Julie Pottinger, better known by her pen name, Julia Quinn, is an American author of historical romance fiction. Her novels have been translated into 41 languages and have appeared on The New York Times Bestseller List 19 times. She has been inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame. Her Bridgerton series of novels has been adapted for Netflix by Shondaland under the title Bridgerton.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of six million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970. It was substantially caused by poor economic and social conditions due to prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states where Jim Crow laws were upheld. In particular, continued lynchings motivated a portion of the migrants, as African Americans searched for social reprieve. The historic change brought by the migration was amplified because the migrants, for the most part, moved to the then-largest cities in the United States at a time when those cities had a central cultural, social, political, and economic influence over the United States; there, African Americans established culturally influential communities of their own. According to Isabel Wilkerson, despite the loss of leaving their homes in the South, and the barriers faced by the migrants in their new homes, the migration was an act of individual and collective agency, which changed the course of American history, a "declaration of independence" written by their actions.
The Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing is one of the fourteen American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Journalism. It has been awarded since 1979 for a distinguished example of feature writing giving prime consideration to high literary quality and originality.
The Known World is a historical novel by American author Edward P. Jones, published in 2003. Set in antebellum Virginia, the novel explores the complex and morally ambiguous world of slavery, focusing on the unusual phenomenon of black enslavers. The book received widespread critical acclaim for its innovative storytelling, richly drawn characters, and profound examination of power, race, and the human condition in the context of American slavery.
Shonda Lynn Rhimes, is an American television producer and screenwriter, and founder of the production company Shondaland. Inducted into the Television Hall of Fame and NAB Broadcasting Hall of Fame, Rhimes became known as the showrunner—creator, head writer, and executive producer—of the medical drama Grey's Anatomy (2005–present), its spin-off Private Practice (2007–2013) and the political thriller Scandal (2012–2018), becoming the first woman to create three television dramas that have achieved the 100 episode milestone.
George Jack Makari is a psychiatrist and historian. He serves as director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts, which encompasses the Oskar Diethelm Library at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he is also a Professor of Psychiatry. Makari's work has been widely reviewed, and he is well known among historians of the mind sciences, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis for Revolution in Mind, The Creation of Psychoanalysis and Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind. His recent work, Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, won the 87th annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in the nonfiction category. He was the Director and Attending Psychiatrist of a sliding scale Psychotherapy Clinic at Payne Whitney Clinic from 1991-2016.
David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
In the context of the 20th-century history of the United States, the Second Great Migration was the migration of more than 5 million African Americans from the South to the Northeast, Midwest and West. It began in 1940, through World War II, and lasted until 1970. It was much larger and of a different character than the first Great Migration (1916–1940), where the migrants were mainly rural farmers from the South and only came to the Northeast and Midwest.
Isabel Wilkerson is an African-American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family is a 2008 book by American historian Annette Gordon-Reed. It recounts the history of four generations of the African-American Hemings family, from their African and Virginia origins until the 1826 death of Thomas Jefferson, their master and the father of Sally Hemings' children.
Annette Gordon-Reed is an American historian and law professor. She is currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and a professor of history in the university's Faculty of Arts & Sciences. She is formerly the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Gordon-Reed is noted for changing scholarship on Thomas Jefferson regarding his relationship with Sally Hemings and her children.
Migration studies is the academic study of human migration. Migration studies is an interdisciplinary field which draws on anthropology, prehistory, history, economics, law, sociology and postcolonial studies.
Shondaland is an American television production company founded by television writer and producer Shonda Rhimes. She founded it to be one of the production companies of her first series, the medical drama Grey's Anatomy in 2005. It has since gone on to produce Rhimes's other creations, Grey's spinoff Private Practice and the political drama Scandal, and her other productions—the short-lived Off the Map, the Viola Davis-starring legal thriller How to Get Away with Murder, and the crime thriller The Catch—all of which are co-produced with ABC Studios and air on ABC. As of 2017, it has a partnership affiliation with Netflix creating shows like Bridgerton and the spin-off Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. Their logo features a rollercoaster.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels and has published extensively on the recognition of African-American literature as part of the Western canon.
Namwali Serpell is an American and Zambian writer who teaches in the United States. In April 2014, she was named on Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with the potential and talent to define trends in African literature. Her short story "The Sack" won the 2015 Caine Prize for African fiction in English. In 2020, Serpell won the Belles-lettres category Grand Prix of Literary Associations 2019 for her debut novel The Old Drift.
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, authored by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr., is an anthropological and sociological study of the African-American urban experience in the first half of the 20th century. Published in 1945, later expanded editions added some material relating to the 1950s and 1960s. Relying on massive research conducted in Chicago, primarily as part of a Works Progress Administration program, Drake and Cayton produced, according to the Encyclopedia of African American History, a "foundational text in African American history, cultural studies, and urban sociology."
Luvvie Ajayi, also known as Luvvie Ajayi Jones, is a Nigerian–American author, speaker, and digital strategist. Her book, I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual, was a New York Times best-seller.
The Great Migration: Journey to the North is a 2011 children's poetry book. Written by Eloise Greenfield and illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist, the poems depict the experiences and feelings of African-American families that participated in the Great Migration in the United States in the 20th century. It was first published by Amistad.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a nonfiction book by the American journalist Isabel Wilkerson, published in August 2020 by Random House. The book describes racism in the United States as an aspect of a caste system—a society-wide system of social stratification characterized by notions such as hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, and purity. Wilkerson does so by comparing aspects of the experience of American people of color to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany, and she explores the impact of caste on societies shaped by them, and their people.
