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Hubert Harrison

Hubert Henry Harrison (April 27, 1883 – December 17, 1927) was a West Indian-American writer, orator, educator, critic, race and class conscious political activist, and radical internationalist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by activist A. Philip Randolph as "the father of Harlem radicalism" and by the historian Joel Augustus Rogers as "the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time." John G. Jackson of American Atheists described him as "The Black Socrates".

An immigrant from St. Croix at the age of 17, Harrison played significant roles in the largest radical class and race movements in the United States. In 1912–14, he was the leading Black organizer in the Socialist Party of America. In 1917 he founded the Liberty League and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper of the race-conscious "New Negro" movement. From his Liberty League and Voice came the core leadership of individuals and race-conscious program of the Garvey movement.

Harrison was a seminal and influential thinker who encouraged the development of class consciousness among workers, black pride, agnostic atheism, secular humanism, social progressivism, and freethought. He was also a self-described "radical internationalist" and contributed significantly to the Caribbean radical tradition. Harrison profoundly influenced a generation of "New Negro" militants, including A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, Marcus Garvey, Richard Benjamin Moore, W. A. Domingo, Williana Burroughs, and Cyril Briggs.

Early life
Hubert was born to Cecilia Elizabeth Haines, a working-class woman, on Estate Concordia, St. Croix, Danish West Indies. His biological father, Adolphus Harrison, was born enslaved. One account from the 1920s suggested that Harrison's father owned a substantial estate. Harrison's biographer, however, found no such landholding and writes that "there is no indication that Adolphus, a laborer his entire life, ever owned, or even rented, land". As a youth, Harrison knew poverty but also learned of African customs and the Crucian people's rich history of direct action mass struggles. Among his schoolmates was his lifelong friend, the future Crucian labor leader and social activist, D. Hamilton Jackson.

In later life Harrison worked with many Virgin Islands-born activists, including James C. Canegata, Anselmo Jackson, Rothschild Francis, Elizabeth Hendrikson, Casper Holstein, and Frank Rudolph Crosswaith. He was especially active in Virgin Island causes after the March 1917 U.S. purchase of the Virgin Islands, and subsequent abuses under the U.S. naval occupation of the islands.

Emigration and education
Harrison came to New York in 1900 as a 17-year-old orphan and joined his older sister. He confronted a racial oppression unlike anything he previously knew, as only the United States had such a binary color line. In the Caribbean, social relations were more fluid. Harrison was especially "shocked" by the virulent white-supremacy typified by lynchings, which were reaching a peak in these years in the South. They were a horror that had not existed in St. Croix or other Caribbean islands. In addition, the fact that in most places blacks and people of color far outnumbered whites meant they had more social spaces in which to operate away from the oversight of whites.

In the beginning, Harrison worked low-paying service jobs while attending high school at night. For the rest of his life, Harrison continued to study as an autodidact. While he was still in high school, his intellectual gifts were recognized. He was described as a "genius" in The World, a New York daily newspaper. At age 20, he had an early letter published by The New York Times in 1903. He became an American citizen and lived in the United States the rest of his life.

Marriage and family
In 1909 Harrison married Irene Louise Horton. They had four daughters and one son.

Career
In his first decade in New York, Harrison started writing letters to the editor of The New York Times on topics such as lynching, Charles Darwin's theory of Evolution and literary criticism. He also began lecturing on such subjects as the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Reconstruction. As part of his civic efforts, Harrison worked with St. Benedict's Lyceum (along with bibliophile Arthur Schomburg from Puerto Rico, journalist John Edward Bruce, and activist Samuel Duncan); St. Mark's Lyceum (with bibliophile George Young, educator/activist John Dotha Jones, and actor/activist Charles Burroughs); the White Rose Home (with educator/activist Frances Reynolds Keyser), and the Colored YMCA.

In this period, Harrison also became interested in the freethought movement, which encouraged use of the scientific method, empiricism, and reason to solve problems in place of theistic dogma. He deconverted from Christianity and became an agnostic atheist similar to Thomas Huxley, one of his influences. Harrison's new worldview placed humanity, not god, at its center.

