James Baldwin Digs Into the Roots of American Music
James Baldwin’s writing about music illuminates the significance of racial slavery for all American music. Black American music can help America to move forward if used properly.
James Baldwin’s writing about music illuminates the significance of racial slavery for all American music. Black American music can help America to move forward if used properly.
Ken Burns talks about his forthcoming PBS documentary The American Buffalo, the near extinction of the majestic beasts, and their respectful return to their rightful homeland.
In Raymond Griffith: The Silk Hat Comedian, the two clever silent films Paths to Paradise and You’d Be Surprised, make a working-class hero out of a toff in a top hat.
W. E. B. Du Bois hoped that WWI would help Black Americans make gains at home after serving their country abroad. His work for racial progress, like America itself, remains unfinished.
As Bob Dylan learned, only through baring of one’s soul does one show the way forward, providing both a glimpse into the other and perhaps the shape of things to come.
Rutgers University Press’ engaging, accomplished interpretation of ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ confirms it as W.E.B. DuBois’ most prescient and indelible work.
Like political populism, punk’s traits and tenets are sufficiently vague, contradictory, and unmoored to be vulnerable to co-option by all political opportunists—including the fascist alt-right.
Andrew Nagorski’s engrossing biography, Saving Freud, brings forth the dangerous power of denial.
In The Listeners, scholar Brian Hochman narrates a history of surveillance in the United States by means of technological cunning up to 2001.
Frank Capra’s America is always on the edge of madness and nightmare. The deeper you dig into his Arsenic and Old Lace, the darker and queasier it becomes.
To ignore the “bad gays” past and present risks romanticizing an idealized version of history and stunts the forward momentum of queer liberation.
In this excerpt of British punk history book, ‘No Machos or Pop Stars’, the Mekons, Gang of Four, and Delta 5 put their anti-hierarchical, anti-capitalist, feminist theory to the test.