Stylin': African American Expressive Culture, from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit

We know of the music, literature, and athletic exploits of black Americans, but most historians of Afro-American influence on American culture never emphasize the modes of expression, vernacular, color schemes, and hairstyles that everyone picks up on. That's where Australian professors Shane and Graham White come in, with a long-overdue look at how black fashions were absorbed into U.S. and world culture from the arrival of the first slaves up to the 1940s. Using photos, illustrations, recordings, advertisements, and other sources, they catalog a number of influential black cultural phenomena, from the antebellum clothes of 18th-century South Carolina slaves to the famed "zoot suit" explosion of the 1940s. --Eugene Holley Jr.