“News buffs and urban planners alike will appreciate . . . Media Capital, which explores the landmarks — a few still surviving — that media moguls built to validate their dominance.”

“Graves’s name won’t ring a bell for many outside musicians’ circles, but Burkett ‘Uncle Josh’ Graves helped take bluegrass from southern Appalachia to college campuses and beyond, to the world-music status it enjoys today. When he joined Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs in 1955, his fiery, blues-inspired playing on the Dobro resonator slide guitar gave the Foggy Mountain Boys a signature sound that set the band apart from the herd. The Foggy Mountain Boys played fast and hard-driving and as loud as acoustic music can get. Their dynamic stage shows, featuring acrobatic turns at a lone mic for breakneck solos, remain the stuff of legend.”

Library Journal published an early review calling The Accordion in the Americas “an excellent collection of ethnomusicology scholarship that will be of interest to those who like world music, ethnography, or unusual instruments.”

The official publication date is October 29, 2012, but it can be ordered online now.

“Jones’ wields his hatchet with a particularly clumsy swing when he is compelled to misquote a passage from my book in order to depict me as some sort of neo-con:

‘Demonstrating his enmity toward the defendants, Messer-Kruse asserts that modern Americans should abide by the assumptions of a flawed nineteenth-century legal system explicitly designed to protect plutocratic interests. “According to the law that was operative at the time of the Haymarket trial,” he writes, “the most relevant act was not the throwing of the bomb” but the plotting of the demonstrations that resulted in violence. If prosecutors at the time had employed a standard as lax as Messer-Kruse advocates today, every labor activist in Chicago would have been as legally culpable for the attack as the individual bomber.’

Here is the actual quotation from p. 14 of my book:

‘According to the law that was operative at the time of the Haymarket trial, the most relevant act was not the throwing of the bomb but the meeting at which this attack was planned.’

…

(Note that in order to twist my words, Jones elides the end of my quote which would have clarified my meaning had he included it.)”

Read more about The Thai Jones Hatchet Job for Dissent.

“Following in Mr. [Alan] Lomax’s footsteps, Mr. Wade went back into the field to track down the descendants of 12 of the near-forgotten musicians who recorded for the Library of Congress between 1934 and 1942. He has turned his findings into an extraordinary book called The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience that was published earlier this month by the University of Illinois Press. It’s a masterpiece of humane scholarship—but one that reads like a detective story.”

“Musician and folklorist Stephen Wade dissects and celebrates the vast diversity
of American culture in The Beautiful Music All Around Us, his book drawn from
the Library of Congress’ vast holdings of field recordings made from 1934 to 1942. . . .
These stories and the recordings — capturing the voices of everyday people, not
pop stars — simply crackle.”

Publishers Weekly has posted its review of The Beautiful Music All Around Us:

“From 12-year-old Mississippian Ora Dell Graham singing ‘Pullin’ the Skiff’ to Kelly Pace and prisoners of the Arkansas State Penitentiary doing a rendition of ‘Rock Island Line,’ Wade profiles these and other ‘vernacular builders’ while ‘grappl[ing] with questions of culture and ownership, and by extension, what is ours, individually and collectively.’ Tracing these songs’ and singers’ roots from cotton fields to prison yards, from front porches to back alleys, Wade’s study offers an understanding not only of a musical thread vital to American culture, but of America itself.”

“Marion Jacobson prefaces her delightful book with a quote from the Minneapolis Journal of December 16, 1912: ‘A fearful instrument that looks like a cash register, and sounds worse, produces gasps of pleasure at the Orpheum this week. It is called the piano accordion and its behaviour is shameless.’ . . . This often-maligned instrument has found a worthy champion in Jacobson. Her likeable, informative and readable book, illustrated with superb colour plates of classic instruments and performers, looks set to remain the definitive work on the subject.” —Lou Glandfield, The Times Literary Supplement

“Given how much of human experience involves touch and feel, it’s odd that those senses have been overlooked by most historians. . . . A major appeal of Classen’s new book is her account of the Industrial Revolution. Workers became cogs, less masters of the machinery than its servants. But before that could happen, Classen suggests, expectations of the human body had to change. In the late 16th century, for example, the military ‘drill’ emerged to mold fighting bodies by breaking down and reshaping the way the soldiers responded to their commanders. This practice seeped into prisons, schools, and much later even the Salvation Army, whose adherents drilled, too. . . . Mark M. Smith, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina who is the series’ general editor, is one of the most prominent figures in the study of sensory history. ‘I don’t think of sensory history as a field,’ he says, ‘but as a habit of historical inquiry, one that transcends discrete fields of inquiry and discipline.’”

“The most enjoyable moment in A People’s History of Baseball comes when Mitchell Nathanson recalls US Representative Newt Gingrich’s strategy for ending the lockout that threatened the 1994 Major League Baseball season. The soon-to-be House speaker suggested that if both sides watched Field of Dreams together, their differences would be forgotten. As Nathanson concludes, ‘[T]he film offered up mythology as history, something Gingrich himself endorsed.’. . . A People’s History of Baseball provides vigorous and fascinating challenges to the ways in which fans have related to a game that he says has been ‘virtually synonymous’ with America for well over a century.”