We are proud to celebrate Benjamin Barson and his book Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons for being chosen as a Finalist for the MAAH Stone Book Award! #maahmuseum #brassrootsdemocracy #musichistory

A festive window display for the weekend 🎉

Nobody wants no damn Gavin Newsome. We must resist the undemocratic imposition of these boring, trite liberals and court a new political axis centered on internationalist solidarity and eco socialism.

3/12 MSBA 2025 ShortList: Benjamin Barson's 'Brassroots Democracy' recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed.

Congratulations to Benjamin Barson, whose book Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons has been selected for the MAAH Stone Book Award Shortlist! Visit weslpress.org to order a copy!

I just learned that the @maahstonebookaward.bsky.social shortlisted "Brassroots Democracy" for the Stone Book Award, in the company of so many brilliant and vital books. Winners will be announced in October. So grateful to the committee for reading this love letter to jazz and its social vision.

In Jazz and Culture Vol. 8, No. 1, @benjaminbarson.bsky.social explores the historical and theoretical intersections between marronage and jazz through a critical analysis of archival records, musical practices, and Black ecological practice. scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/jac/arti...

🎷Jazz and Culture Vol. 8, No. 1, is here! Feat. work by @paulausterlitz.bsky.social, Jhensen Ortiz, @benjaminbarson.bsky.social, Elizabeth Frickey, Scott Gray Douglass, El Williams III, plus a review of "Brassroots Democracy" @weslpress.bsky.social! scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/jac/issu...

13/141 2025 Official Submission #MAAHStoneAtoZ

Interesting. New contracting memorandum from Secy of Defense says military contracts shld stop including language that bars contractors from running segregated facilities.

The corporate coup is global. Trump's mad tariffs do not mark the end of neoliberalism or free trade or whatever you want to call it. They mark the end game of what we have been fighting for decades: corporate rule. They do not believe in the public. They believe in their wealth.

Ben Barson, eli namay, Lyn Rye, Adam Shead, and Fred Jackson celebrate BRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY with a discussion on music, improvisation and community organizing 🎶

Sunday! Join Barson, eli, namay, Lyn Rye, Adam Shead, and Fred Jackson for for an event in celebration of Barson's Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons! pilsencommunitybooks.com/events/43336

Join us in celebrating Benjamin Barson's new book, Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons at the BK House. The evening will blend music and conversation exploring the legacies of Haitian music, language, and politics in New Orleans with Creole music by Leyla McCalla and Sunpie.

Join us tomorrow at 7pm for music and conversation exploring the legacies of Haitian music, language, and politics in New Orleans! @benjaminbarson.bsky.social joined by #LeylaMcCall, and @brucesunpiebarnes.bsky.social & the Louisiana Sunspots. #TulaneLiberalArts #BKHouseNOLA @nousfnd.bsky.social

■ Chart Showing the Attendance and Absence Records of Students at an Ottoman Elementary School in Baalbek (Lebanon), 1894 #history #baalbek #lebanon #education

Just in! -- review of Brassroots Democracy in the Journal of Jazz Studies by E Frickey. "This sprawling and pioneering text is perhaps only the beginning of not just a new outlook on jazz scholarship but an invigorated musicology that engages with its site of research literally from the ground up."

happy Haitian Independence Day !

Honored to have Brassroots Democracy named in @popmatters.bsky.social “Best Books of 2024”!

Thanks @vickmickunas.bsky.social for the in-depth interview about Brassroots Democracy on Book Nook. You can check out the full interview here:

Jazz’s Historical Agenda as Protest Music in the Stellar Brassroots Democracy Benjamin Barson's excellent 'Brassroots Democracy' details the beautiful and bleak ways that #jazz created the soundtrack of an emancipatory movement that lasts to this day.

Coming soon: The Prison Notebooks by Luigi Mangione

Thank you @popmatters.bsky.social for calling my book Brassroots Democracy "Stellar." "9/10."(!) "Brassroots Democracy inspires hope about what is possible under the bleakest conditions." So cool to be featured in this outlet. Check out the full review here:

New edition, soon! “Öcalan’s works make many intellectuals uncomfortable because they represent a form of thought which is not only inextricable from action, but which directly grapples with the knowledge that it is.” —David Graeber author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years pmpress.org/index.php?l=...

Writing tip #2: All of my books have soundtracks. I always start with music that will somehow help me to understand the people I am studying. The track for *Outlaws of the Atlantic* was the music of the great London-based dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, what he called "Jamaican rebel music."

Check out @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social's conversation with WUP author Benjamin Barson on his latest book "Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons." newbooksnetwork.com/brassroots-d... #BenjaminBarson #Jazz #CivilRights #MusicHistory

Pilsen Community Books is such an amazing space! Thank you for hosting and all that you do