The Harlem Renaissance was a period when African-American art and culture began to flourish in mainstream American culture. Poets, musicians, artists, and writers sought to define and explore the African-American experience on African-American terms. What emerged was a proliferation of work that examined the influence of slavery on the lives of black Americans, brought attention to African-American folklore, introduced a context in which to describe black urban life in the North, addressed the impacts of discrimination, and celebrated African-American culture at large. By bringing these issues into the American cultural mainstream, the Harlem Renaissance also laid the groundwork for the burgeoning civil rights movement of the 1940s and 1950s.
Prompt:
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Choose one to two artists or writers, not included in this unit (you may NOT use Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, August Wilson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, or Alice Dunbar-Nelson) from the Harlem Renaissance whom you would like to research. For example, you might research a writer who was born in the South but moved to a Northern city, such as Richard Wright. You might choose to focus on the early life of writer Claude McKay, the career of Paul Robeson, or the success of Ma Rainey. Research your chosen topic, and formulate a position on how your subjects' work contributed to gaining greater visibility for African-Americans in mainstream culture, how it impacted society, or how their life experiences impacted their work. Then, write an informative research essay, using textual evidence and source material to support your ideas. Be sure your informative research paper includes the following:
Writing to Sources. You must refer to at least THREE reliable sources in your essay. As you are conducting your research, be sure to
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Use the free online citation creators below to generate and save citations for all types of sources.
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Gale in Context includes content from full-text magazines, academic journals, news articles, primary source documents, images, videos, and audio files. Use this database to search for information about people, places, events, and other topics. This is a good all-purpose database.
Biography.com includes information about famous people from the past and present.
