Motown music emerged in the United States in the 1960s. It launched the careers of many African American musicians. Motown music shaped culture and society during the American civil rights movement. The Making of Motown explores the history and legacy of Motown. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards.

"In 1958, 'Esquire' magazine was planning a special issue focused on American jazz. Art Kane, a graphic designer in New York City, pitched a crazy idea: gather as many jazz musicians as were willing and photograph the group. Kane got the assignment -- but he didn't own a professional camera, he didn't know how many musicians would show up, and he wanted to shoot the photograph in front of a Harlem brownstone. Would his idea work? Kane pulled it off,...

John Nickel is a black ex-jazz musician who only wants to be a good father. But when his son is taken away from him, he's left with nothing but the Memphis bar he manages. Then he hires Fay, a young white waitress, who has a volatile brother named Carl in tow. Nickel finds himself consumed with the idea of Taft-Fay and Carl's dead father-and begins to reconstruct the life of a man he never met. But his sympathies for these lost souls soon take him...

Amy Absher's The Black Musician and the White City tells the story of African American musicians in Chicago during the mid-twentieth century. While depicting the segregated city before World War II, Absher traces the migration of black musicians, both men and women and both classical and vernacular performers, from the American South to Chicago during the 1930s to 1950s. Absher takes the history beyond the study of jazz and blues by examining the...

"The Notorious B.I.G. was one of the most charismatic and talented artists of the 1990s. Born Christopher Wallace and raised in Clinton Hill/Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, Biggie lived an almost archetypal rap life: young trouble, drug dealing, guns, prison, a giant hit record, the wealth and international superstardom that came with it, then an early violent death. Biggie released his first record, Ready to Die, in 1994, when he was only 22. Less than three...