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This official tie-in to the highly acclaimed film, The Birth of a Nation, surveys the history and legacy of Nat Turner, the leader of one of the most renowned slave rebellions on American soil, while also exploring Turner’s relevance to contemporary dialogues on race relations. Based on astounding events in American history, The Birth of a Nation is the epic story of one man championing the spirit of resistance as he leads a rough-and-tumble group into a revolt against injustice and slavery. Breathing new life into a story that has been rife with controversy and prejudice for over two centuries, the film follows the rise of the visionary Virginian slave, Nat Turner. Hired out by his owner to preach to and placate slaves on drought-plagued plantations, Turner eventually transforms into an inspired, impassioned, and fierce anti-slavery leader. Beautifully illustrated with stills from the movie and original illustrations, the book also features an essay by writer/director, Nate Parker, contributions by members of the cast and crew, and commentary by educator Brian Favors and historians Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Daina Ramey Berry who place Nat Turner and the rebellion he led into historical context. The Birth of a Nation reframes the way we think about slavery and resistance as it explores the passion, determination, and faith that inspired Nat Turner to sacrifice everything for freedom.
In this deeply researched and vividly written volume, Melvyn Stokes illuminates the origins, production, reception and continuing history of this ground-breaking, aesthetically brilliant, and yet highly controversial movie. By going back to the original archives, particularly the NAACP and D. W. Griffith Papers, Stokes explodes many of the myths surrounding The Birth of a Nation (1915). Yet the story that remains is fascinating: the longest American film of its time, Griffith's film incorporated many new features, including the first full musical score compiled for an American film. It was distributed and advertised by pioneering methods that would quickly become standard. Through the high prices charged for admission and the fact that it was shown, at first, only in "live" theaters with orchestral accompaniment, Birth played a major role in reconfiguring the American movie audience by attracting more middle-class patrons. But if the film was a milestone in the history of cinema, it was also undeniably racist. Stokes shows that the darker side of this classic movie has its origins in the racist ideas of Thomas Dixon, Jr. and Griffith's own Kentuckian background and earlier film career. The book reveals how, as the years went by, the campaign against the film became increasingly successful. In the 1920s, for example, the NAACP exploited the fact that the new Ku Klux Klan, which used Griffith's film as a recruiting and retention tool, was not just anti-black, but also anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, as a way to mobilize new allies in opposition to the film. This crisply written book sheds light on both the film's racism and the aesthetic brilliance of Griffith's filmmaking. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the cinema.
Over one hundred years since it premiered on cinema screens, D. W. Griffith's controversial photoplay The Birth of a Nation continues to influence American film production and to have relevance for race relations in the United States. This work challenges the idea the United States has moved beyond racial problems and highlights the role of film and representation in the continued struggle for equality.
In 1915, two men -- one a journalist agitator, the other a technically brilliant filmmaker -- incited a public confrontation that roiled America, pitting black against white, Hollywood against Boston, and free speech against civil rights. Monroe Trotter and D. W. Griffith were fighting over a film that dramatized the Civil War and Reconstruction in a post-Confederate South. Almost fifty years earlier, Monroe's father, James, was a sergeant in an all-black Union regiment that marched into Charleston, South Carolina, just as the Kentucky cavalry -- including Roaring Jack Griffith, D. W.'s father -- fled for their lives. Griffith's film, The Birth of a Nation, included actors in blackface, heroic portraits of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and a depiction of Lincoln's assassination. Freed slaves were portrayed as villainous, vengeful, slovenly, and dangerous to the sanctity of American values. It was tremendously successful, eventually seen by 25 million Americans. But violent protests against the film flared up across the country. Monroe Trotter's titanic crusade to have the film censored became a blueprint for dissent during the 1950s and 1960s. This is the fiery story of a revolutionary moment for mass media and the nascent civil rights movement, and the men clashing over the cultural and political soul of a still-young America standing at the cusp of its greatest days.
In Uplift Cinema, Allyson Nadia Field recovers the significant yet forgotten legacy of African American filmmaking in the 1910s. Like the racial uplift project, this cinema emphasized economic self-sufficiency, education, and respectability as the keys to African American progress. Field discusses films made at the Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes to promote education, as well as the controversial The New Era, which was an antiracist response to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. She also shows how Black filmmakers in New York and Chicago engaged with uplift through the promotion of Black modernity. Uplift cinema developed not just as a response to onscreen racism, but constituted an original engagement with the new medium that has had a deep and lasting significance for African American cinema. Although none of these films survived, Field's examination of archival film ephemera presents a method for studying lost films that opens up new frontiers for exploring early film culture.
Birth of a White Nation, Second Edition examines the social construction of race through the invention of white people. Surveying colonial North American law and history, the book interrogates the origins of racial inequality and injustice in American society, and details how the invention still serves to protect the ruling elite to the present day. This second edition documents the proliferation of ideas imposed and claimed throughout history that have conspired to give content, form, and social meaning to one’s racial classification. Beginning its expanded narrative with the development of diverse Native American societies through contact with European colonizers in the Tidewater region, and progressing to the emigration of Mexicans, Irish, and other "non-whites", this new edition addresses the ongoing production and reproduction of whiteness as a distinct and dominant social category. It also looks to the future by developing a new, applied framework for countering racial inequality and promoting greater awareness of anti-racist policies and practices. Birth of a White Nation will be of great interest to students, scholars, and general readers seeking to make sense of the dramatic racial inequities of our time and to forge an antiracist path forward.
A biography of our first President, from his growing-up years in Virginia to his death at Mount Vernon.
Co-edited and introduced by Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Birth of a Nation'hood elucidates as never before the grim miasma of the O.J. Simpson case, which has elicited gargantuan fascination. As they pertain to the scandal, the issues of race, sex, violence, money, and the media are refracted through twelve powerful essays that have been written especially for this book by distinguished intellectuals--black and white, male and female. Together these keen analyses of a defining American moment cast a chilling gaze on the script and spectacle of the insidious tensions that rend our society, even as they ponder the proper historical, cultural, political, legal, psychological, and linguistic ramifications of the affair. With contributions by: Toni Morrison, George Lipsitz, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., with Aderson Bellegarde Francois and Linda Y. Yueh, Nikol G. Alexander and Drucilla Cornell, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Ishmael Reed, Leola Johnson and David Roediger, Andrew Ross, Patricia J. Williams, Ann duCille, Armond White, Claudia Brodsky Lacour
Launched in Nairobi in 1960, three years before the birth of independent Kenya, the Nation group of newspapers grew up sharing the struggles of an infant nation, suffering the pain of its failures and rejoicing in its successes. Marking its 50th anniversary in 2010, the Nation looks back on its performance as the standard-bearer for journalistic integrity and how far it fell short or supported the loyalty demanded by its founding slogan 'The Truth shall make you free'. The Aga Khan was still a student at Harvard University when he decided that an honest and independent newspaper would be a crucial contribution to East Africa's peaceful transition to democracy. The "Sunday Nation" and "Daily Nation" were launched in 1960 when independence for Kenya was not far over the horizon. They quickly established a reputation for honesty and fair-mindedness, while shocking the colonial and settler establishment by calling for the release of the man who could become the nation's first prime minister, Jomo Kenyatta, and early negotiations for 'Uhuru'. The history of the 'Nation' papers and that of Kenya are closely intertwined; in the heat of its printing presses and philosophical struggles, that story is told here: from committed beginnings to its position today as East Africa's leading newspaper group.