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Smoketown - The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance (Paperback)
Loot Price: R470
Discovery Miles 4 700
You Save: R89
(16%)
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Smoketown - The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance (Paperback)
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List price R559
Loot Price R470
Discovery Miles 4 700
You Save R89 (16%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
|
A brilliant, lively account of the Black Renaissance that burst
forth in Pittsburgh from the 1920s through the 1950s-"Smoketown
will appeal to anybody interested in black history and anybody who
loves a good story...terrific, eminently readable...fascinating"
(The Washington Post). Today black Pittsburgh is known as the
setting for August Wilson's famed plays about noble, but doomed,
working-class citizens. But this community once had an impact on
American history that rivaled the far larger black worlds of Harlem
and Chicago. It published the most widely read black newspaper in
the country, urging black voters to switch from the Republican to
the Democratic Party, and then rallying black support for World War
II. It fielded two of the greatest baseball teams of the Negro
Leagues and introduced Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Pittsburgh was the childhood home of jazz pioneers Billy Strayhorn,
Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner;
Hall of Fame slugger Josh Gibson-and August Wilson himself. Some of
the most glittering figures of the era were changed forever by the
time they spent in the city, from Joe Louis and Satchel Paige to
Duke Ellington and Lena Horne. Mark Whitaker's Smoketown is a
"rewarding trip to a forgotten special place and time" (Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette). It depicts how ambitious Southern migrants were
drawn to a steel-making city on a strategic river junction; how
they were shaped by its schools and a spirit of commerce with roots
in the Gilded Age; and how their world was eventually destroyed by
industrial decline and urban renewal. "Smoketown brilliantly offers
us a chance to see this other Black Renaissance and spend time with
the many luminaries who sparked it...It's thanks to such a gifted
storyteller as Whitaker that this forgotten chapter of American
history can finally be told in all its vibrancy and glory" (The New
York Times Book Review).
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