At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly list

Every American city had a small, self-aware, and active black elite, who felt it was their duty to set the standard for the less fortunate members of their race

The reconciliation of North and South following the Civil War depended as much on cultural imagination as on the politics of Reconstruction. Drawing on a wide r

After the upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction shattered the plantation economy of the Old South, white southerners turned to the railroad to reconstru