The most successful bandleader of the 1920s, Paul Whiteman was an entertainment icon who played a major role in the mainstreaming of jazz. Whiteman and his band premiered Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Duke Ellington acknowledged his achievements. His astonishing ear for talent vaulted a who’s who of artists toward prominence. But Whiteman’s oversized presence eclipsed Black jazz musicians while his middlebrow music prompted later generations to jettison him from jazz history.

W. Anthony Sheppard’s collection of essays confronts the racial implications of Whiteman’s career. The contributors explore Whiteman’s broad impact on popular culture, tracking his work and influence in American marketing, animated films, the Black press, Hollywood, and the music publication industry, and following him behind the scenes with arrangers, into grand concert halls, across the Atlantic, into the courtroom, and on television.

Multifaceted and cutting-edge, Beyond the Bandstand explores the racial politics and artistic questions surrounding a controversial figure in popular music.

Contributors: Ryan Raul Bañagale, Stephanie Doktor, John Howland, Katherine M. Leo, Sarah Caissie Provost, W. Anthony Sheppard, Catherine Tackley, Elijah Wald, and Christi Jay Wells

Minnesota’s Twin Cities have long been powerful engines of change. From their origins in the early nineteenth century, the Twin Cities helped drive the dispossession of the region’s Native American peoples, turned their riverfronts into bustling industrial and commercial centers, spread streets and homes outward to the horizon, and reached well beyond their urban confines, setting in motion the environmental transformation of distant hinterlands. As these processes unfolded, residents inscribed their culture into the landscape, complete with all its tensions, disagreements, contradictions, prejudices, and social inequalities. These stories lie at the heart of Nature’s Crossroads. The book features an interdisciplinary team of distinguished scholars who aim to open new conversations about the environmental history of the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota.