From Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins's 1879 musical Peculiar Sam to Lynn Nottage's 2021 musical MJ, the 'Black musical' does not get the credit it deserves for sustaining the genre we know and love. This introductory book is devoted to representative African-American perspectives in musical theatre from the literature of slavery and freedom, 1746-1865, to the contemporary period, offering the reader case studies of what the 'Black musical' is, how it works, and why it matters.

The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre ConferenceWhere past and performance converge—scholarship that moves the stage forward.Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference encompasses the states of Illinois, Iowa, Nebra...

Hipparchus was the most important astronomer of the ancient Greek world. This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to almost everything that can be known or reasonably surmised about his life and work. Hipparchus was the first to apply an effective geometric model to the cosmos, which enabled him to predict the positions of the Sun, Moon and stars more reliably than before. He was also the first to catalogue most of the stars that were visible in the northern hemisphere, giving a d...

School improvement that is reliant on accountability is a myth based upon falsehoods and wrong assumptions. Public educations’ increased dependence on this foundation for school reform and change has failed both students and teachers. The fact remains that people who create education policy do not understand what is best for individual students and classrooms. Their devised curriculum standards are, in actuality, curriculum limits that prevent students from creating successful personal and...

Stranded on an alien planet, two astronauts must battle deadly elements and each other to recover a reserve shuttle built for oneBlack Star is a debut graphic novel by Eric Anthony Glover, based on his original unproduced screenplay, and illustrated by Arielle Jovellanos. In the future, interstellar travel is past its prime and sending shuttles beyond our solar system—even for vital scientific research—is a life-threatening gamble. However, in order to ret...

Jon Glover reads this novelisation of an outlandish adventure for the Sixth Doctor and Peri.The TARDIS materialises aboard the Vipod Mor, a galactic survey ship captained by the repulsive Orlous Moston Slarn.Things are not going well on board the spacecraft. A mysterious killer stalks the infrastructure, and a junior officer - whose body is four years older than his brain - commands its bridge. The craft's computer seems to be developing its own distinctive...

For more than a century before gay marriage became a hot-button political issue, same-sex unions flourished in America. Pairs of men and pairs of women joined together in committed unions, standing by each other “for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health” for periods of thirty or forty—sometimes as many as fifty—years. In short, they loved and supported each other every bit as much as any husband and wife.In Outlaw Marriages, cultural historian Rodger Strei...

Renowned astronomer Carl Sagan’s classic bestseller that “dives into the past, present, and future of science, dealing with the mind-staggering enormity of the cosmos in which we exist” (Associated Press)—with an Introduction by Ann Druyan and a Foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson“Sagan dazzles the mind with the miracle of our survival, framed by the stately galaxies of space.”—CosmopolitanTHE INSPIRATION FOR THE FOX MINISERIES...

Of all the days to have a problem, today was the worst. Of all the problems to have on all of the days, this was the worst.3000 years, they'd travelled the stars. 3,000 years of searching and archiving, cataloguing every single planet in the entire Universe. Their journey was now over. The day was here when they could, finally return home.But they'd found another planet.Today was a very bad day.

Cultural commentator John Strausbaugh's The Village is the first complete history of Greenwich Village, the prodigiously influential and infamous New York City neighborhood.From the Dutch settlers and Washington Square patricians, to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and Prohibition-era speakeasies; from Abstract Expressionism and beatniks, to Stonewall and AIDS, the connecting narratives of The Village tell the story of America itself.Illustrated with historic...

The life of blues legend Robert Johnson becomes the centerpiece for this innovative look at what many consider to be America's deepest and most influential music genre. Pivotal are the questions surrounding why Johnson was ignored by the core black audience of his time yet now celebrated as the greatest figure in blues history.Trying to separate myth from reality, biographer Elijah Wald studies the blues from the inside -- not only examining recordings but also the recollections of...

"There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear them through the musical filter of other styles that came after them, all the way through funk and hip hop. As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz...