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An Endless Quest for Questions
why ornette coleman matters. Ornette’s idea of freedom has social implications for a society and a citizenry less and less inclined or able to hear their own muse, sing their own song, and collaborate...
View ArticleSkin In the Game
Skin is the best source for the image, because it works in all directions at once. If we could turn the skin off, we would appreciate it much more. But the skin works most of the time on automatic...
View ArticleStudents Examine Folk Music History Through a Digital Lens
digitizing folk music history feature from middlebury college newsroom. Wow! What a wonderful profile of the students in my Digitizing Folk Music History course this past spring at Middlebury College:...
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Busted
rethinking columbia records “but the man can’t bust our music” ad campaign. Does anyone ever actually look at the records listed in the infamous 1969 Columbia CBS Records’ “But The Man can’t bust our...
View ArticleA Critical Perspective
Critics are poets cut down, says someone—by way of jeer; but, in truth, they are men with the poetical temperament to apprehend, with the philosophical tendency to investigate. — Margaret Fuller
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Book Review—The Mind Is a Muscle
postmodern dance & intellectual history @ usih book reviews. X-posted from USIH Book Reviews. Ninotchka Bennahum, Wendy Perron, and Bruce Robertson, eds. Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone...
View ArticleMusic Can (Almost) Change the World
dialogue between lou reed & václav havel. “You obviously feel and prove that music can change the world?,” Lou Reed. “Not in itself, it’s not sufficient in itself. But it can contribute to that...
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Book Review—A People’s History of the 1970s
three new books offer “history from below” in the 1970s. X-posted from USIH Book Reviews. M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (University of...
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We Carried You In Our Arms On Independence Day
images & sounds for july 4. The Band, “Tears of Rage,” Woodstock Festival, 1969. Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” 5 July 5 1852. Bill Callahan, “America!,” 2011....
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Knock on Wood(stock)
There’s a history of American ascendancy that might be written in terms of luck and timing, guile and opportunity. …There’s the past, and there’s the story we tell about it. Those who benefitted from...
View ArticleWhen Woodstock Was “Wild East” Op-Ed
fifty years ago, the wild west festival didn’t happen; but democracy & civic engagement sparked by the planned rock music & arts festival did. Today in Washington Post‘s Made By History...
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How Does It Feel?
I wish I knew. For now, anthem as wish; wish as anthem. I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free. Written by Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas. Billy Taylor. Most famously performed by Nina Simone. I...
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Frank Views Of Fifties America
robert frank’s amazing observations of the usa in the 1950s. Robert Frank, who died this week at 94, led a complicated life, but his photos remain alive with the energies of 50s America. He caught the...
View ArticleSyllabus: Modern America— Freedom Dreams in a Multiracial Democracy
Fall 2019 @ College at Brockport, SUNY Course Description Modern America: Freedom Dreams in a Multiracial Democracy provides an in-depth exploration of the dramatic history of America since the Civil...
View ArticleSyllabus: The Sixties in the US & the World
Fall 2019 @ College at Brockport, SUNY Course Description “If you remember the sixties, you weren’t there.” So goes a famous saying from the time period, yet as we move through the fiftieth...
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Teaching Philosophy
My goal as a teacher is to help students develop skills of analysis and communication grounded in a deeper understanding of the past. I place questions of identity, social position, and power—of race,...
View ArticleCourses
US History Surveys Modern America: Freedom Dreams and Multiracial Democracy (US History Since 1865)US History Since 1893US History Since 1945US Cultural History, Civil War to the PresentUS...
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Mind Body Dualism
Brainery community center on one side of the street, strip club on the other.
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Higher Frequencies
ken burns’ country music. Dolly Parton, on the Porter Wagoner Show, 1967. Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? — Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man Sometimes, the full cultural and...
View ArticleIt’s a Happening!
…class itself is not a thing, it is a happening. — EP Thompson, 1968 Postscript to The Making of the English Working Class (h/t Gabriel Winant) The United States is a country of sophisticated...
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