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- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 1
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 2
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 1
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Category: Gayle Wald
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A Q&A with Gayle Wald | It’s fantastic to see Tharpe getting all kinds of recognition, especially from young people and artists like Lizzo. I should also say that there are musicians and people in the gospel world who always cherished her, so the world is catching up with them.
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This will be our second summer with our favorite global party-crasher, the pandemic. (Leave already, Pandy! We want to get on with our lives.) Seems like a lifetime ago when this started, huh? Except this season, the rollout of vaccines is making outdoor time under the sun a little freer and a little less fraught…
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Black History Month is the time that connections need to be made between the ancestors of Black heritage and the living inheritors. As educator Christopher Emdin wrote on our blog, the stories of past battles should never be told as if they are over or conquered. The stories are alive and playing out today. The…
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By Gayle Wald: Speculation is a risky but inevitably necessary business for biographers. When I was working on Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, I made a decision not to stray too far from what I could verify from historical and contemporary sources (even while acknowledging that these, too,…
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Today is International Women’s Day, a global day to honor and celebrate the social, economic, cultural, and political accomplishments of women. Observed since the early 1900s, it marks a call to action for accelerating gender equality. This year’s campaign theme, #BeBoldForChange, implores us to help build a more inclusive, gender-equal world. It also coincides with…
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By Gayle F. Wald More than forty years after her burial in an unmarked Philadelphia grave, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, gospel’s first superstar and its most celebrated crossover figure, is enjoying a burst of Internet celebrity. A video of her playing one of her signature tunes, “Didn’t It Rain,” from a 1964 TV special filmed for…
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Enter to win a free copy of Shout, Sister, Shout!, the biography of Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
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Gayle F. Wald, a professor at George Washington University, is the author of Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in 20th -Century U.S. Literature and Culture. She wrote the liner notes for a critically acclaimed 2003 Rosetta Tharpe tribute album. Wald lives in…
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