A Raisin in the Sun the Sun" was the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, as well as the first with a black director, Mr. Richards. Hansberry noted that her play introduced details of black life to the overwhelmingly white Broadway audiences, while director Richards observed that it was the first play to which large numbers of black people were drawn. Frank Rich, writing in "The New York Times" in 1983, stated that "A Raisin in the Sun" "changed American theater forever." In 2016, Claire Brennan wrote in "The Guardian" that "The power and craft of the writing make
What Is a Nation? and continues to be invoked. Political historian Karl Deutsch, in a quote sometimes mistakenly attributed to Renan, said that a nation is "a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours". Benedict Anderson's 1983 work Imagined Communities, which states that a nation is an "imagined political community", argues that Renan contradicts himself when he says French people must have forgotten the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, yet does not explain what it is. In other words, Renan assumes that all his readers will remember the very massacre he says they have forgotten.