The official publication of Carla L. Peterson’s Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City is Tuesday, February 22, but already she is lending her voice to the story of free blacks in the age of slavery and Reconstruction in New York. Today, Peterson will
Michelle Stein George Gershwin’s music is a near inimitable part of American culture. Though he lived a short life, dying at the age of thirty-eight, the work he composed during his life offered a long-lasting heritage and contribution to American musicals and concert pieces. In 1935, Gershwin’s American folk opera
NBC’s 2nd season of Who Do You Think You Are? premieres tomorrow night at 8/7c. Following its first season’s coverage of stars such as Brooke Shields, Emmitt Smith, and Sarah Jessica Parker, new episodes will feature new celebrities like Kim Cattrall, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Vanessa Williams. The pursuit of personal
An op-ed piece was posted to the New York Times’s “Opinionator” by Carla L. Peterson, whose book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City, will be published next month. As part of the Times’s Disunion series, following the Civil War as it unfolded as
If you’ve been missing all the buzz, be sure to check out the year-end giveaway at “Muphoric Sounds,” including our newly published, Anthology of Rap, which makes an excellent holiday gift for any music aficionado. The contest will stay open until Thursday, December 23, so enter and grab a gift
If you missed it on NPR’s All Things Considered last weekend, be sure to listen to Adam Bradley‘s brief interview on lyrics as poetry: NPR.org. NPR’s “The Record” blog also followed up with Sam Anderson after his rave review of The Anthology of Rap in New York magazine, and you
Is this awesome or what? The long-awaited trailer for The Anthology of Rap, edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois, is finally here. By bringing together more than three hundred lyrics written over thirty years, from the “old school” to the “golden age” to the present day, the book doubles
This summer, the International Center for Photography in New York is presenting the exhibition For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, curated by Maurice Berger, a professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The show presents film and television clips, photography, newspapers, and
National African American History Month! Yale Press has a wide range of books covering this topic for you to check out. Here’s just a sample: Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, edited by Susan Earle In paintings, murals, and book illustrations, Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) produced the most powerful visual legacy of
In honor of Black History Month, we are proud to release a new paperback version of Erskine Clarke’s Dwelling Place, winner of the 2006 Bancroft Prize in American History. David Brion Davis of the American Historical Review calls it “one of the best and most important studies of American slavery