Like Huxley, Harrison became a relentless foe of theism and religious faith for the rest of his life. He denounced the Bible as a slave master's book, said that black Christians needed their heads examined, and refused to exalt a "lily white God " and "Jim Crow Jesus." He rebuked the famous motto, "Take the world, but give me Jesus", saying that it legitimized anti-black racism and discrimination. He also said that he preferred going to hell rather than heaven since Satan and his demons were black while God, Jesus, and the angels were white. Harrison repeatedly offered scathing rebuttals to both the Bible and the existence of God in his sociopolitical commentary. Theists, incensed at his outspoken disbelief, often rioted during his lectures and public speeches. During one such incident, Harrison disarmed and chased off a religious extremist who attacked him with a crowbar. A policeman arrested Harrison for assault, letting the assailant get away. A judge found Harrison innocent on grounds of self-defense and admonished the officer for detaining the wrong person. Harrison had been arguing at his event for birth control, and castigating Churches for advancing racism, superstition, ignorance, and poverty.

Harrison was a firm advocate for separation of Church and State, taxation of religious organizations, and teaching evolution in schools. He said that Caucasians were more like apes than black people, having straight hair and fair skin. He also famously remarked, "Show me a population that is deeply religious, and I will show you a servile population, content with whips and chains, contumely and the gibbet, content to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the waters of affliction." Harrison wrote in his 1914 book The Negro Conservative that "It should seem that Negroes, of all Americans, would be found in the Free-thought fold, since they have suffered more than any other class of Americans from the dubious blessings of Christianity."

In 1907 Harrison obtained a job at the United States Post Office.

Harrison was an early supporter of the protest philosophies of W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. Particularly after the Brownsville Affair, Harrison became an outspoken critic of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and of the Republican Party.

Harrison expressed disapproval of Booker T. Washington, a prominent Black leader, characterizing his political philosophy as subservient. In 1910, Harrison wrote two critical letters to the New York Sun, challenging Washington's statements. As a result of the influential "Tuskegee Machine" led by Washington, Harrison lost his postal job. The sequence of events involved Charles W. Anderson, a prominent Black Republican, Emmett Scott, Washington's assistant, and Edward M. Morgan, the New York Postmaster.

Socialism
Harrison was an early advocate of the Georgist economic philosophy and later clarified that he had believed Georgism was the same thing as socialism. In 1911, after his postal firing, Harrison began full-time work with the Socialist Party of America and became America's leading Black Socialist. He lectured widely against capitalism, campaigned for the party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs in 1912, and founded the Colored Socialist Club (the Socialist's first effort at reaching African Americans). He developed two important and pioneering theoretical series on "The Negro and Socialism" for the socialist newspaper the New York Call and for the socialist monthly International Socialist Review. In these articles Harrison outlined a materialist analysis of racism, arguing that it resulted from "the fallacy of economic fear" and economic competition, and that capitalists had an interest in maintaining economic discrimination based on racism, as "they can always use it as a club for the other workers". He maintained that it was the principal "duty" of the Socialists to "champion the cause of the African American and that the Socialists should undertake special efforts to reach African Americans as they had done with foreigners and women." Perhaps most importantly, he emphasized that "Politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic idea" and that true democracy and equality implies "a revolution... startling even to think of."

Harrison moved to the left in the Socialist Party. He supported the socialistic, egalitarian, and militantly radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He was a prominent speaker along with IWW leaders Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, and Patrick Quinlan at the historic 1913 Paterson Silk Strike of 1913. He also supported IWW advocacy of direct action and sabotage. He commended the interracial, IWW-influenced, Brotherhood of Timber Workers efforts in the Deep South.

Despite his efforts, Socialist Party practice and positions included segregated locals in the South and racist positions on Asian immigration. Harrison's position in the Party was also affected by his alignment with its left-wing and the IWW, who were engaged in factional struggle with its right-wing faction: many leftists exited after Haywood (who had been a member of the SPA's executive committee) was expelled from the Party in 1912. The Socialist Party of New York was led by Morris Hillquit, a prominent figure on the right, and party leaders in New York City began restricting Harrison's activities, including preventing his own branch from having him as a speaker. Harrison concluded that Socialist Party leaders, like organized labor, put the white "Race first and class after." After writing a note to the NYC executive committee telling it to "go chase itself", he was suspended from the Party for three months: he resigned from the Socialist Party in 1918, before his suspension was over, but was periodically referred to as a socialist by others for years afterwards. After resigning from the Socialist Party, Harrison increased his activism within the 1920s Single-Tax movement.

