As early as 1909, African Americans were utilizing the new medium of cinema to catalogue the world around them, using the film camera as a device to capture their lives and their history. The daunting subject of race and ethnicity permeated life in America at the turn of the twentieth century and due to the effect of certain early films, specific television images, and an often-biased news media, it still plagues us today. As new technologies bring the power of the moving image to the masses, African Americans will shoot and edit on laptop computers and share their stories with a global audience via the World Wide Web. These independently produced visions will add to the diverse cache of African American images being displayed on an ever-expanding silver screen. This wide range of stories, topics, views, and genres will finally give the world a glimpse of African American life that has long been ignored and has yet to be seen. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1400 cross-referenced entries on actors, actresses, movies, producers, organizations, awards, and terminology, this book provides a better understanding of the role African Americans played in film history. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about African American cinema.

Alphabetically-arranged entries from O to T that explores significant events, major persons, organizations, and political and social movements in African-American history from 1896 to the twenty-first-century.

Biographical and critical information on contemporary African-American artists. Each entry includes birth and death dates, education, awards, and affiliations.

An encyclopedic guide to 20th-century communism around the world The first book of its kind to appear since the end of the Cold War, this indispensable reference provides encyclopedic coverage of communism and its impact throughout the world in the 20th century. With the opening of archives in former communist states, scholars have found new material that has expanded and sometimes altered the understanding of communism as an ideological and political force. A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism brings this scholarship to students, teachers, and scholars in related fields. In more than 400 concise entries, the book explains what communism was, the forms it took, and the enormous role it played in world history from the Russian Revolution through the collapse of the Soviet Union and beyond. Examines the political, intellectual, and social influences of communism around the globe Features contributions from an international team of 160 scholars Includes more than 400 entries on major topics, such as: Figures: Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Castro, Gorbachev Events: Cold War, Prague Spring, Cultural Revolution, Sandinista Revolution Ideas and concepts: Marxism-Leninism, cult of personality, labor Organizations and movements: KGB, Comintern, Gulag, Khmer Rouge Related topics: totalitarianism, nationalism, antifascism, anticommunism, McCarthyism Guides readers to further research through bibliographies, cross-references, and an index

A bridge to African American dialect, culture and nuance, this dictionary of over 1,000 words and phrases is a fully cross-referenced, authoritative guide to current African American slang. Sample Definitions Funky: Odiferous; attractive; suggestive of metaphorical aura surrounding guiding nuances of greater African American culture, individual embodiment or expression of the African American population's sense of cultural self, or ethnic identity based on shared experience, struggle, or upbringing; indicative of a genre of music popular in the late twentieth century influenced by blues, gospel, jazz, psychedelia, reggae, rock, rhythm and blues, and soul and characterized by strong, frequently changing and often idiosyncratic rhythms. See also: bananas, dragon, fly, foine, fresh, funk, funky-ass, funky-ass shit, funky-fresh, funky shit, off da chain and rank. Ghetto pass: The earned ability for one to conduct him or herself in a neighborhood unscathed, based especially on the acceptance of the common person and the shared result of the individual's appearance, behaviors and mannerisms, discourse, knowledge of cultural mores, social hierarchies and systems as well as explicit demonstrations of physical prowess and strength. See also: down, ghetto, soldier, street, street cred and street knowledge.

Covers the entire spectrum of the African-American literary tradition, from the eighteenth-century writings of pioneers such as Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley, to twentieth-century canonic texts, to the finest of today's best-selling authors and rap artists.