Ashawnta Jackson is a reader, writer, and record collector living in New York. She has written for NPR Music, Bandcamp, Artsy, Atlas Obscura, and GRAMMY.com, among others. You can read more of her work at heyjackson.net.
The year 1893 was a big one for Eagle, Wisconsin. Workers found a huge diamond on the Devereaux farm: sixteen carats, uncut, and now, all these years later, missing.
Richard Potter, the first American-born ventriloquist and stage magician, learned his trade after being kidnapped and abandoned as a child in Great Britain.
Debt peonage is often associated with agricultural labor, but in the early twentieth century, Black musicians found themselves trapped in its exploitative cycle.
De La Soul are known for the effect their use of samples had on their music sales and availability on streaming sites. They’re finally streaming. Why now?
Nancy Clem was a Gilded Age con artist whose swindles eventually turned deadly. Her crimes would test the era’s assumptions about class, gender, and criminality.
The Mississippi River flood that Smith allegedly memorialized happened weeks after she'd written and released her song. Where was the real “Back Water”?
Black women composers have been active in the US since at least the mid-nineteenth century, yet they’re largely omitted from scholarship on women musicians.
From 1857 to 1889, he could be found walking a 365-mile loop in western Connecticut and eastern New York. Everybody recognized him, but no one knew his name.
Opportunities were restricted during the so-called Heroic Age, but women still dreamed of exploration...and sometimes managed to reach the polar regions.
The Boston Typesetting Races of 1886 demonstrated the speed of women compositors, helping to lower the barriers to workplace equity for female “swifts.”