Race radicalism and the New Negro Movement
In 1914–15, after withdrawing from the Socialist Party, Harrison began work with freethinkers, the freethought/anarchist-influenced Modern School Movement (started by the martyred Spanish anarchist/educator Francisco Ferrer), and his own Radical Forum. He also spoke widely on topics such as birth control, evolution, literature, nonbelief, and the racial aspects of World War I. His outdoor talks and free speech efforts were instrumental in developing a Harlem tradition of militant street corner oratory. He paved the way for those who followed, including A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, Richard B. Moore, and (later) Malcolm X.

In 1915–16, after a New York Age editorial by James Weldon Johnson praised his street lectures, Harrison decided to concentrate his work in Harlem's Black community. He wrote reviews on the developing Black Theatre and the pioneering Lafayette Players of the Lafayette Theatre (Harlem). He emphasized how the "Negro Theater" helped express the psychology of the "Negro" and how it called attention to color consciousness within the African-American community.

In response to the "white first" attitude of the organized labor movement and the Socialists, Harrison provided a "race first" political perspective. He founded the "New Negro Movement," as a race-conscious, internationalist, mass-based, radical movement for equality, justice, opportunity, and economic power. This "New Negro" movement laid the basis for the Garvey movement. It encouraged mass interest in literature and the arts, and paved the way for publication of Alain Locke's well-known The New Negro eight years later. Harrison's mass-based political movement was noticeably different from the more middle-class and apolitical movement associated with Locke.

In 1917, African Americans and others were asked to 'Make the World Safe for Democracy" by fighting during World War I. In the United States, lynchings, racial segregation and discrimination continued. Harrison founded the Liberty League and the Voice: A Newspaper for the New Negro, as a radical alternative to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The Liberty League aimed at the Black masses beyond "The Talented Tenth". Its program advocated internationalism, political independence, and class and race consciousness. It called for full equality, federal anti-lynching legislation, enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, labor organizing, support for socialist and anti-imperialist causes, armed self-defense, and mass-based political efforts. Meanwhile, the Voice achieved circulation of up to 10,000 per issue, however it ceased publication in November 1917 after five months, after refusing to accept advertising for products Harrison felt were damaging to racial pride such as hair straighteners and skin lighteners, and due to poor financial management. Harrison pointed to Ireland and the Irish Home Rule movement as an example to emulate.

In 1918 Harrison briefly served as an organizer for the American Federation of Labor (AFL). He chaired the Negro-American Liberty Congress (co-headed by William Monroe Trotter.) The latter was the major wartime protest effort of African Americans. The Liberty Congress pushed demands against discrimination and racial segregation in the United States. It submitted a petition to the U. S. Congress for federal anti-lynching legislation, which the NAACP did not demand at that time. Harrison commented on domestic and international aspects of the war, writing: "During the war the idea of democracy was widely advertised, especially in the English-speaking world, mainly as a convenient camouflage behind which competing imperialists masked their sordid aims... [however] those who so loudly proclaimed and formulated the new democratic demands never had the slightest intention of extending the limits or the applications of 'democracy.'"

The autonomous Liberty Congress effort was undermined by the U.S. Army's anti-radical Military Intelligence Bureau (MIB) in a campaign that included NAACP leader Joel E. Spingarn (a Major in Military Intelligence) and W. E. B. Du Bois (who applied for a Captaincy in Military Intelligence). The Liberty Congress protest efforts in wartime can be seen as precursors to the A. Philip Randolph-led March on Washington Movement during World War II, and to the Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr.-led March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom during the Vietnam War.

In 1919 Harrison edited the monthly New Negro magazine, which was "intended as an organ of the international consciousness of the darker races--especially of the Negro race". Harrison's concentration on international matters continued. Over the next several years, he wrote many powerful pieces critical of imperialism and supportive of internationalism. His writings and talks over his last decade revealed a deep understanding of developments in India, China, Africa, Asia, the Islamic world, and the Caribbean. Harrison repeatedly began his analysis of contemporary situations from an international perspective. Though a strong advocate of armed self-defense for African Americans, he also praised the mass-based non-violent efforts of Mohandas K. Gandhi.

