16 items
From the earliest years of European settlement in North America, whites enslaved and oppressed black people. Although the Civil War finally brought about the abolition of slavery, a harsh system of white supremacy persisted thereafter...
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New Orleans and the History of Jazz
New Orleans is a city built in a location that was by any measure a mistake. North American settlers needed a way to import and export goods via the Mississippi River, so a city was created atop swamps. By virtue of its location and...
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Winning the Vote: A History of Voting Rights
Voting Rights on the Eve of the Revolution The basic principle that governed voting in colonial America was that voters should have a "stake in society." Leading colonists associated democracy with disorder and mob rule, and believed...
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The Myth of the Frontier: Progress or Lost Freedom
For two centuries the frontier West was the setting for America’s most enduring form of popular entertainment. Daniel Boone—master hunter, pathfinder, Indian fighter, and a frontier leader of the American Revolution—was the progenitor...
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"People Get Ready": Music and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s
Few sights or sounds conjure up the passion and purposefulness of the Southern Civil Rights Movement as powerfully as the freedom songs that provided a stirring musical accompaniment to the campaign for racial justice and equality in...
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9/11 and Springsteen
The transformation of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, into a seemingly foreordained historical narrative began almost as soon as the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. I was teaching an 8 a.m....
Women and the Music Industry in the 1970s
The 1970s gets a bad rap. Rarely revered as a glorious—or even particularly memorable—time in contemporary American history, the seventies is more often seen as the sad stepchild to the 1960s, which is celebrated as a decade of peace,...
The Sixties and Protest Music
Music has always kept company with American wars. During the Revolutionary War, "Yankee Doodle" and many other songs set to reels and dances were sung to keep spirits alive during dark hours. "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," Lincoln...
Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years
In October 1950, the newly established People’s Republic of China entered the Korean War on the North Korean side against the United States and other United Nations troops. Many Chinese American citizens expressed deep concern at this...
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The Jewish Imprint on American Musical Theater
Long celebrated as one of the most quintessentially American of entertainment genres, Broadway musicals delight audiences with glitz, glitter, and polish; send them home with at least a glimmer of hope; and celebrate America’s promise...
Immigrant Fiction: Exploring an American Identity
Strictly speaking, all American novels (with the exception of those written by Native Americans) are in one way or another immigrant fiction. But we usually think of immigrant fiction more narrowly as the encounter of the foreign-born...
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파도와 메아리: Waves and Echoes of Korean Migration to the United States
According to the 2020 US Census, 1.9 million Korean Americans reside in the United States. Among Asian Americans, they are the fifth-largest ethnic group and primarily reside in California, New York, Hawaii, and Texas. [1] This essay...
The Repeal of Asian Exclusion
The United States excluded Chinese people beginning in the late nineteenth century and expanded its ban to all Asians in the 1917 and 1924 Immigration Acts. In addition to creating a national origins quota system best known for...
The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority
The United States harvested a bumper crop of good immigrants in 1955. About 1,000 highly educated Chinese gained citizenship, including acclaimed scientists, professionals, and entrepreneurs such as the architect I. M. Pei, the...
American Sabor: A Guided Playlist of Latino Music
The word sabor in Spanish evokes the delights of music, as well as food. It signifies a rich essence that makes our mouths water, or makes our bodies want to move. In this article we highlight a few songs by Latinos and Latinas that...
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