http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fga__y6NulU&feature=related

Louis ArmstrongOne of the most famous jazz musicians of the 20th century, he first achieved fame as a trumpeter, but toward the end of his career he was best known as a vocalist and was one of the most influential jazz singers. African-American jazz composer-trumpeter. He also sang in a gravelly voice. (It’s a Wonderful World”)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ostKKWXJvbE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MzU8xM99Uo

Bessie SmithBessie Smith is largely regarded as the most popular and successful blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s, and by some as the most influential performer in blues history. African-American blues singer “Empress of the Blues”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBOBHB4jR8g

Duke EllingtonMany regard Duke Ellington as one of the most important figures to emerge from the U.S. jazz scene in the twentieth century. He was one of the twentieth century's best-known African-American celebrities. He recorded for many American record companies, and appeared in several films. African-American jazz composer and piano player. He was a well known celebrity.

Langston HughesHughes was an American poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, and newspaper columnist. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. He combined the experiences of African and American cultural roots to reflect and lift African-Americans in society. African-American poet who combined the experiences of African and American cultural roots

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mFp40WJbsA&feature=related

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain:

The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.

Jacob LawrenceLawrence is easily among the best-known twentieth century African American painters. African-American painter who chronicled the experiences of the Great Migration north through art.

The “Lost Generation” in the

Jazz Age

George GershwinGeorge Gershwin was an American composer who wrote uniquely American music. Many of his compositions have been used on television and in numerous films, and many became jazz standards. Composer who wrote uniquely American music used in commercials and on Broadway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U40xBSz6Dc

Georgia O’KeefeO'Keeffe has been a major figure in American art since the 1920s. “Her clear bright paintings show the beauty she found in simple, natural things around her.” Artist known for urban scenes and, later, paintings of the Southwest which often had flowers, and animal bones like skulls.

Aaron Copland

Copland was an American composer of concert and film music.

Instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, he was widely known as

"the dean of American composers". Copland's music achieved a difficult balance between modern and American folk styles, said to represent the vast

American landscape.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsReWx9XdNs&feature=related

F. Scott FitzgeraldFitzgerald an Irish American Jazz Age novelist and short story writer. He wrote The Great Gatsby.He is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. He finished four novels, left a fifth unfinished, and wrote dozens of short stories in addition to his musical accomplishments.

The Great Gatsby

Cover of the first edition, 1925.

The novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the "Jazz Age”

Although Fitzgerald, like Nick Carraway in his novel, idolized the riches and glamor of the age, he was uncomfortable with the unrestrained materialism and the lack of morality that went with it.

John Steinbeck• John Steinbeck was a novelist (author)

who portrayed the strength of poor migrant workers during the 1930s.

• “John Steinbeck arrived at the migrant camps in northern California in the late 1930s with little experience as a political writer. What he found stirred enough anger to convince him to take on the topic in what would become his most famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath.”

From the movie starring Henry Fonda

From the many works of John Steinbeck