The Garvey Movement
In January 1920 Harrison became principal editor of the Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Over the next eight months, he developed it into the leading race-conscious, radical and literary publication of the day. By the August 1920 UNIA convention, Harrison had grown increasingly critical of Garvey. Harrison criticized Garvey for exaggerations, financial schemes, and desire for empire. In contrast to Garvey, Harrison emphasized that African Americans' principal struggle was in the United States, not in Africa. Harrison did however contribute to the UNIA's 1920 "Declaration of the Negro Peoples of the World". Though Harrison continued to write for the Negro World into 1922, he looked to develop political alternatives to Garvey.

Later years
In the 1920s, after breaking with Garvey, Harrison continued public speaking, writing, and organizing. He lectured on politics history, science, literature, social sciences, international affairs, and the arts for the New York City Board of Education, and was one of the first to use radio to discuss topics in which he had expertise. In early July 1923, he spoke on "The Negro and The Nation" over New York station WEAF. His book and theater reviews and other writings appeared in many of the leading periodicals of the day—including The New York Times, New York Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News, New York World, Nation, New Republic, Modern Quarterly, Boston Chronicle, and Opportunity magazine. He openly criticized the Ku Klux Klan and the racist attacks of the "Tulsa Race Riot" of 1921. He worked with various groups, including the Virgin Island Congressional Council, the Democratic Party, the Farmer-Labor Party, the single tax movement inspired by Henry George, the American Friends Service Committee, the Urban League, the American Negro Labor Congress, and the Workers (Communist) Party (the name at that time of the Communist Party USA).

In 1924 Harrison founded the International Colored Unity League (ICUL), which was his most broadly unitary effort. The ICUL urged Black people to develop "race consciousness" as a defensive measure—to be aware of their racial oppression and to use that awareness to unite, organize, and respond as a group. The ICUL program sought political rights, economic power, and social justice; urged self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and cooperative efforts; and called for the founding of "a Negro state" in the U.S. (not in Africa, as Garvey advocated). In 1927 Harrison edited the ICUL's Voice of the Negro until shortly before his death that year.

In his last lecture, Harrison told his listeners that he had appendicitis and would be getting surgery. Afterwards, he said he would be giving another lecture. He died on the operating table, at the age of 44.

Intellectual and educational work
Harrison's appeal was both mass and individual. His race-conscious mass appeal utilized newspapers, popular lectures, and street-corner talks. This was in contrast to the approaches of Booker T. Washington, who relied on white patrons and a Black political machine, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who focused on the "Talented Tenth of the Negro Race". Harrison's appeal (later identified with that of Garvey) was aimed directly at the masses. His class- and race-conscious radicalism, though neglected at some periods, laid out the contours of much subsequent debate and discussion of African-American social activists. It is being increasingly studied.

For many years after his 1927 death, Harrison was much neglected. However, recent scholarship on Harrison's life and the Columbia University Library's acquisition of his papers show renewed interest. Columbia published the "Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893-1927: Finding Aid", and plans to make Harrison's writings available on the internet. The forthcoming Columbia University Press two-volume Harrison biography also reflects the growing interest in Harrison's life and thought.

Legacy and honors
Biographer Jeffrey B. Perry writes that, among the African-American leaders of his era, Harrison was "the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals." Perry emphasized that Harrison was a key unifying figure between two major trends of African-American struggle—the labor/civil rights trend (identified with Randolph and Owen, and later with Martin Luther King Jr.) and the race/nationalist trend (identified with Garvey, and later with Malcolm X).

Harrison has been described as "the most distinguished, if not the most well-known, Caribbean radical in the United States in the early twentieth century" by historian Winston James.

As an intellectual, Harrison was an unrivaled soapbox orator, a featured lecturer for the New York City Board of Education's prestigious "Trend of the Times" series, a prolific and influential writer, and, reportedly, the first Black person to write regularly published book reviews in history. His efforts in these areas were lauded by both black and white writers, intellectuals, and activists such as Eugene O'Neill, James Weldon Johnson, Henry Miller, Hermie Huiswoud, William Pickens, Bertha Howe, Hodge Kirnon, and Oscar Benson. Harrison aided Black writers and artists, including Charles Gilpin, Andy Razaf, J. A. Rogers, Eubie Blake, Walter Everette Hawkins, Claude McKay, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, Lucian B. Watkins, and Augusta Savage. He was a pioneer Black participant in the freethought and birth control movements as well as being a bibliophile and library popularizer. He created "Poetry for the People" columns in various publications, including the New Negro magazine (1919), Garvey's Negro World (1920), and the International Colored Unity League's The Voice of the Negro (1927).

