Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-pfhbr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-10T14:29:56.391Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

WHEN THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE BECAME VOGUE: PERIODIZATION AND THE ORGANIZATION OF POSTWAR AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2014

ANDREW M. FEARNLEY
ANDREW M. FEARNLEY*
Affiliation:
Department of English, American Studies and Creative Writing, University of Manchester E-mail: andrew.fearnley-2@manchester.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In the years around mid-century a number of periodizing terms entered Western historiography. These included the “Weimar Republic” and Frühneuzeit in Germany, “the age of Wilberforce” in Britain, and “the age of Jackson” in the United States, to name just a few. The appearance of these terms attested to the popularity that periodization, or the deliberate creation of historical periods, had within historical practice, and they were embraced variously as heuristics, as means of organizing the historical record, and as the root of synthesis. In this essay I trace the coinage of one term, “Harlem Renaissance,” from its emergence in the 1940s, through to the sharper profile it earned in the postwar years, and its institutionalization in the late twentieth century. In doing so I argue that Harlem Renaissance was neither a term nor a concept used by those who lived during the years it is now said to describe, and illuminate the alternative ways in which contemporaries apprehended their historical position. The context for the coinage and popularization of this term was the displacement of these earlier modes of interpretation by temporal ones, and the emergence of a mode of historical practice that stressed synthetic interpretation. By tracing the fluctuating ways in which a core analytical concept like periodization was handled between the mid- and the late twentieth century we might better grasp how historiographical orientations changed in these years.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , April 2014 , pp. 59 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This essay has benefitted considerably from the suggestions and comments of Charles Capper, Will Jackson, Frank Kelderman, Daniel Matlin, Michael O'Brien, and the journal's three anonymous reviewers, and I am most grateful to them all.

References

1 See Kelley, Donald R., “Ideas of Periodization in the West,” in Wang, Q. Edward and Fillafer, Franz L., eds., The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-cultural Approaches to Historiography (New York, 2007), 17–27Google Scholar.

2 On the asymmetry between the importance of periodization to historical practice and the lack of theoretical discussion of it, see Morris, Ian, “Periodization and the Heroes: Inventing a Dark Age,” in Golden, Mark and Toohey, Peter, eds., Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism, Periodization, and the Ancient World (London, 1997), 96–131Google Scholar. Works that won the Pulitzer Prize in these years include Buley, R. Carlyle, The Old Northwest, Pioneer Period, 1815–1840 (Bloomington, 1950)Google Scholar; Dangerfield, George, The Era of Good Feelings (New York, 1952)Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; White, Leonard and Schneider, Jean, The Republican Era, 1869–1901 (New York, 1958)Google Scholar; Leech, Margaret, In the Days of McKinley (New York, 1959)Google Scholar; Unger, IrwinThe Greenback Era (Princeton, NJ, 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Ullrich, Sebastian, “Mehr als Schall und Rauch: Der Streit um den Namen der ersten Deutschen Demokratie 1918–1949,” in Föllmer, Moritz and Graf, Rüdiger, eds., Die “Krise” der Weimarer Republik: Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt, 2005), 187–207, 203Google Scholar. The field of periodiserung in German historiography is discussed in Reinhard, Wolfgang, “The Idea of Early Modern History,” in Bentley, Michael, ed., Companion to Historiography (London, 1997), 281–92Google Scholar.

4 See Rodgers, Daniel, “American Exceptionalism Explained,” Raritan, 24/2 (2004), 21–47, 25–7Google Scholar. The Harlem Renaissance was described as filling the period “between the two World Wars” in “New Book Announcement,” 9 Nov. 1988, Folder: David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, Box 591518935, Central Files, Oxford University Press Archives, Oxford University Press, New York (hereafter OUP/New York).

5 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York, 2003), 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Elshakry, Marwa, “When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections,” Isis, 101 (2010), 98–109CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

7 Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History, rev. edn (Oxford, 1993; first published 1946), 53Google Scholar; Carr, E. H., What Is History, rev. edn with a new introduction by Evans, Richard J. (London, 2001; first published 1961), 54–5Google ScholarPubMed.

8 Ferguson, Wallace K., The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston, 1948), 393Google Scholar.

9 Hesseltine, William, “Review of Origins of the New South,” American Historical Review, 62 (July 1952), 993–4, 994CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For cogent summaries of other historical fields’ thinking about periodization see “Medieval/Renaissance: After Periodization,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37 (Fall 2007); Golden and Toohey, Inventing Ancient Culture.

