Shoga Films

"It required no fife and drum corps, no Fourth of July procession, to set me tingling with patriotism," Mary Antin wrote in her 1912 autobiography, The Promised Land.

The book traces the oppressed, circumscribed life inside the Jewish Pale of Settlement, where Mashka — later Mary — grew up until age 13. In 1894 her family followed her father to Boston, where he'd gone three years earlier to seek economic opportunity.

America never delivered on its promise of prosperity to her father. But it did give a poor Jewish girl something impossible in the Old Country: a free education. Antin proved a prodigy and became a successful writer.

She became a symbol to those who championed the nation's capacity to absorb the immigrant — and the immigrant's capacity to enrich America. In The Promised Land, she pointed to her own adolescent success as proof of the opportunity held out to those who abandoned the old to embrace the new.

The book made her famous, selling nearly 85,000 copies before her death. It was, not coincidentally, the first book-length autobiography published by an American Jew.

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***rhistory #1912

He was the best-selling bluesman in America, and almost no one remembers his name.

In 1925, Papa Charlie Jackson — the first man to record the blues by himself, voice and a six-string banjo-guitar, learned busking on Chicago's Maxwell Street — cut "Shake That Thing" for Paramount. It became one of the most influential records in the history of race records. Paramount's own J. Mayo Williams said it "helped put the roar in the roaring '20s."

It opened two doors.

The first: his success proved a man alone could sell records, and Paramount went looking for more. Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake walked through behind him. Much of the solo blues that followed traces back to him.

The second is quieter. "Shake That Thing" set off the hokum craze — sexual meaning smuggled past the censors onto record as a joke, a dance, a double meaning. That same coded language became one of the only places Black q***r desire got sung out loud: Ma Rainey's "Prove It On Me," Lucille Bogan's "B.D. Woman's Blues." Papa Charlie didn't sing those songs. He helped build the tongue they were sung in.

He died in Chicago in 1938 and lay in an unmarked grave for 75 years, until blues fans bought him a headstone in 2013.

The man who opened the door rarely gets to walk through it.

Sources: Paramount Records, 1924–1930; J. Mayo Williams quote via the history of "Shake That Thing"; Ma Rainey, "Prove It On Me Blues" (1928); Lucille Bogan, "B.D. Woman's Blues" (1935).