That American Rag

To mark the 100th anniversary of Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag, authors Jasen and Jones have written a fascinating history of the ragtime era throughout the United States. Following the craze as it spread from St. Louis through the mid-West & South, to the West & finally to the East Coast & New York, they provide a cultural history of America through its popular culture.

This comprehensive "natural history" of a traditional art form honors more than a hundred contemporary Finnish American rag rug weavers and loom builders, whom the author has met and interviewed during more than two decades of research, mostly in Michigan's western Upper Peninsula. As in the classic Finnish American rag rug, Lockwood weaves a colorful yet subdued, artfully lasting, and deeply symbolic tribute that reclaims remnants of past Michigan Traditional Arts Program productions in a fresh composition that will appeal to rag rug artisans, Finns and Finnish Americans, scholars, and a broad public alike. Janet C. Gilmore, Independent Folklorist & Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison --

Reveals how the new technologies of mass culture--the phonograph, radio, and film--played a key role in accelerating the diffusion of jazz as a modernist art form across the nation's racial divide. Focuses on four cities--New Orleans, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles--to show how each city produced a distinctive style of jazz.

While there have been a number of studies that have explored African American “movement culture” and African American “movement politics,” rarely has the mixture of black music and black politics or, rather, black music an as expression of black movement politics, been explored across several genres of African American “movement music,” and certainly not with a central focus on the major soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement: gospel, freedom songs, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll. Here the mixture of music and politics emerging out of the Civil Rights Movement is critically examined as an incredibly important site and source of spiritual rejuvenation, social organization, political education, and cultural transformation, not simply for the non-violent civil rights soldiers of the 1950s and 1960s, but for organic intellectual-artist-activists deeply committed to continuing the core ideals and ethos of the Civil Rights Movement in the twenty-first century. Civil Rights Music: The Soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement is primarily preoccupied with that liminal, in-between, and often inexplicable place where black popular music and black popular movements meet and merge. Black popular movements are more than merely social and political affairs. Beyond social organization and political activism, black popular movements provide much-needed spaces for cultural development and artistic experimentation, including the mixing of musical and other aesthetic traditions. “Movement music” experimentation has historically led to musical innovation, and musical innovation in turn has led to new music that has myriad meanings and messages—some social, some political, some cultural, some spiritual and, indeed, some sexual. Just as black popular movements have a multiplicity of meanings, this book argues that the music that emerges out of black popular movements has a multiplicity of meanings as well.

This set reprints three famous but now hard-to-obtain works that recount the development of American journalism from its beginnings in the seventeenth century up to 1940. Together these books outline nearly 300 years' worth of changes in production techniques, journalistic practices and distribution methods. Available as a collection, the three titles are also sold separately, either as two-volume sets priced at $250.00/Y [Can. $375.00/Y] or in their component volumes at $125.00/Y [Can. $188.00/Y]: Journalism in the United Statesfrom 1690-1872Frederic Hudson (1873) Two Volume Set: 840pp: 0 415 24142 1 Volume One: 420pp: 0 415 22889 1 Volume Two: 420pp: 0 415 22890 5 The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social InstrumentAlfred McClung Lee (1937) Two Volume Set: 812pp: 0 415 24143 X Volume One: 406pp: 0 415 22891 3 Volume Two: 406pp: 0 415 22892 1 American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 250 years, 1690-1940Frank Luther Mott (1941) Two Volume Set: 782pp: 0 415 24144 8 Volume One: 391pp: 0 415 22893 X Volume Two: 0 415 22894 8