11 Filene, Peter G., “An Obituary for ‘The Progressive Movement’,” American Quarterly, 22 (Spring 1970), 20–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Forum: Should We Abolish the Gilded Age?”, Journal of the History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 8 (Oct. 2009); Howe, Daniel Walker, “Goodbye to the ‘Age of Jackson?’,” New York Review of Books, 56 (28 May 2009)Google Scholar; Isaac, Joel and Bell, Duncan, eds., Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War (New York, 2012)Google Scholar. See also the two special issues on the “Victorian Age” in Journal of Victorian Culture, 11/1 and 2 (2006).

12 Harris, Leonard and Molesworth, Charles, Alain L. Locke: Biography of a Philosopher (Chicago, 2008), 179CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Walrond, Eric, “The Black City,” (Jan. 1924), reprinted in Wilson, Sondra Kathryn, ed., The Messenger Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from The Messenger Magazine (New York, 2000), 271–73, 273Google Scholar; Wallace Thurman, “Negro Life in New York's Harlem: A Lively Picture of a Popular and Interesting Section,” Haldeman-Julius Quarterly (Fall 1927), 132–45.

14 Van Doren, Carl, “The Roving Critic: The Negro Renaissance,” Century Magazine, 111 (March 1926), 635–37, 636Google Scholar.

15 Chamberlain, John, “The Negro as Writer,” The Bookman, 70 (Feb. 1930), 603–11, 605 and 606Google Scholar.

16 Chamberlain, “The Negro as Writer,” 605. See also Chamberlain, “The Negro on Manhattan Island,” New York Times, 27 July 1930, 55.

17 Wright, Richard, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” New Challenge (Fall 1937), reprinted in Huggins, Nathan, ed., Voices from the Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1995; first published 1976), 394–402, 401Google Scholar.

18 Brawley, Benjamin, The Negro Genius: A New Appraisal of the Achievement of the American Negro in Literature and the Fine Arts (New York, 1937), 10–11, 233–4, 236Google Scholar. See also Brawley, Benjamin, “The Negro Literary Renaissance,” Southern Workman, 56 (April 1927), 177–84Google Scholar.

19 Charles Chesnutt, “Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem,” The Crisis (June 1931), 193–4.

20 On the distinction between historical concepts and the vocabularies used to articulate them see Skinner, Quentin, “The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon” (1979), reprinted in Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2002), 158–74Google Scholar.

21 Ralph Thompson, “Books of the Times: Claude McKay,” New York Times, 13 March 1937, Folder 327, Box 10, Claude McKay Papers, JWJ MSS 27, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. See also Gloster, Hugh, “The Van Vechten Vogue,” Phylon, 6 (4th Qtr, 1945), 310–314, 314CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 White, Walter, “Negro Literature,” in Macy, John, ed., American Writers on American Literature: By Thirty-Seven Contemporary Writers (New York, 1931), 442–41, 442Google Scholar.

23 White, “Negro Literature,” 449.

24 Croce, Benedetto, Aesthetic, as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, trans. Ainslie, Douglas (New York, 1965; first published 1902)Google Scholar. On Croce's influence in the US see Roberts, David D., “Croce in America: Influence, Misunderstanding, and Neglect,” Humanitas, 8 (1995), 3–34Google Scholar.

25 Wellek, René, “Periods and Movements in Literary History,” English Institute Annual, 1940 (New York, 1965; first published 1941), 73–93, 81Google Scholar; Wellek, René and Warren, Austin, Theory of Literature (New York, 1949), 226Google Scholar.

26 “Dr. Locke Tells of the New Negro,” Associated Press, n.d., Folder 36, Box 164-146, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Library, Howard University, Washington, DC (hereafter ALP/Howard).

27 Maud Cuney-Hare, “As the Negro Grows up: Review of The New Negro,” Christian Science Monitor, 23 Jan. 1926, Folder 19, Box 164-122, ALP/Howard; Locke, Alain, “Foreword,” in The New Negro: An Anthology (New York, 1997; first published 1925), xxv–xxvii, at xxviGoogle Scholar.

