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The Lion, the City and the Water
Black Visual Satire
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Joanna Hiffernan and James McNeill Whistler
Israel and the Search for Jewish Identity
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The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War
Painters, Politics, and Public Murals in 1930s New York
New York and the End of the Middle Passage
Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture
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The Power of the Reader’s Mind over a Universe of Death
A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn
A Seasonal History of Plants and People
Fashion and Duration
A Life in Comics
A Life in Nine Pieces
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From the Blog
Pigs At Work by Pigs At Work
October 22, 2020
When much of the human world was in lockdown this spring, the animal world seemed to come out of its own kind of quarantine. Dolphins had a holiday in the Bosphorus. Mountain goats cruised through Llandudno. Wild boar munched their way through Haifa. These stories were so addictive that they were followed by many false reports, then many excellent parodies, then critiques of the mix of fear and boredom and anxious optimism that fueled all this publicity in the first place. Our media teemed with animals even more than our cities did.
Read moreCultural Exchanges and Trans-Atlantic Bonds: African Music and the Evolution of Blues and Jazz by Toyin Falola and Raphael Chiji
October 21, 2020
The subject of Black music and its African cultural roots is arguably one of the most engaging topics in contemporary Africana studies, cultural anthropology, and ethnomusicology. It is compelling because the record of successes attained by Black music artists across the world is one of the best testaments of African genius. Music and dance in the African world constitute a unique cultural invention that racial prejudice and oppression cannot smother. Rather than destroying it, American plantation slavery and its culture of despoliation strengthened Black music. Under slavery, music was not just a coping mechanism amid coercion; it was also a repertoire of knowledge, an intellectual tradition, and an outlet for those suppressed thoughts and emotions that found alternative expressive outlets in the forms of blues and jazz.
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