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Crowded and brightly-lit Beale Street in Memphis.
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Memphis: The Roots of Rock in the Land of the Mississippians

Rising on the lands of an ancient agricultural system, Memphis has a long history of negotiating social conflict and change while singing the blues.
by Rob Crossan via JSTOR Daily on October 18, 2024
Buffy of the Fat Boys playing turntables in 1985.

Questlove’s Personal History of Hip-Hop

An elegiac retelling of rap's origins, "Hip-Hop Is History" also ends with a sense of hope.
by Bijan Stephen via The Nation on August 27, 2024
Stylized illustration of a jazz trio.
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The Barrier-Breaking Ozark Club of Great Falls, Montana

The Black-owned club became a Great Falls hotspot, welcoming all to a music-filled social venue for almost thirty years.
by Ashawnta Jackson, Ken Robison via JSTOR Daily on July 10, 2024
A painting of a crowd of people heading through gates labeled Chicago, New York, and St. Louis.

Fog From Harlem: Recovering a New Negro Renaissance in the American Midwest

How the focus on Harlem obfuscated Black culture in the Midwest.
by Sam Thozer via Journal of the History of Ideas Blog on June 19, 2024
Harriet Tubman.

How a Young Harriet Tubman Found Solace in Syncretic Religion

Childhood trauma led Minty Ross (Harriet Tubman) to seek divine intervention.
by Tiya Miles via Literary Hub on June 18, 2024
Aaron Douglas, “Still Life,” n.d.

The Harlem Renaissance Was Bigger Than Harlem

How Black artists made modernism their own.
by Susan Tallman via The Atlantic on June 14, 2024
Basketball players taking a knee on the court and wearing "Black Lives Matter" shirts.
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How the NBA Learned to Embrace Activism

A changing NBA fan base drove the league toward an embrace of Black culture, and social justice politics.
by Adam Criblez via Made By History on April 19, 2024
Aaron Douglas, detail from painting Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction, 1934.

The Cosmopolitan Modernism of the Harlem Renaissance

The world-spanning art of the Harlem Renaissance.
by Rachel Himes via The Nation on April 9, 2024
Boxes with Black American history inside

The Black Box of Race

In a circumscribed universe, Black Americans have ceaselessly reinvented themselves.
by Henry Louis Gates Jr. via The Atlantic on March 16, 2024
A photograph of George Washington Cable with Mark Twain.

The Dying Pelican

Romanticism, local color, and nostalgic New Orleans.
by Eleanor Stern via 64 Parishes on February 29, 2024
Greenwood District, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Class, Race, and the Formation of Urban Black Communities

A review of three new studies about how race and class intersect.
by Randal Maurice Jelks via The Common Reader on February 21, 2024
Proposed layout of the museum

The Long Road to a Juneteenth Museum

Architects have made a Fort Worth neighborhood’s history part of the plan.
by James Russell via Texas Observer on February 1, 2024
Collage of African Americans' faces.

Specters of the Mythic South

How plantation fiction fixed ghost stories to Black Americans.
by Alena Pirok via Southern Cultures on January 24, 2024
An engraving of Mrs. David Meade Randolph by Charle de Saint-Mémin.

Southern Hospitality? The Abstracted Labor of the Whole Pig Roast

Barbecue is a cornerstone of American cuisine, containing all of the contradictions of the country itself.
by Jessica Carbone via Perspectives on History on January 19, 2024
Nicki Minaj and the autobiography of Malcolm X written by Alex Haley.

It’s Bigger Than Hip-Hop

We cannot understand the last fifty years of U.S. history—certainly not the first thing about Black history—without studying the emergence and evolution of rap.
by Austin McCoy via The Baffler on January 9, 2024
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Remembering Slavery

At museums and historic sites throughout the American South, a fuller and more complex picture of slavery is finally taking shape.
by Ed Ayers on January 8, 2024
A computer-drawn image of George Moses Horton.

Stand Up and Spout

Cecil Brown wants to digitally revive the enslaved antebellum poet George Moses Horton. Can digital technology help reconnect us to the tradition he embodied?
by Matt Sandler via The Baffler on January 8, 2024
Watch meeting on New Year's Eve in Grafton, Virginia.

Countdown to Freedom

The significance of New Year’s Eve ‘watch night’ services for Black Americans.
by Chandelis Duster via CNN on December 31, 2023
Sly Stone with daughter Nove, ca. 1980.

On the Sly

A memoir of the Family Stone.
by Carl Wilson via Bookforum on December 4, 2023
A drawing of a family tree of white rappers connecting Eminem and Macklemore.

A Brief Cultural History of the White Rapper

Why do they exist? Where did they come from? Can they be defended? The most pressing questions, answered.
by Alex Skopic via Current Affairs on November 29, 2023
Illustration by Yannick Lowery. A drawing of watermelons between hills and valleys

Tell Me Why the Watermelon Grows

Throughout its botanical, cultural, and social history, the watermelon has been a vehicle for our ideas about community, survival, and what we owe the future.
by Jori Lewis via Switchyard Magazine on November 25, 2023
The Three Strikes You’re Out fishing crew : several older Black man posing and smiling around a large fish.

Fish Hacks

Often dismissed as a “trash fish,” the porgy is an anchor of Black maritime culture.
by Jayson Maurice Porter via Distillations on November 17, 2023
The Fisk Jubilee Singers.

How the Negro Spiritual Changed American Popular Music—And America Itself

In 1871, the Fisk University singers embarked on a tour that introduced white Americans to a Black sound that would reshape the nation.
by Vann R. Newkirk II via The Atlantic on November 13, 2023
Puff Daddy performs at his annual White Party.

Hip-Hop’s Midlife Slump

It’s been 25 years since Puff Daddy went to the Hamptons. What’s changed?
by Xochitl Gonzalez via The Atlantic on July 3, 2023
The New York Renaissance basketball team.

The Harlem Hoopsters of the Renaissance

The New York Renaissance, also known as the Harlem Renaissance, was the first Black-owned, all-black, fully-professional basketball team established in 1923.
by Frank Drouzas via The Weekly Challenger on June 26, 2023
1903 postcard depicts two Black actors, one of whom is dressed in drag, performing a cakewalk in Paris.

The First Self-Proclaimed Drag Queen Was a Formerly Enslaved Man

In the late 19th century, William Dorsey Swann's private balls attracted unwelcome attention from authorities and the press.
by Cari Shane via Smithsonian on June 9, 2023
Miles Davis, Howard McGhee, and unknown pianist. NYC, September 1947.

On Menand’s "The Free World" and Dinerstein’s "The Origins of Cool in Postwar America"

Two differing explorations of post-WWII culture, politics, and ideals.
by Michael J. Kramer via Society for U.S. Intellectual History on May 21, 2023
Ronald Squire, Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge.

Against Race Essentialism

Black identity is a reality, not an idea.
by Tomiwa Owolade via New Statesman on May 15, 2023
Walter Barnes and His Royal Creolians, a popular jazz orchestra from Chicago.

Rhythm Night Club Fire: Tragedy Devastated Young Black Natchez

In April 1940, Walter Barnes and His Royal Creolians continued to play to calm the crowd as the Natchez Rhythm Night Club burned.
by Karen L. Cox via Mississippi Free Press on April 21, 2023
Native American and Black girls tossing around a medicine ball in a circle.

Right Living, Right Acting, and Right Thinking

How Black women used exercise to achieve civic goals in the late nineteenth century.
by Ava Purkiss via Lapham’s Quarterly on April 17, 2023
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