who could not qualify for them from traditional financial institutions. Remarkably, one of the powerful early numbers bosses was a woman, Madame Stephanie St. Clair. The popularity of bolito waned with the introduction of the New York State lottery, which has higher payouts and is legal, but the practice continues on a smaller scale among those who prefer the "numbers" tradition or who prefer to trust their local numbers runner over the state. 1940 statistics show about 100 murders per year in Harlem, "but rape is very rare." By 1950, essentially all of the whites had left Harlem and by 1960, the black middle class had gone. At the time of the 1964 riots, the drug addiction rate in Harlem was ten times higher than the New York City average, and twelve times higher than the United States as a whole. Of the 30,000 drug addicts then estimated to live in New York City, 15,000 to 20,000 lived in Harlem. Property crime was pervasive, and the murder rate was six times higher than New York's average. Half of the children in Harlem grew up with only one parent, or none, and lack of supervision contributed to juvenile delinquency. Injecting heroin grew in popularity in Harlem through the 1950s and 1960s, though the use of this drug then levelled off. In the 1980s, use of crack cocaine became widespread, which produced collateral crime as addicts stole to finance their purchasing of additional drugs, and as dealers fought for the right to sell in particular regions, or over deals gone bad. In 1981, 6,500 robberies were reported in Harlem. The number dropped to 4,800 in 1990, perhaps due to an increase in the number of police assigned to the neighborhood. Over the next ten years, with the end of the "crack wars" and with the initiation of aggressive policing under mayor Rudolph Giuliani, crime in Harlem plummeted. In 2000, only 1,700 robberies were reported. There have been similar changes in all categories of crimes tracked by the New York City Police Department. In the 32nd Precinct, for example, in Central Harlem, between 1993 and 2004, the murder rate dropped 68%, the rape rate dropped 70%, the robbery rate dropped 60%, burglary dropped 81%, and the total number of crime complaints dropped 62%. The crime rate in Harlem in 2005 is comparable to that in wealthy, white neighborhoods in other American cities, such as Santa Monica, California.

Activism in Harlem

The NAACP arrived in Harlem in 1910 and Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1916. However, the earliest social activism by blacks to change the situation in Harlem itself may have been the ultimately successful campaign to force retail shops on 125th Street to hire black employees. Boycotts were originally organized by the Communist Party and the Citizens' League for Fair Play in the 1930s, and efforts were continued under other leadership, including that of preacher and later congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. By the early 1960s, the Committee on Racial Equality (CORE) had offices on 125th street, and acted as negotiator for the community with the city, especially in times of racial unrest. They pressed for civilian review boards to hear complaints of police abuse, a demand that was ultimately met. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Harlem was the scene of a massive rent strike by neighborhood tenants, led by local activist Jesse Gray, who became discredited after he was identified as a member of the Communist Party by witnesses testifying under oath before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Gray himself was given an opportunity to testify before the same committee, but he pleaded the Fifth Amendment every time he was asked a question regarding the Communist Party or his alleged connection to it. The rent strike collapsed soon after. Residents of Harlem rioted in 1935, 1943, 1964, 1968, and 1995. Most of these riots stemmed from real or rumored brutality by the police. However, the 1968 riot followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1995 riots were organized by black activists against Jewish shopowners on 125th street. Today, the Abyssinian Baptist Church is a particularly potent organization, possessing great wealth as a result of its extensive real estate holdings. It advocates on behalf of its mostly lower class, black community. The neighborhood is a center for the Black Muslim movement in the United States. Malcolm X lived in Harlem and was assassinated in the Audobon Ballroom in Washington Heights in 1965. Harlem has one of the highest asthma rates in the United States. This is largely due to high particulate matter, mostly due to diesel emissions from buses and trucks. The environmental group WEACT has been instrumental in bringing this to the public's attention.

Harlem Landmarks


- 125th Street
- Abyssinian Baptist Church
- Apollo Theater
- Arthur Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture
- Astor Row
- City College of New York
- Hamilton Grange
- Hamilton Heights
- Harlem Boys Choir
- Lenox Lounge
- Mount Morris Park Historic District
- Strivers' Row
- Sylvia's Soul Food
- Hotel Theresa

People from Harlem

Listed chronologically
- Alexander Hamilton - politician
- John James Audubon - naturalist
- Thurgood Marshall - Supreme Court justice
- Collyer brothers - compulsive hoarders
- Langston Hughes - writer
- Claude McKay - poet
- Ella Fitzgerald - singer
- Duke Ellington - musician
- Harry Belafonte -calypso musican
- James Van Der Zee - photographer
- Madam C. J. Walker - philanthropist and tycoon
- A'Lelia Walker - socialite and businesswoman
- Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. - politician
- Malcolm X - preacher, revolutionary
- James Baldwin - novelist
- Earl Manigault - Basketball player
- Ron Brown - Secretary of Commerce
- Marcia Gay Harden - actress
- Adam Clayton Powell IV - New York City council member
- Akhnatan Spencer-El - Olympic fencer
- KJ - singer and actor

Representatives


- Charles B. Rangel - United States House of Representatives
- David Paterson - New York State Senate minority leader
- Robert Jackson - New York City council
- Keith L.T. Wright- New York State Assembly
- Inez Dickens- New York City Council

External links


- [http://www.southeastmuseum.org/html/history.html New York and Harlem Railroad and the Harlem Valley line.]
- [http://www.weact.org West Harlem Environmental Action (WEACT)]
- [http://www.boyschoirofharlem.org Harlem Boys Choir]

Reference


- "The Making of Harlem," James Weldon Johnson, The Survey Graphic, March 1925
- WPA Guide to New York City 1939
- [http://nfo.net/usa/harlem.html The Big Bands Database, My Harlem Reverie]
- Francis A. J. Ianni, Black Mafia: Ethnic Succession in Organized Crime
- "244,000 Native Sons," LOOK Magazine, May 21, 1940, p.8+
- "Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto. Negro New York, 1890-1930". Gilbert Osofsky, 1963
- TIME Magaine, vol. 84, No.5, July 31, 1964. "Harlem: No Place Like Home"
- Newsweek, August 3, 1964,. "Harlem: Hatred in the Streets"
- McCord C and HP Freeman. "Excess Mortality in Harlem." New England Journal of Medicine 322(1990):173-177
- "Crack's Decline: Some Surprises from U.S. Cities", National Institute of Justice Research in Brief, July 1997
- "How New York Cut Crime", Reform Magazine, Autumn 2002 p.11
- The Economic Redevelopment of Harlem, PhD Thesis of Eldad Gothelf, submitted to Columbia University in May 2004
- [http://www.demographia.com/db-nyc-wardrank.htm Demographia population density figures]
- [http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/pdf/chfdept/cs032pct.pdf Policy Department City of New York CompStat, 32nd Precinct, vol. 12 No 38]
- [http://santamonica.areaconnect.com/crime1.htm Santa Monica CA Crime Statistics] Category:Manhattan neighborhoods ja:ハーレム地区

Category:American novels

Category:Novels by country Category:American literature

Peer Gynt (band)

Peer Günt is a Finnish hard rock band.

External link


- [http://www.peergunt.com/ Official website] Category:Finnish musical groups

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