COLONIALISM & INSTITUTIONS
White Colonial Ideologies and the Institutionalization of Power
THE BLUEPRINT: Madam C. J. Walker: The Mission We Forgot
Now, the way the story came down to me, Madam C. J. Walker made hair products, invented the hot comb, and became America’s first Black woman millionaire.
A Conversation with Elijah Anderson
Elijah Anderson, one of the leading urban ethnographers and cultural theorists in the United States, is the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale University. Among his many scholarly contributions to the field of sociology are five books that provide a detailed cultural history of US urban landscapes. Qualitative fieldwork he conducted as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago led to his widely acclaimed first book, A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men (University of Chicago Press, 1978), examining street-corner life at “Jelly’s,” a South Side Chicago bar.
The Auction Block and the Hit Song: Blues Is My Business
It wasn’t until 1978 that Bob Dylan would acknowledge that “Blowin’ in the Wind” was a direct adaptation from “No More Auction Block for Me.”
The song literally made him millions, but he didn’t owe anything to the song’s original creators. Dylan has a long history of litigation around his “borrowing” of elements of songs from other musicians, but when “No More Auction Block for Me” was first written down in 1867 in Slave Songs of the United States, its creation was simply attributed to “Anonymous.”
Copyrights 2025
The idea that major record labels will be devastated by the wave of artists reclaiming their copyrights is almost laughable, especially when considering what these labels currently own and control.
Black Business in Colonial America
As enslaved Africans gained their freedom in colonial America, they used the labor activities learned in slavery to start a new life. Across the cities and towns of this nation, free Blacks set up agribusinesses and took up as bricklayers, gunsmiths, shoemakers, nurses and innkeepers to form the initial steps of the Black business community.