28 Alain Locke to Langston Hughes, 22 May 1924, Folder 1975, Box 104, Langston Hughes Papers, JWJ MSS 26, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT (hereafter LHP/Yale); Alain Locke, “Youth Speaks,” in New Negro, 659–60, 659.

29 F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” Scribner's Magazine, 90 (Nov. 1931), 459–64, 460 (emphasis my own). For the context see Smith, Jason Scott, “The Strange History of the Decade: Modernity, Nostalgia, and the Perils of Periodization,” Journal of Social History, 32 (Winter 1998), 263–85, esp. 270–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Paul Kellogg to Will Alexander, n.d. 1925, Folder 4, Box 164-88; Paul Kellogg to Arthur Greenwood, 29 June 1927, Folder 8, Box 164-114, both in ALP/Howard.

31 Paul Kellogg to Alain Locke, 5 Feb. 1925, Folder 6, Box 164-88, ALP/Howard.

32 Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke, 193; Paul Kellogg to Alain Locke, 20 March 1925, Folder 6, Box 164-88, ALP/Howard.

33 Paul Kellogg to Alain Locke quoted in Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke, 194.

34 Locke, “Foreword,” in New Negro, x–xi.

35 Locke, Alain, “The Negro: ‘New’ or Newer: A Retrospective Review of the Literature of the Negro for 1938,” Opportunity, 17 (Jan. 1939), 4–10Google Scholar, Folder 10, Box 164-135, ALP/Howard.

36 Charles S. Johnson, “The Negro Renaissance and Its Significance,” reprinted in Huggins, Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, 213.

37 James Weldon Johnson to Edwin Embree, 5 Sept. 1929, Folder 414, Box 17, Series I, James Weldon Johnson Papers, JWJ MSS 49, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

38 Johnson, James Weldon, Black Manhattan (New York, 1977; first published 1930), 231Google Scholar.

39 Johnson, James Weldon, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (1932), reprinted in James Weldon Johnson: Writings (New York, 2004), 560Google Scholar. Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago, 1903), 186Google Scholar.

40 (Wright, Richard), “Portrait of Harlem,” in Federal Writers’ Project, New York Panorama: Committee for Federal Writers’ Publication (New York, 1938), 132–51, 142Google Scholar.

41 St Clair Bourne, “Harlem's ‘Renaissance’ Produced ‘New Negro,’” New York Amsterdam News, 24 Jan. 1942, 7.

42 Ibid.

43 Cruise, Harold, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, with an introduction by Stanley Crouch (New York, 2005; first published 1967), 52Google Scholar.

44 Hughes, Langston, The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes (New York, 1940), 223Google Scholar.

45 Ibid., 247, 248, and 223.

46 Langston Hughes to Sidney Jacobs, 17 June 1940, Folder 73, Box 4, Series I, LHP/Yale.

47 Franklin, John Hope, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (New York, 1947), 490Google Scholar.

48 Blanche Knopf to Langston Hughes, 18 Nov. 1939, Folder 1825, Box 97, Series 1, LHP/Yale.

49 Carl Van Vechten to Langston Hughes, 29 Nov. 1939, in Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964, ed. Emily Bernard (New York, 2001), 156; Blanche Knopf to Langston Hughes, 29 Nov. 1939, Folder 1825, Box 97, LHP/Yale.

50 Langston Hughes to Blanche Knopf, 8 Feb. 1940, LHP/Yale, Folder 1826, Box 97.

51 McKay, Claude, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York, 1968; first published 1940), 26, 15, and 19Google Scholar.

52 See E. P. Dutton to Claude McKay, 19 Nov. 1940, Folder 258, Box 8, Series I, Claude McKay Collection, JWJ MSS 27, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

53 Langston Hughes to Arna Bontemps, 23 Feb. 1948, in Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes, Letters, 1925–1967, ed. Charles H. Nichols (New York, 1980), 229 (emphasis in original).

54 Ottley, Roi, New World A-coming (Boston, 1943), 59Google Scholar.

55 Ottley, Roi, Black Odyssey: The Story of the Negro in America (New York, 1948), 245Google Scholar.

56 Ottley, Roi, “Review of From Slavery to Freedom by John Hope Franklin,” New York Times, 12 Oct. 1947, BR40. For Franklin's response see his Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (New York, 2005), 134Google Scholar.

57 “Did You Know That . . .?” Negro Story, 1 (Oct.–Nov. 1944), 58–9, 59.

58 Franklin, John Hope, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 4th edn (New York, 1974; first published 1947), viiGoogle Scholar.

59 Compare The Negro Almanac: A Reference Work on the Afro American, 1776 Bicentennial Edition 1976, ed. Harry A. Ploski and Warren Marr, II, 1st and 3rd edns (New York, 1967, 1976); Logan, Rayford, The Negro in the United States (Princeton, NJ, 1957), 77–81Google Scholar; Logan, Rayford and Cohen, Irving S., The American Negro: Old World Background and New World Experience, 2nd edn (Boston, 1970), 176–80Google Scholar.

60 Arna Bontemps to Langston Hughes, 25 April 1955, in Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes, Letters, 332–3 (emphasis in original).

61 Brown, Sterling A., “The New Negro in Literature (1925–1955)” (1955), in A Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown, ed. Sanders, Mark A. (Boston, 1996), 184–203, 185Google Scholar.

62 Quotation in Besserman, Lawrence, “The Challenge of Periodization,” in Besserman, ed. The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (New York, 1996), 19 n. 1Google Scholar.

63 See Logan, Rayford, The Negro in American Life and Thought, The Nadir, 1877–1901 (New York, 1954)Google Scholar; Flexner, Eleanor, Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA, 1959)Google Scholar.

64 Ferguson, Wallace K., “The Interpretation of the Renaissance: Suggestions for a Synthesis,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (Oct. 1951), 483–95, 483CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ferguson, Renaissance in Historical Thought, 393.

65 Ferguson, Renaissance in Historical Thought, 393. On Mink see James, Samuel, “Louis Mink, ‘Postmodernism’, and the Vocation of Historiography,” Modern Intellectual History, 7 (April 2010), 151–84, esp. 168–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Ferguson, “Interpretation of the Renaissance,” 485; Cameron, Meribeth, “The Periodization of Chinese History,” Pacific Historical Review, 15 (June 1946), 171–7, 177CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bentley, Michael, Modernizing England's Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar. On Beard's conception of synthesis see Tyrrell, Ian, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970 (Chicago, 2005)Google Scholar.

67 See Henry, Astrid, Not My Mother's Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism (Bloomington, 2004), 57–65Google Scholar.

68 See, for example, Arna Bontemps, “The Harlem Renaissance,” Saturday Evening Review of Literature, 22 March 1947, 12–13, 44; Bontemps, “Heroes of the Harlem Renaissance,” Negro Digest, 5 (June 1947), 20–24.

69 Bontemps, Arna, “The Two Harlems,” American Scholar, 14 (Spring 1945), 167–73, 171Google Scholar.

70 “Harlem Gang Leader: Red Jackson's Life Is One of Fear, Frustration and Violence,” Life, 1 Nov. 1948, 96–104, 106, 102 and 96. On the relationship between photographs of African Americans and their captions see Berger, Martin A., Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley, 2011)Google Scholar.

71 See Jackson, Lawrence P., The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (Princeton, NJ, 2010), 277–80Google Scholar.

72 Both quotations are from Weaver, Robert C., The Negro Ghetto (New York, 1967; first published), 3Google Scholar.

73 Locke, Alain, “Harlem,” Survey Graphic, 6 (March 1925), 629–30, 630Google Scholar.

74 George Schuyler, Sept. 1974, Folder 2, Box 1, Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, SC M87–15, Schomburg Center for Research in Black History, New York.

75 For a more detailed account of this history see Matlin, Daniel, “Who Speaks for Harlem? Kenneth B. Clark, Albert Murray, and the Controversies of Black Urban Life,” Journal of American Studies, 46 (Nov. 2012), 875–94Google Scholar.

76 Ottley, Black Odyssey, 257 and 258.

77 Rotella, Carlo, October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (Berkeley, 1998), 221–4Google Scholar. Usage of Harlem Renaissance in this way, to explain later urban renewal campaigns, can also be found in Chappell, Kevin, “Can Harlem Bring Back the Black Mecca Era?”, Ebony, 56 (Aug. 2001), 152–60Google Scholar, esp. 156.

78 See Stephen Ferry, “Urban Decay in New York City,” March 1995, Editorial Image #774553, Getty Images, at www.gettyimages.com.

