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The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramatic versions of alternative identities, but also the material for performing such alternatives in the real world, through songs and the characters and attitudes those songs project.

In Culture on the Margins, Jon Cruz recounts the \"discovery\" of black music by white elites in the nineteenth century, boldly revealing how the episode shaped modern approaches to studying racial and ethnic cultures. Slave owners had long heard black song making as meaningless \"noise.\" Abolitionists began to attribute social and political meaning to the music, inspired, as many were, by Frederick Douglass's invitation to hear slaves' songs as testimonies to their inner, subjective worlds. This interpretive shift—which Cruz calls \"ethnosympathy\"—marks the beginning of a mainstream American interest in the country's cultural margins. In tracing the emergence of a new interpretive framework for black music, Cruz shows how the concept of \"cultural authenticity\" is constantly redefined by critics for a variety of purposes—from easing anxieties arising from contested social relations to furthering debates about modern ethics and egalitarianism.

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes

In their new memoir, \"Along the Way: The Journey of a Father and Son,\" which was written with Hope Edelman, the two examine the nature of their relationship and the ways it formed and has informed both of their lives. [...]it's a loving account that's also very candid, staring unflinchingly at the painful moments, including Martin Sheen's alcohol-fueled psychotic breakdown on the set of \"Apocalypse Now,\" seen through Emilio's eyes and recalled with the humiliated clarity of a self-conscious teenager.

Reichl's love and empathy for her mother were apparent in the \"Mim tales\" she told to great comic effect in her best-selling first memoir, \"Tender at the Bone.\" On the surface, Reichl's passion for food (she was The New York Times restaurant critic and is now the editor of Gourmet magazine) was a yearning for security.

Would my life have been better? As she gathers fragments of information and insight from these artifacts, Reichl shows us how untimely death and financial crisis distorted her mother's life and how her grandparents' Old World assumptions weighed on Mim's self-esteem. According to her daughter, \"she led by negative example,\" as if to offer caution against making the same mistakes she did.

If you have a mother like that who is physically incapable of tasting spoilage, you become very focused on the flavor of things because you're constantly trying to see, should I eat this? Q. What were the worst things she made? A. I will never forget the day when half a pie went into a casserole with the tuna and the leftover lima beans and everything else that was in the refrigerator.

A true vehicle of social change, the bicycle went from oddity in 1878 to commonplace by 1895, affecting the place of women in society in ways that were debated by men and women alike.

As a teacher, in between graduate degrees, [William M. Chace] served as an instructor at Stillman College, a traditionally black school in Mississippi. In 1963, he was one of the few white faculty members there who took a public interest in the civil rights struggle his students were waging. And, at Stanford University in the 1970s and '80s, Chace undertook a career path of effective teaching and institutional service that began his ascent up the ranks of academic leadership. In settling into his job as president of Emory University, Chace describes his usual program of leadership: Study the institution carefully, lay out a short but ambitious list of goals, and begin the job with patience and persistence. Aside from the usual need for any institution to have sound finances and academic integrity, Chace's goals for Emory were clear: beautifying the campus, reaching out to city institutions, and hiring world-class faculty. Retired from day-to-day administrative duties since 2004, Chace has returned to the classroom to teach literature. Students at Emory who might have plain old Professor Chace for one of their courses should consider themselves lucky indeed. Tales of adventure await them.

Though [Wendy Kopp] is justifiably proud of Teach for America's survival, the jury is out on its long-term results. Critics within teacher- education schools see TFA as little more than dabbling by Ivy- leaguers, but Kopp's statistics, showing that 60 percent of its alumni remain involved with education in some way, argue otherwise. At a time when we need talented educators more than ever, Teach for America's story is one worth telling- -- perhaps next time in a book that spends less time behind the scenes and more in the classroom.