A sampling of his varied work and poetry appears in the edited collection A Hubert Harrison Reader (2001). His collected writings are found in the Hubert H. Harrison Papers (which also contain a detailed Finding Aid) at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University. Other writings appear in his two books The Negro and the Nation (1917) and When Africa Awakes. A two-volume biography by Jeffrey B. Perry is being published by Columbia University Press. The first volume, The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918, was published in November 2008 (an excerpt is available online).

In 2005 Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired Harrison's papers and the digitalized papers were made available through Columbia's Digital Library Collections website in 2020.

Writings by Hubert H. Harrison

 * A Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. with introduction and notes by Jeffrey B. Perry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001).
 * "Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893-1927: Finding Aid," Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. A list of Harrison's writings available at Columbia. On Columbia's acquisition of the Papers see "Rare Book and Manuscript Library Acquires the Papers of Hubert Harrison." The Father of Harlem Radicalism," Columbia University Library News. Columbia also plans to put Harrison's Writings online.
 * Harrison, Hubert H., "A Negro on Chicken Stealing", Letter to the editor, The New York Times, December 11, 1904, p. 6.
 * Harrison, Hubert, The Black Man's Burden [1915].
 * Harrison, Hubert H., The Negro and Nation (New York: Cosmo-Advocate Publishing Company, 1917).
 * Harrison, Hubert, "On A Certain Condescension in White Publishers," Negro World, March 1922.
 * Harrison, Hubert H., When Africa Awakes: The "Inside Story" of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World (New York: Porro Press, 1920), New Expanded Edition, edited with notes and a new introduction by Jeffrey B. Perry (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2015).
 * "Transfer Day: Hubert Harrison's Analysis", Virgin Islands Daily News, March 31.

Personal biographical sketches

 * Jackson, John G., "Hubert Henry Harrison: The Black Socrates", American Atheists, February 1987.
 * Moore, Richard B., "Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927)", in Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston (eds), Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 292–93.
 * Rogers, Joel A., "Hubert Harrison: Intellectual Giant and Free-Lance Educator", in Joel A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, ed. John Henrik Clarke, 2 vols (1946–47; New York: Collier Books, 1972), 2:432-42.

Main biographical portraits

 * Foner, Philip S., "Local New York, the Colored Socialist Club, Hubert H. Harrison, and W. E. B. Du Bois", in Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 202–19.
 * Innis, Patrick, "Hubert Henry Harrison: Great African American Freethinker", Secular Subjects (St. Louis: Rationalist Society of St. Louis, 1992), rpt. in American Atheists Examiner. See also Inniss, Patrick in AAH Examiner, vol. 4, no. 4, Winter 1994.
 * James, Portia, "Hubert H. Harrison and the New Negro Movement", Western Journal of Black Studies, 13, no. 2 (1989): 82–91.
 * James, Winston, "Dimensions and Main Currents of Caribbean Radicalism in America: Hubert Harrison, the African Blood Brotherhood, and the UNIA," in Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1998), 122–84.
 * Perry, Jeffrey B., "The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights from Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight against White Supremacy," Cultural Logic, 2010.
 * Perry, Jeffrey, "An Introduction to Hubert Harrison, 'The Father of Harlem Radicalism,'" Souls, 2, no. 1 (Winter 2000), 38–54.
 * Perry, Jeffrey B., "Hubert Harrison: Race Consciousness and the Struggle for Socialism", Socialism and Democracy, vol. 17, no. 2 (Summer–Fall 2003), 103–30.
 * Perry, Jeffrey B., "Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Early 20th Century Harlem Radicalism," BlackPast.org, October 2008.
 * Perry, Jeffrey B., Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), ISBN 978-0-231-13910-6
 * Perry, Jeffrey B., "Hubert Henry Harrison 'The Father of Harlem Radicalism': The Early Years—1883 Through the Founding of the Liberty League and The Voice in 1917" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1986), includes an extensive bibliography (pp. 711–809).
 * Perry, Jeffrey B., "On Hubert Harrison's Importance", Virgin Islands Daily News, February 18, 2003.
 * Perry, Jeffrey B.: Hubert Harrison: the struggle for equality, 1918-1927, New York : Columbia University Press, [2021], ISBN 978-0-231-18262-1
 * Samuels, Wilfred David, Five Afro-Caribbean Voices in American Culture (Boulder: Belmont Books a Division of Cockburn Publishing, 1977), 27–41.

