What’s one thing you wish everybody knew? That’s the question host and producer Dexter L. Thomas Jr. asks in this new podcast from the Humanities Council at Princeton.
Through conversations with artists, journalists, and scholars– from Princeton and beyond—“If Everybody Knew” highlights innovative research, new ideas, and untold stories that could change the world. Or at least the way you look at things.
In the first episode, Thomas investigates the lost history of “Shuffle Along,” the hit Broadway musical that debuted in 1921, just one week before the Tulsa Race Massacre. The show—the first major all-Black Broadway musical—ran for 504 performances and received rave reviews from audiences. So why haven’t more people heard of it? Thomas talks with experts to find out.
Guests include Caseen Gaines, pop culture historian and author of “Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way,” Amber Iman, who starred in the show’s 2016 revival, and Catherine M. Young, who will soon teach a spring course in Humanistic Studies about the history of performance and the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Episode one, “…about the black musical that disappeared forever, twice” will be available on December 1. New episodes will be released on the Humanities Council website.
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Meet the Host
Dexter L. Thomas Jr. is an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Emerging Voices Fellow and a postdoctoral research associate in the Humanities Council. He holds a Ph.D. in Asian Studies from Cornell University, where he wrote his dissertation on Japanese hip-hop. As a journalist, he has most recently worked as an on-camera correspondent for VICE News Tonight, with documentaries appearing on HBO, VICE TV, and Showtime. Originally from San Bernardino, California, Thomas is a Fulbright Scholar, a News Emmy winner, and contributed to Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage while at the LA Times.
