The cultural campaigns of the NAACP: 1910-1955
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) used a wide range of strategies for securing racial equality. These included some perhaps surprising tactics: it encouraged black writers and artists, published poems and plays, organised an art exhibition, picketed cinemas and dined with Hollywood moguls. This thesis explores the NAACP's involvement with and use of the arts and popular culture between 1910 and 1955. It asks why the NAACP developed a culturalf strategy, what this strategy was and how it was implemented, and what it reveals about the NAACP as an organisation during the first half of the twentieth century. 
 
The NAACP believed that racial inequality was caused by racial prejudice. In other words, African Americans suffered political, social and economic discrimination because of the attitudes of white Americans toward the race. These attitudes were formed in large part by the depiction of blacks in American culture. Therefore, the NAACP hoped that if it could change the representation of the race then it could alter white prejudices and achieve racial equality. The NAACP challenged what it considered to be negative cultural representations of African Americans and sought to replace them with positive images. It saw the creation of 'high' culture as a signifier of a group's status and believed the production of fine art and literature could be used to prove that African Americans 'deserved' equal rights. Furthermore, it used culture to instil racial pride and to forge a sense of a collective black identity. The arts were also utilised to change attitudes on specific issues, most notably to encourage anti-lynching sentiment amongst whites. The NAACP believed that culture could be used as a weapon in the fight for racial equality.
Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s
"Terrible Honesty" is a portrait of the soul of a generation, the story of the men and women who made New York the capital of American literature, music, and language in the 1920s. Ann Douglas's magnificent account of "mongrel Manhattan" focuses especially on brilliant and diverse artists - F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Eugene O'Neill, Walter Winchell, Ernest Hemingway and Irving Berlin among them - and on those who influenced them most strongly, the powerful figures of Sigmund Freud, William James and Gertrude Stein. Ann Douglas argues that when, after World War I, the United States began to assume the economic and political leadership of the West, American artists and thinkers determined to break with what they saw as the false and derivative cultural tradition of Europe and the past. New York became the heart of that daring and accomplished historical transformation when blacks and whites, men and women together created the new American culture.
We're in the money : depression America and its films
Part 1 Introduction xi Part 2 A Note on the Movie Industry and the Depression xix Part 3 PART ONE 1930-1933 Chapter 4 The Gangsters 3 Chapter 5 The Shyster and the City 18 Chapter 6 Some Anarcho-Nihilist Laff Riots 30 Chapter 7 Sex and Personal Relations: Women of the Streets, Women of the World 49 Chapter 8 A Musical Interlude 62 Part 9 PART TWO 1933-1939 Chapter 10 Back to the Earth: King Kong and King Vidor 69 Chapter 11 The G-Man and the Cowboy 83 Chapter 12 Warner Brothers Presents Social Consciousness 92 Chapter 13 The Mob and the Search for Authority, 1933-1937 110 Chapter 14 Frank Capra and Screwball Comedy, 1931-1941 132 Chapter 15 A Solution to Environment: The Juvenile Delinquent 149 Chapter 16 Conclusions 167 Part 17 Notes 175 Part 18 Bibliography 187 Part 19 Index 195