Archive

 * Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893–1927, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
 * Finding Aid
 * Digitised papers, Digital Library Collection

Audio

 * "Jeffrey Perry Discusses Hubert Harrison", Podcast Interview, Inside Higher Ed, December 10, 2008.

Video

 * "Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism" video of slide presentation/talk by Jeffrey B. Perry
 * Jeffrey B. Perry, "On Hubert Harrison", Interview by Stella Winston, TV show "Straight Up!"
 * "Hubert Harrison: Life, Legacy, and Some Writings."
 * "Hubert Harrison: Life, Legacy, and Some Writings."

title: Hubert Harrison


text:
Giovanni Battista Amici

Giovanni Battista Amici (25 March 1786 – 10 April 1863) was an Italian astronomer, microscopist, and botanist.

Amici was born in Modena, in present-day Italy. After studying at Bologna, he became professor of mathematics at Modena, and in 1831 was appointed inspector-general of studies in the Duchy of Modena. A few years later he was chosen director of the observatory at Florence, where he also lectured at the museum of natural history. Amici died in Florence in 1863.

His name is best known for the improvements he effected in the mirrors of reflecting telescopes and especially in the construction of the microscope. He was also a diligent and skillful observer, and busied himself not only with astronomical subjects, such as the double stars, the satellites of Jupiter and the measurement of the polar and equatorial diameters of the sun, but also with biological studies of the circulation of the sap in plants, the fructification of plants, infusoria etc. He was the first to observe the pollen tube.

He invented the dipleidoscope and also the direct vision prism.

The crater Amici on the Moon is named in his honour.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Giovanni Battista Amici


text:
User:J Dog, the DG god

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title: User:J Dog, the DG god


text: Category:Sheffield

title: Category:Sheffield


text:
Billboard charts

The Billboard charts tabulate the relative weekly popularity of songs and albums in the United States and elsewhere. The results are published in Billboard magazine. Billboard biz, the online extension of the Billboard charts, provides additional weekly charts, as well as year-end charts. The two most important charts are the Billboard Hot 100 for songs and Billboard 200 for albums, and other charts may be dedicated to a specific genre such as R&B, country, or rock, or they may cover all genres. The charts can be ranked according to sales, streams, or airplay, and for main song charts such as the Hot 100 song chart, all three data are used to compile the charts. For the Billboard 200 album chart, streams and track sales are included in addition to album sales.

The weekly sales and streams charts are monitored on a Friday-to-Thursday cycle since July 2015; previously it was on a Monday-to-Sunday cycle. Radio airplay song charts, however, follow the Monday-to-Sunday cycle (previously Wednesday-to-Tuesday). The charts are released each Tuesday with an issue date the following Saturday.

History
The first chart published by Billboard was "Last Week's Ten Best Sellers Among The Popular Songs", a list of best-selling sheet music, in July 1913. Other early charts listed popular song performances in theatres and recitals in different cities. In 1928, "Popular Numbers Featured by Famous Singers and Leaders" appeared, which added radio performances to in-person performances. On January 4, 1936, Billboard magazine published its first pop chart based on record sales. Titled "Ten Best Records for Week Ending", it listed the 10 top-selling records of three leading record companies as reported by the companies themselves. In March 1937, the "Songs with the Most Radio Plugs" chart debuted with data from a separate company. In October 1938, a review list, "The Week's Best Records", was retitled "The Billboard Record Buying Guide" by incorporating airplay and sheet music sales, which would eventually become the first trade survey of record popularity.

In the July 27, 1940, issue, the first "Billboard Music Popularity Chart" was published for week ending July 20, with separate listings covering retail sales, sheet music sales, jukebox song selection and radio play. Among the lists were the 10 songs of the "Best Selling Retail Records", which is the fore-runner of today's pop chart, with "I'll Never Smile Again" by Tommy Dorsey (featuring vocals by Frank Sinatra) its first number one. This best-seller chart (also known as "Best Sellers in Stores" and "Best Selling Pop Singles in Stores") is considered the true guide to a song's popularity until the creation of the Hot 100 in 1958. Another accolade of a successful song was a position on the "Honor Roll of Hits", introduced on March 24, 1945, initially as a 10-song list, later expanded to 30 songs, which ranked the most popular songs by combining record and sheet sales, disk jockey, and jukebox performances as determined by Billboard's weekly nationwide survey. This chart amalgamated different records of the same song by different performers as one, and topping the first chart was "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive".

