This chapter argues that television history has been neglected by jazz scholars. It describes a historical relationship between the music and the broadcast medium, noting particular trends such as musicians in variety and other performance settings, reenactments of key moments in jazz history, narratives of jazz in episodic drama and comedic treatments of jazz. While there is a growing literature on variety/performance programming, the chapter notes the ongoing absence of scholarship on dramatic and comedic treatments. Drawing on methodologies from television studies, case studies are presented which demonstrate rich engagements between jazz and television. The chapter ends by suggesting that we should turn away from considering exceptional moments in jazz television history and towards its presence in the everyday consumption of television.

Traces migration of impeachment from Great Britain to British North American colonies. Summarizes impeachment proceedings in colonies before American Revolution. Catalogues the impeachment provisions of the constitutions of the newly independent American states from 1776-1788, and describes use of impeachment by the states prior to enactment of U.S. Constitution.

Race has always been a central issue in discussions of jazz. A history of the representation of jazz in the American cinema is, in many ways, a history of the representation of African Americans, including their struggle to overcome oppression from whites. But as the title of this paper suggests, jazz is one of several aspects of American culture which has delighted white people and inspired them to appropriate– or to steal– the music of Black people. Many of the early jazz films were built around the white swing orchestras and their followers. In the 1940s and 1950s, biopics told the stories of white jazz artists. Biopics of black artists appeared in the 1960s and later. More recently, jazz has been celebrated as an art that allows musicians and audiences to ascend to a higher plane.

Describes the invention and use of impeachment by the British Parliament from 1376 through the 1780s, with particular focus on its primary purpose as a legislative counterweight to royal oppression and overreach, as well as its role in defining the limits of the British constitution.

Academic Thrillers: The formulaic plot of Gospel Thrillers, with their personal, political, and theological anxieties, occasionally bursts into the real world when new discoveries (real or forged) generate anxiety within, and outside of, academic biblical studies. That the fictional and real-world narratives in such cases as the Secret Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Judas, and Gospel of Jesus’s Wife mirror so closely the overblown world of Gospel Thrillers shows how deeply these fears and anxieties penetrate into cultural and political consciousness.

The genius of this genre of Gospel Thrillers is its ability to amplify but also contain the endless fears and anxieties generated by the vulnerable Bible produced by modern biblical studies.

Tells story of 1787 Constitutional Convention focusing on how and why impeachment was included in the constitutional design. Describes the unique design of American impeachment and how it differs from prior British practice. Focuses particularly on the kinds of officials who are impeachable, the mechanism of impeachment, the standard of impeachable conduct, and the consequences of impeachment.

Crooning emerged as a style that contemporaneous audiences, black and white, read as “white”: it wasn’t until the early 1930s that African American crooners appeared on record. This delay is unusual in American music, where innovations in vernacular music ordinarily have African American origins. That delay is explicable, however, once we recover what crooning signified for black audiences and how that signified meant something different to white audiences. More interesting still is the fact that crooning continues to play a role in contemporary African American music, long after white audiences abandoned it as old-fashioned. The apotheosis of this pattern can be heard in the 1963 record, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. Trane then made his one record with a vocalist for fairly obvious reasons, but it is less clear why he chose to do so, not with a jazz singer, but a crooner.

This essay investigates the slang that emerged from jazz scenes during the twentieth century. A music history characterized by continual stylistic change and innovation is echoed in a corresponding ‘slanguage’ created by jazz musicians. Jazz slang permeates American culture and reflects the experience of Black musicians who created new worlds within language itself. Jazz slang has provided a venue for protesting white supremacy, exploring artistic playfulness, and expressing the energy of improvisation. This essay engages the reasons for jazz slang’s creation, scholarly and societal perceptions of the language, as well as some of the major conditions contributing to its dissemination.

By the end of the nineteenth century, cakewalk and ragtime music had taken the world so much by storm that Europe’s major classical composers were composing ragtime and cakewalk inspired music. Both Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy sought to break from European classical traditions by investing in the African American vernacular forms that were introducing the Old World to New World rhythmic patterns and melodies. This interest in performance, nightlife, the circus, and café culture was shared by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Charles Demuth, and George Grosz, all of whom explored themes and aesthetics influenced by the confluence of African American performance culture and African art available in the Western cultural capitals of Paris, New York, and Berlin. By the time author F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the 1920s “the jazz age” in the United States, African American music had already been influencing the trajectory of visual culture in the United States for several decades. With its creative fluidity, investment in aesthetics, and ability to mine African diasporic cultures for its most innovative impulses, jazz has been poised to respond to visual culture’s search for new vocabularies of form.

Analyzes the acquittal of Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial, detailing the reasons given by senators who voted to convict and acquit, and advances lessons from the acquittal.

This chapter explores the role of intertextuality in jazz. I argue that major variants of intertextuality– in particular, post-structuralism and Bloom’s “anxiety of influence”– miss what is most important to jazz: the way jazz has served as a vehicle for both the transmission of tradition and a dialogue within it and with other genres. I suggest that Bakhtin’s dialogism illuminates those neglected intertextual features and show how jazz musicians intertextually “re-accent” or “signify” in their use of quotations, licks, style, and repertory. Players quote, use licks, affirm and cross genre boundaries, and improvise over standards in order both to contribute to a tradition and alter it by expressing their individuality. In Jason Moran’s recent work engaging with Thelonious Monk and Fats Waller, he uses stylistic, generic, and repertory-based intertextuality to make the case for jazz as a far reaching but ultimately unified continuum. He thus connects with a larger tradition, but at the same time through recontextualization and re-accenting uses those utterances for self-expression and pushes against cultural– and, by implication, social and political– boundaries. Thus intertextual jazz performances simultaneously express the musicians themselves and engage with the larger whole(s) of which they are a part.

An interlude exploring Donald Trump’s monetization of the presidency and possible violations of the foreign and domestic emoluments clauses. The chapter addresses whether this conduct is impeachable and why Trump was not impeached on this ground.

Explores the ascent of Richard Nixon to the presidency during the Vietnam War era, his presidency, his abuses of presidential power, and the many aspects of the Watergate affair that spawned multiple investigations by prosecutors, Congress, and the press and finally led to Nixon’s resignation to avoid impeachment.