Cultural Literature

Part sports star, part antihero, part hip-hop icon, Allen Iverson has managed to cross over into the mainstream of American culture -- without compromise. Defiantly tattooed, with his hair in cornrows, the six-foot Philadelphia 76ers point guard is one...

The long journey of an American song, from its enormous success in the early 1850s, written by a white man, considered the father of American music, about a Black man being sold downriver, performed for decades by white men in blackface, and the song, an...

MMXX: The Black Artivism Capsule is a curated collection of art made by Black creatives worldwide during the 2020 pandemic. In the midst of the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, John Lewis, Chadwick Boseman, and Kobe and Gigi Bryant, we also had to...

The fandom driving the magazine is infectious, and the best pieces are simply essential.... A large part of Anthology's draw, as with Wax Poetics the magazine, is how gorgeous it looks: Many pieces come with lovingly reproduced album covers and 45...

How two Vietnam POWs, one white and one black, formed an unexpected friendship that saved them both: "A moving story." -- John McCainFred Cherry was one of the few black pilots taken prisoner by the Vietnamese, tortured and intimidated by captors who...

"Music is simply the soul boiling over into sound. When you produce with this in mind, there is no way you'll ever miss the mark." Curtiss King: Producer. Rapper. Mentor to thousands of aspiring artists and entrepreneurs through his YouTube channel...

Never one to mince words, Effa Manley once wrote a letter to sportswriter Art Carter, saying that she hoped they could meet soon because "I would like to tell you a lot of things you should know about baseball." From 1936 to 1948, Manley ran the Negro...

A true music-lover's journey into the past! Late one night in 2005, Zeke Schein made an amazing discovery while searching for a vintage guitar on eBay: a grainy, battered photograph captioned Old Snapshot Blues Guitar BB King Neither man looked like...

Take a look at Americans in their natural habitat: guys shopping for barbecue grills, doing that special walk men do when in the presence of lumber; superefficient soccer Ubermoms who chair school auctions, organize PTAs, and weigh less than their kids;...

Jazz Man's Journey chronicles the life and career of, Ellis Louis Marsalis, Jr., one of New Orleans' most vivacious and talented jazz musicians. From his childhood in a rural section of New Orleans, to solo appearances with the New Orleans/Louisiana...

An astonishing and heartbreaking study of the Polish Holocaust survivors who returned home only to face continued violence and anti-Semitism at the hands of their neighbors "[Fear] culminates in so keen a shock that even a student of the Jewish tragedy...

In modern Britain, the working class has become an object of fear and ridicule. From Little Britain's Vicky Pollard to the demonization of Jade Goody, media and politicians alike dismiss as feckless, criminalized and ignorant a vast, underprivileged...

An Imperfect God is a major new biography of Washington, and the first to explore his engagement with American slaveryWhen George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves...

A narrative-driven exploration of policing and the punishment of disadvantage in Chicago, and a new vision for repairing urban neighborhoods For people of color who live in segregated urban neighborhoods, surviving crime and violence is a generational...

For fifty years The Jazz Book has been the most encyclopedic interpretive history of jazz available in one volume. In this new seventh edition, each chapter has been completely revised and expanded to incorporate the dominant styles and musicians since...