Civil Rights
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.
Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.
Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.
Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.
In August 1908, a white mob attacked Springfield, Illinois’s Black community, destroying homes and businesses and lynching two Black men. National outrage over the violence helped spur the movement that created the NAACP the following year.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Microtypography is a range of methods for improving the readability and appearance of text, especially justified text. The methods reduce the appearance of large interword spaces and create edges to the text that appear more even. Microtypography methods can also increase reading comprehension of text, reducing the cognitive load of reading.
ConTeXt, stylised as ConTeXt, is a general-purpose document processor. Like LaTeX, it is derived from the TeX typesetting system. ConTeXt is especially suited for structured documents, automated document production, very fine typography, and multilingual typesetting. It is based in part on TeX, and uses a document markup language for manuscript preparation. The typographical and automated capabilities of ConTeXt are extensive, including interfaces for handling microtypography, multiple footnotes and footnote classes, and manipulating OpenType fonts and features. Moreover, ConTeXt offers extensive support for colors, backgrounds, hyperlinks, presentations, figure-text integration, and conditional compilation. It gives the user extensive control over formatting, while making it easy to create new layouts and styles without learning the low-level TeX macro language. While comparisons can be made between ConTeXt and LaTeX, the primary objectives of the two systems are distinct. From the outset, ConTeXt has been a typography and typesetting system designed to give users straightforward and consistent access to advanced typographical control, which is crucial for general-purpose typesetting. LaTeX's original vision, on the other hand, was to insulate the user from typographical decisions—an approach particularly useful for tasks such as submitting articles to a scientific journal. Although LaTeX has evolved from this original vision, ConTeXt's unified design prevents the package clashes which are often experienced with LaTeX. ConTeXt provides a multilingual user interface with support for markup in English, Dutch, German, French, and Italian, and support for output in many scripts including western European, eastern European, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. It also allows the user to use different TeX engines, like LuaTeX (MkIV) and LuaMetaTeX (LMTX). Older versions (MkII) worked with pdfTeX or XeTeX. As its native drawing engine, ConTeXt integrates a superset of MetaPost called MetaFun, which allows users to draw page backgrounds and ornaments with MetaPost. MetaFun can also be used directly with MetaPost. ConTeXt also supports the use of other external drawing engines, like PGF/TikZ and PSTricks. ConTeXt also provides a macro package for typesetting chemical structure diagrams with TeX, called PPCHTeX, as well as many other modules. This package can also be used with plain TeX and LaTeX. Originally titled pragmatex, ConTeXt was given its name around 1996 by Hans Hagen from PRAGMA Advanced Document Engineering (Pragma ADE), a Netherlands-based company.
XeTeX ( ZEE-tekh or ; see also TeX § Pronunciation and spelling), sometimes stylized as XeTeX, is a TeX typesetting engine using Unicode and supporting modern font technologies such as OpenType, Graphite and Apple Advanced Typography (AAT). It was originally written by Jonathan Kew and is distributed under the X11 free software license. Initially developed for Mac OS X only, it is now available for all major platforms. It natively supports Unicode and the input file is assumed to be in UTF-8 encoding by default. XeTeX can use any fonts installed in the operating system without configuring TeX font metrics, and can make direct use of advanced typographic features of OpenType, AAT and Graphite technologies such as alternative glyphs and swashes, optional or historic ligatures, and variable font weights. Support for OpenType local typographic conventions (locl tag) is also present. XeTeX even allows raw OpenType feature tags to be passed to the font. Microtypography is also supported. XeTeX also supports typesetting mathematics using Unicode fonts that contain special mathematical features, such as Cambria Math or Asana Math as an alternative to the traditional mathematical typesetting based on TeX font metrics. LaTeX developers have announced that they no longer support new LaTeX functionalities on the XeTeX engine, and encourage users to migrate to LuaTeX, another Unicode-supporting engine.
Kashida or kasheeda (Persian: کَشِیدَه, romanized: kašīda, lit. 'extended' or 'stretched' or 'lengthened'), also known as tatweel or tatwīl (Arabic: تَطْوِيل, romanized: taṭwīl), is a type of justification in written Arabic scripts, in which the line connecting letters is extended. In contrast to white-space justification, which increases the length of a line of text by expanding spaces between words or individual letters, kasheeda creates justification by elongating characters at certain points. Kasheeda justification can be combined with white-space justification. The analog in European (Latin-based) typography (expanding or contracting letters to improve spacing) is sometimes called expansion, and falls within microtypography. Kashida is considerably easier and more flexible, however, because Arabic–Persian scripts feature prominent horizontal strokes, whose lengths are accordingly flexible. For example, al-ḥamdu and Raḥīm with and without kasheeda may look like the following: The terms kasheeda and tatweel can also refer to a character that represents this elongation (ـ) or to one of a set of glyphs of varying lengths that implement this elongation in a font. The Unicode standard assigns code point U+0640 ـ ARABIC TATWEEL. The kasheeda can take a subtle downward curvature in some calligraphic styles and handwriting. However, the curvilinear stroke is not feasible for most basic fonts, which merely use a completely flat underscore-like (or string-like) stroke for kashida. In addition to letter spacing and justification, calligraphers also use kasheeda for emphasis and as book or chapter titles. In modern Arabic mathematical notation, kasheeda appears in some operation symbols that must stretch to accommodate associated contents above or below. Kasheeda generally only appears in one word per line, and one letter per word. Furthermore, experts recommend kasheeda only between certain combinations of letters (typically those that cannot form a ligature). Some calligraphers who were paid by the page used a large number of kasheeda in order to stretch content over more pages. The branding of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar applies kasheeda to Latin script, connecting the bottom of the "t" and the second "a" in the host country's name. A similar concept exists in Hebrew, where certain letters (אדהכלםרת←ﬡﬢﬣﬤﬥﬦﬧﬨ) may be stretched or elongated horizontally for the purpose of block justification in text. This is commonly used in Ktav Stam.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Shirley Chisholm, elected in 1968.