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In 1963, Duke Ellington gave an interview on Swedish Television remarking that in the hundred years since the Emancipation Proclamation the demands for equality were growing stronger. At the time, President Kennedy had promised to introduce a Civil Rights bill in Congress, and Ellington was ...

Grace Abbott (1878-1939), an architect of social work and an activist in the immigrant rights movement, was the highest ranking woman in government from 1921 to 1934 as chief of the Department of Labor’s Children’s Bureau. She led the fight to end child labor and ...

The daughter of sharecropper in rural Texas, Bessie Coleman grew up picking cotton and eventually became the first African American woman aviator. Coleman became a media sensation with her daredevil performances, and was hailed as “Queen Bess” and “the world’s greatest woman flier.” Throughout her ...

    Miles Davis is known as one of the twentieth-century's most influential musicians and a key figure in shaping modern day jazz. However, many Miles Davis fans and admirers would be surprised to know that the pioneer was a man of many diversified talents; ...

Stanley Nelson, director of Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, talks about why he chose to make a film about the iconic jazz musician. He also discusses how this film is more than just a film about a jazz musician and really a film about ...

Just as Miles Davis’s music evolved through his life, so did his sense of style, exemplifying what it meant to be “cool” with in both how he played and how he dressed. Rule-Breaker In the 1950s and 60s, Miles Davis was tying new ways of ...

The Miles Davis Estate offered unprecedented access to its archive in order to help make this film the "definitive" documentary on Miles Davis, according to Davis's relatives.

Miles Davis recorded tune after tune in order to fulfill his contractual obligation to Prestige Records. In the process, he recorded "gems" of jazz spontaneity.

The great jazz trumpeter and composer Miles Davis went through multiple artistic transformations throughout his life, remaking his sound, his creative process, his bands, and even the clothes he wore. The early music he recorded sounds very different from the music he made toward the ...

In this clip from I.M. Pei: Building China Modern, Pei describes the resistance he initially face when building The Louvre Pyramid and how he worked through the cultural attitudes that were resistant to putting a modern structure in a classical space. A production of PACEM ...