In November 1955, a composite standing chart that combined retail sales, jukebox and disk jockeys play charts but counted individual record separately was created as "The Top 100" chart, with "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" by The Four Aces its first No. 1. This chart is the direct predecessor to the current Hot 100 chart. The jukebox chart ceased publication after the June 17, 1957, issue, the disk jockey chart after July 28, 1958, the best-seller chart after October 13, 1958. After July 28, 1958, the composite chart the "Top 100" chart was also discontinued; and the "Hot 100" began the following week on August 4, 1958, listing "Poor Little Fool" by Ricky Nelson as its first No. 1.  The Hot 100 currently combines singles sales, radio airplay, digital downloads, and streaming activity (including data from YouTube and other video sites). Many Billboard charts use this basic formula apart from charts dedicated to the three data sources: sales (both physical and digital), airplay and streaming.

In the early period, the issue dates and the chart dates given in Billboard were different until January 13, 1962, when the issue dates and the chart dates both referred to the week ending dates. The Honor Roll of Hits chart was discontinued after November 16, 1963.

Billboard also publishes various music genre charts. "Harlem Hit Parade" was created in 1943 which became "Best-Selling Race Records" in 1948 and "Best-selling Rhythm & Blues Records" in 1949, and then "Soul Singles" in 1969 (currently Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs). "Best-selling Folk Records" was published in 1948, and this morphed into "Best-Selling Country & Western Records" in 1949, "Best-Selling C&W Records" in 1956 and "Hot Country Singles" in 1963 (now Hot Country Songs). MOR charts has been published since 1961, variously called "Easy Listening", "Middle-Road Singles" and "Pop-Standard Singles" and now Adult Contemporary. Billboard charts now cover these music genres: rock, pop, country, dance, bluegrass, jazz, classical, R&B, rap, electronic, Latin, Christian, world and holiday music, and even ringtones for mobile (cell) phones.

An album chart, the "Best Selling Popular Record Albums", was first published on March 24, 1945, with The King Cole Trio its first No. 1. The first chart had 10 albums, before reducing to five in the following weeks, before increasing again to 10 in 1948. The album chart was split into 33-8 and 45 rpm lists in 1950 before they recombined in 1954, then divided into mono and stereo classifications in 1959 before they merged into a 150-item pop album chart in 1963. It was eventually expanded into a 200 album list on May 13, 1967. Various genre album charts were also published: Country LP chart in January 1964, R&B chart in 1965, jazz in 1969, Latin in 1973, Gospel 1974, and Rock in 1981. Other charts include Classical albums, Comedy Albums, Holiday Albums, Soundtracks, Independent Albums, Catalog Album and many others besides.

At the end of each year, Billboard tallies the results of all of its charts, and the results are published in a year-end issue and heard on year-end editions of its American Top 40 and American Country Countdown radio broadcasts. The first such annual charts released were for the year 1946, published on the January 4, 1947, issue, although annual listing of songs had been published some years prior, such as the undifferentiated annual chart based on "Honor Roll of Hits" for 1945. Between 1991 and 2006, the top single/album/artist(s) in each of those charts was/were awarded in the form of the annual Billboard Music Awards, which were held in December until the awards went dormant in 2007. The awards returned in May 2011.

Chart compilation methodology
For many years, a song had to be commercially available as a single to be considered for any of the Billboard charts. At the time, instead of using Nielsen SoundScan or Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems (BDS), Billboard obtained its data from manual reports filled out by radio stations and stores. For different musical genres, which stations and stores are used separates the charts; each musical genre has a core audience or retail group. Each genre's department at Billboard is headed up by a chart manager, who makes these determinations. According to the 100th-anniversary issue of Billboard, prior to the official implementation of SoundScan tracking in November 1991, many radio stations and retail stores removed songs from their manual reports after the associated record labels stopped promoting a particular single. Thus, songs fell quickly after peaking and had shorter chart lives. In 1990, the country singles chart was the first chart to use SoundScan and BDS. They were followed by the Hot 100 and the R&B chart in 1991. Today, all of the Billboard charts use this technology.

