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This book examines the flowering of African American creativity, activism, and scholarship in the South Side Chicago district known as Bronzeville during the period between the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Poverty stricken, segregated, and bursting at the seams with migrants, Bronzeville was the community that provided inspiration, training, and work for an entire generation of diversely talented African American authors and artists who came of age during the years between the two world wars. This book investigates the institutions and streetscapes of Black Chicago that fueled an entire literary and artistic movement. It argues that African American authors and artists—such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, painter Archibald Motley, and many others—viewed and presented black reality from a specific geographic vantage point: the view along the streets of Bronzeville. The book explores how the particular rhythms and scenes of daily life in Bronzeville locations, such as the State Street “Stroll” district or the bustling intersection of 47th Street and South Parkway, figured into the creative works and experiences of the artists and writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance.

The notion that war plays a fundamental role in the United States' idea of itself obscures the rich—and by no means naïve—seam of anti-war thinking that winds through American culture. This book engages with the question of what makes a text anti-war. Ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joel Barlow to Maxine Hong Kingston and Tim O'Brien, this book explores why sustained attempts at identifying the anti-war texts formal and philosophical features seem to always end at an impasse. The book moves a step beyond to construct a theoretical model that invites new inquiries into America's nonviolent, nonconformist tradition even as it challenges the ways we study U.S. war-making and the cultural reactions to it. In the process, it defines anti-war literature and explores the genre's role in the assertive peace-fighting project that offered—and still offers—alternatives to violence.