79 The “Third World” functioned in a comparable way; see Gilman, Nils, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD, 2003)Google Scholar.

80 On the formation of black studies see Biondi, Martha, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley, 2012)Google Scholar.

81 See Bontemps to Hughes, 25 April 1955, in Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes, Letters, 332–3, 332; Bontemps to Hughes, 22 Nov. 1966, in ibid., 481.

82 Michael Peplow to John Wright, 26 April 1973, Folder: Huggins, Nathan, Voices, Box 591518912, OUP/New York.

83 Washington, Mary Helen, “Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?” American Quarterly, 50 (March 1998), 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 Gerhard, Dietrich, “Periodization in European History,” American Historical Review, 61 (July 1956), 900–13, 900CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 See “Myth and Symbolism in Afro-American Literature,” 1983, UC–Santa Barbara, Center for Black Studies Collection, UArch 45, Department of Special Collections, Santa Barbara, CA. Cheryl Wall notes that “Arna Bontemps taught one of the earliest courses in the Harlem Renaissance, a graduate seminar, at Yale University in 1969–1970.” See Wall, Cheryl, “Histories and Heresies: Engendering the Harlem Renaissance,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 2 (2001), 56–76, 74 n. 6Google Scholar. The Yale catalogue shows that the course was an undergraduate survey that partially covered the “Harlem awakening of the 1920s.” See Yale University Programs of Study, 1969–70 and 1970–71, Series 65 (June 1969), Yale University Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, New Haven, CT.

86 Huggins taught the class in 1970–71 and 1974–75; see “Columbia College,” Columbia Course Bulletins, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, NY; “Tentative Course Descriptions,” c.1969, Folder 1, Box 4, Vassar, College 1969 Black Studies Sit-in Records, 1966–74, Vassar College Archive and Special Collections, Poughkeepsie, NY.

87 See Duffy, David and Frey, Mitsue M., Directory of African & Afro-American Studies in the United States (Waltham, MA, 1979)Google Scholar.

88 “A Progress Report Standing Committee to Develop the Afro-American Studies Department, 22 September 1969,” Harvard University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Folder 11, Box 7, News Bureau, UFP 8.5, University of Pennsylvania, PA. On the role of undergraduate courses in strengthening certain periodizing terms see Evans, Richard J., In Defense of History (London, 1997), 154–6Google ScholarPubMed.

89 On Huggins's career see Levine, Lawrence, “The Historical Odyssey of Nathan Irvin Huggins,” Radical History Review, 55 (Winter 1993), 113–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 118.

90 Rampersad, Arnold, “Foreword,” in Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 2nd edn (New York, 2007; first published 1971), xxvGoogle Scholar.

91 See “Connecticut College to Sponsor Harlem Renaissance Symposium,” Hartford Courant, 17 April 1974, 29; “A Walk Thru Harlem's Renaissance,” New York Amsterdam News, 17 Sept. 1977, D12.

92 Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), 573CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 Huggins, Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, 5 and 3.

94 Blight, David, “In Retrospect: Nathan Irvin Huggins, the Art of History, and the Irony of the American Dream,” Reviews in American History, 22 (March 1994), 174–90, 175CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An alternative view of Huggins is found in Novick, That Noble Dream, 490–91.

95 See “Literature of the American Negro,” n.d., c.1970, Folder: ‘Course Outline’, Box 5, Arthur Paul Davis Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Library, Howard University, Washington, DC.

96 Peplow, Michael and Davis, Arthur P., eds., The New Negro Renaissance: An Anthology (New York, 1975), xxGoogle Scholar.

97 Ibid., xix and xx.

98 Ibid., xx.

99 John Wright to Nathan Huggins, 7 May 1973, Folder: Huggins, Nathan, Voices, Box 591518912, OUP/New York.

100 Nathan Huggins to John Wright, 16 May 1975; Alan Trachtenberg to John Wright, 15 June 1973; Donald Gibson to John Wright, 17 April 1975; John Wright to Nathan Huggins, 9 July 1976, all from Folder: Huggins, Nathan, Voices, Box 591518912, OUP/New York. On the marketing of history in these years see Rosenzweig, Roy, “Marketing the Past: American Heritage and Popular History in the United States,” in Benson, Susanet al., eds., Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public (Philadelphia, 1986), 21–49Google Scholar.