Before September 1995, singles were allowed to chart in the week they first went on sale based on airplay points alone. The policy was changed in September 1995, to only allow a single to debut after a full week of sales on combined sales and airplay points. This allowed several tracks to debut at number one.

In December 1998, the policy was further modified to allow tracks to chart on the basis of airplay alone without a commercial release. This change was made to reflect the changing realities of the music business. Previous to this, several substantial radio and MTV hits had not appeared on the Billboard chart at all, because many major labels chose not to release them as standalone singles, hoping their unavailability would spur greater album sales. Not offering a popular song to the public as a single was unheard of before the 1970s. The genres that suffered most at the time were those that increasingly impacted pop culture, including new genres such as trip hop and grunge. Among the many pre-1999 songs that had ended up in this Hot 100 limbo were The Cardigans' "Lovefool", Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn" (which peaked at 42), Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris" (which hit number 9), OMC's "How Bizarre", Sugar Ray's "Fly", and No Doubt's "Don't Speak".

On June 25, 2015, Billboard made changes in its chart requirements. The official street date for all new album releases was moved from Tuesday to Friday in the United States. For all sales-based charts (ranking both albums and tracks), Billboard and Nielsen changed the chart reporting period to cover the first seven days of an album's release. As a result of the changes, The Billboard 200, top albums sales, genre-based albums, digital songs, genre-based downloads, streaming songs, and genre-focused streaming surveys ran on a Friday-to-Thursday cycle. Radio Songs, which informs the Hot 100, synced to the Monday-to-Sunday period after formerly covering Wednesday to Tuesday. All other radio charts and genre tallies followed the Monday-to-Sunday cycle. The move was made to coincide with the IFPI's move to have all singles and albums released globally on Fridays.

Incorporation of digital platforms
Starting on February 12, 2005, Billboard changed its methodology to include paid digital downloads from digital music retailers such as Rhapsody, AmazonMP3, and iTunes. With this policy change, a song could chart based on digital downloads alone.

On July 31, 2007, Billboard changed its methodology for the Hot 100 chart to include digital streams, which at the time was obtained from Yahoo and AOL's streaming platforms. This change was made exclusively to the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The effect of this chart change was minuscule at the time because it was estimated to account for 5% of the chart's total points.

In October 2012, Billboard significantly changed the methodology for its country, rock, Latin, and rap charts, when it incorporated sales of digital downloads and streaming plays into what had previously been airplay-only charts. Another change was that rather than measuring airplay only from radio stations of a particular genre, the new methodology measures airplay from all radio formats. This methodology was extended to their Christian and gospel charts in late 2013. These methodology changes resulted in higher positions on the genre charts for songs with crossover appeal to other genres and radio formats (especially pop) at the expense of songs that appeal almost exclusively to core fans of the given genre, a change that proved controversial with those devotees.

On February 20, 2013, Billboard announced another change in the methodology for its charts that incorporated YouTube video streaming data into the determination of ranking positions on streaming charts. The incorporation of YouTube streaming data enhanced a formula that includes on-demand audio streaming and online radio streaming. The YouTube video streams that used in this methodology are official video streams, Vevo on YouTube streams, and user-generated clips that use authorized audio. Billboard said this change was made to further reflect the divergent platforms of music consumption in today's world.

Discontinued charts
Notes

Other charts
In December 2010, Billboard announced a new chart titled Social 50, which ranks the most active artists on the world's leading social networking sites. The Social 50 chart tallies artists' popularity using their weekly additions of friends/fans/followers, along with weekly artist page views and weekly song plays on Myspace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and iLike.

In January 2011, Billboard introduced another chart called Uncharted, which lists new and developing artists, who are yet to appear on any major Billboard chart, "...regardless of their country of origin." The ranking is based on the views and fans on social networking websites like Myspace and Facebook. It has since been discontinued.

In May 2014, after the Korea K-Pop Hot 100 chart was discontinued in the U.S., the Billboard K-Town column continued to provide chart information for K-pop artists on all Billboard charts.

The Artist 100 debuted in July 2014.

In June 2019, Billboard launched the Top Songwriters Chart and the Top Producers Chart, based on weekly activity on the Hot 100 and other "Hot" genre charts.

In October 2021, Billboard launched the Hot Trending Songs charts, utilising real-time music-related trends and conversations on Twitter.

title: Billboard charts