History types like me love this week’s “New Yorker” cover. When I taught U.S. History, the kids enjoyed learning about the Twenties–I taught them how to speak “Flapper”–and they enjoyed especially learning about the Harlem Renaissance. 

I’ve always loved black history, ever since I took a class on the history of slavery at Mizzou, which had the odd effect, in learning about people “endurin’ slavery,” (they never said “durin’ slavery” in the slave narratives, precisely because they knew the difference) of making me even prouder to be an American: their lives were such an integral part of our history and so they live on in our lives, our language and our culture.

Maybe when I taught this material my love for it was a little contagious.

Anyway, I took my time on these lessons: Langston Hughes, Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige (“With which pitch would you like me to strike you out?” he’d call to a batter), Duke Ellington and “Take the A Train,”Billie Holiday and “Strange Fruit,” and excerpts, with Wynton Marsalis, who was perfect in explaining both the technical and cultural nuances of the music,  from Ken Burns’s Jazz.

I took a long time, in one lesson, to teach them Malcolm X, and I did it with primary sources taken from poetry.

The students invariably amazed me. They instinctively connected to, and adored, Louis Armstong, and the story of his life always captivated them. I think most teens, unless we extinguish the spark, have an innate sense of justice, of what’s right, and we all know how keen their Hypocrisy Detectors are. That’s one reason why I loved teaching them.

There’s one scene, in Jazz, when Armstrong captivates another teen– Bix Beiderbecke, a Davenport, Iowa, boy, who hears the sound of Armstrong’s cornet skipping across the water from the bandstand of a Mississippi riverboat. Bix was as transfixed as was Saul on the road to Tarsus. He had never heard a sound that pure, and he would spend the rest of his gifted but tragically brief life chasing after it with his own cornet.

Music is amazing, isn’t it?

The students loved, too, the anecdote about the time Bessie Smith interrupted a set to light into, and then chase, some hooded Klansmen, who ran for their lives. “Pick up them skirts, Trash!” she hollered after them.

A historian who learns a story that satisfying doesn’t need to eat much the rest of the day.