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Podcast: NBN Book of the Day
Episode: Julie Malnig, "Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock 'n' Roll, Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Description: Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock 'n' Roll, Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2023) offers a new look at the highly popular phenomenon of the televised teen dance program. These teen shows were incubators of new styles of social and popular dance and both reflected and shaped pressing social issues of the day. Often referred to as "dance parties," the televised teen dance shows helped cultivate a nascent youth culture in the post-World War II era. The youth culture depicted on the shows, however, was primarily white. Black teenagers certainly had a youth cu...