Ashawnta Jackson

Asian American artists who performed for primarily white audiences in the 1930s and ’40s both challenged and solidified racial boundaries in the United States.

The cosmic collision of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway.

How did record collecting and stereophile culture come to exclude women as consumers and experts?

Rumors that enslaved Black New Yorkers were planning a revolt spread across Manhattan even more quickly than the fires for which they were being blamed.

Prohibition—and its newly created underground economy—changed the way women lived, worked, and socialized.

Women have been punching each other in the face (during boxing matches) since the early 1700s.

The story of Morris Slater, aka Railroad Bill, prompts us to ask how the legend of the "American outlaw" changes when race is involved.

Organized movements to bring racial equality to the golf course have been part of the sport since the early 1900s.

A confluence of cross-cultural foodways fed a series of Colorado’s mining booms, and can still be tasted across the state today.

Black-appeal stations were instrumental in propelling R&B into the mainstream while broadcasting news of the ever-growing civil rights movement.

When Sidney Poitier slapped a white murder suspect on screen, it changed how the stories of Black Americans were portrayed on film.

CB radio was portrayed as a mostly white enthusiasm in its heyday, but Black CB users were active as early as 1959.

In 1974, the culture wars came to Kanawha County, West Virginia, inciting protests over school curriculum.

The rise and fall of the iconic sandwich has paralleled changes in Americans' economic conditions.

A landscape architect of the 1950s predicted that lady drivers would want pastel-colored pavement on the interstate.

The author was monitored for his political activities, but also for being gay. The surveillance took a toll on him.

In the experimental world of modernist poetry, literary journals were vulnerable to fake submissions.

Black abolitionist David Ruggles opened the first Black-owned bookstore in 1834, pointing the way to freedom—in more ways than one.

Jazz, King declared, was the ability to take the “hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.”