Dreamers Rise

There's a curious disclaimer on the copyright page of the Dalkey Archive Press reprint of Vincent O. Carter's book about his experie...

The Memphis Jug Band was a shifting collection of African-American musicians that recorded some 70 or 80 sides of music between 1927 and 193...

W. Jeffrey Bolster: Able-bodied seamen versed in “the Mariner’s art” were admittedly a minority among black seamen; but men like Daniel W...

Portrait of David T. Oswell with His Viola, about 1900 William S. Bullard was an amateur photographer who lived in Worcester and Bro...

David W. Blight: Over more than fifty years, 1841-1894, Douglass sat for approximately 160 photographs and wrote some four essays or addr...

Cartoonist Chris Ware, in the New York Review of Books , on Krazy Kat's banjo: I may be in the minority here, but I really think that...

"It was a real neighborhood, and a black experience no one talks about, because it wasn't filled with drugs and it wasn't fille...

More than one hundred and fifty years ago, Austin Reed, an African-American inmate of New York State's Auburn State Prison, wrote a boo...

This unidentified and undated snapshot shows the effects of time and much handling; it may have been folded in half at some point before bei...

Any number of sources will inform you that the classic jazz composition "St. James Infirmary" is derived from an Anglo-America...

There is now a tentative publishing date as well as a cover image for the edition of Austin Reed's 19th-century prison memoir The Life...

In a 2013 post I juxtaposed the self-glorifying funeral instructions left by Oscar Thibault, the patriarch in Roger Martin du Gard's ...

Langston The image above is unlabelled, but knowing that its likely provenance was Oklahoma made it possible to take a guess at its loc...

Guss Crader Finally, a name we can trace; the reverse of this snapshot photograph bears an inscription from one Elder Guss Crader of Jennin...

Sallisaw This photograph may be the pivot of the collection. The image itself has some unusual features (which I'll note shortly), b...

Ancestors? The portion of the apparent family collection that I was able to obtain consists of thirteen photographs in a variety of for...

These photographs represent what are apparently fragments of a single African-American family album or family collection that was recent...

His life has been taken, but his voice is not stilled. Give the pocket history lesson above a listen. Below is his official biography, comp...

These two faded and stained studio portraits of African-American couples were taken sometime in the early decades of the twentieth century...