In recent years there has been a spate of right-wing books attacking the contemporary university. The idea that the university curriculum has been hijacked by radical professors is an article of faith among conservatives and has fueled more than one best-seller. Until now, there has been no forceful, accessible book responding in a comprehensive way for a wide audience. In The Opening of the American Mind, MacArthur award-winning historian Lawrence...

Surveys the oral cultural heritage of black Americans as manifested in music, folk tales and heroes, and humor.

In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are. For most of the nineteenth...