101 “Harlem Renaissance” was placed in the “History” not the “Arts and Humanities” section of William Smith's draft program, for example. See “Black Studies: A Survey of Models and Curricula,” Journal of Black Studies, 1 (March 1971), 259–72, 266 and 268.

102 Martin, Tony, Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts, and the Harlem Renaissance (Dover, MA, 1983), xGoogle Scholar.

103 For evidence of these priorities see Rosanne Bell, “History of Afro-American Literature,” fall 1976, Folder 18, Box 1, Cornell University Africana Studies and Research Center Record, Ithaca, NY; “Afro-American Studies Program,” n.d. (c.1972), Folder 3, Box 8, News Bureau, UFP 8.5, University of Pennsylvania, PA.

104 Hortense Thornton quoted in “Wins Study Grant for Black Rebirth,” New York Amsterdam News, 17 July 1971, B4.

105 Williams, John A., “The Harlem Renaissance: Its Artists, Its Impact, Its Meaning,” Black World, 20 (Nov. 1970), 17–18Google Scholar, 18.

106 Bontemps to Hughes, 16 March 1962, Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes, Letters, 436.

107 Arna Bontemps, “Address to the 26th Annual Educational Conference: Teachers Union of the City of New York, Luncheon Program,” 14 April 1962, Box 62, Arna Bontemps Papers, Syracuse Library, NY (emphasis in original).

108 On the shift in racial terminology see Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA, 1999)Google Scholar; interview with Arna Bontemps, Yale, 18 Dec. 1970, cited in Perry, Margaret, Silence to the Drums: A Survey of the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (Westport, CT, 1976), xivGoogle Scholar. The brackets are Perry's.

109 Wall, “Histories and Heresies,” 63.

110 Cmiel, Kenneth, “Libraries, Books, and the Information Age,” in Nord, David Paulet al., eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 5 (Chapel Hill, 2009), 325–46, 331Google Scholar. See also Abbott, Andrew, “Library Research Infrastructure for Humanistic and Social Scientific Scholarship in the Twentieth Century,” in Camic, Charleset al., eds., Social Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 2011), 43–88. Although “chronological order” was crucial to George Sarton's Isis bibliography, periodizing categories were absent from equivalent catalogues, such as Karl Sudhoff's bibliography of science and medicine. See Stephen Weldon, “Bibliography Is Social: Organizing Knowledge in the Isis Bibliography from Sarton to the Early Twenty-First Century,” Isis, 104 (Sept. 2013), 540–50Google Scholar.

111 Richard Newman to Jean Blackwell Hutson, 18 Oct. 1973, Folder 3, Box 37, Schomburg Center Records, SC MG-4, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.

112 David Levering Lewis, “Précis: When Harlem Was in Vogue: Harlem, 1924–1935,” copy in Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, SC MG-335, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.

113 Fashion remains one of the few creative fields not to have embraced this term. See May Delaney, “Harlem's Vogues: Style, Influence, and ‘Knowingness’ in the Harlem Renaissance” (University of Leeds, BA dissertation, 2011).

114 Cooks, Bridget, “Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind (1969),” American Studies, 48 (Spring 2007), 5–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

115 Baxandall, Michael, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1972)Google Scholar.

116 Linda Robbins to Claire M. Smith, 1 July 1988, Folder: David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, Box 591518935; Sheldon Meyer to Brenda Huggins, 5 June 1995, Folder: Huggins, Nathan, Voices, Box 591518912, both in OUP/New York.

117 Innes, Joanna, “When Did the Victorian Age Begin?”, Journal of Victorian Culture, 11 (Spring 2006), 147–54Google Scholar, 148; Davies, C. S. L., “Representation, Repute, Reality,” English Historical Review, 124 (Dec. 2009), 1432–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

118 Bentley, Modernizing England's Past, 13.

119 Such practices were less pronounced among southern historians; see O'Brien, Michael, Placing the South (Oxford, 2007), 125–6Google Scholar.

120 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, “The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot,” in Knauft, Bruce, ed., Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, 2002), 220–37Google Scholar; Jackson, John L., Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (Chicago, 2001), 28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

121 Nagel, Alexander and Wood, Christopher, “The Authors Reply,” Art Bulletin, 87 (Sept. 2005), 429–32Google Scholar, quotations at 430.