Jonathan Rosenberg is a professor of twentieth-century U.S. history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research focuses on the history of the United States in a global context. His current project is The Jazz Expats: How American Jazz Musicians Left Their Country and Changed the World. His books include Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War (W.W. Norton, 2020); How Far the Promised Land?: World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton University Press, 2006); as co-author, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes (W.W. Norton, 2003); as co-editor, Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 1999).  Before receiving his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, Rosenberg, a graduate of Juilliard, worked as a musician.

How America’s Expat Performers Captivated the French Capital in the 1920s

Abstract: This paper considers the remarkable experiences of three African-American performers, who journeyed from the United States to Europe—to Paris, specifically—in the decade after the Great War. As will be clear, this group of Black Americans, who captured the attention of countless Parisians, did more than cross geographic boundaries in their passage from the United States to France. More significantly, they broke throughless tangible boundaries, which were far more daunting than the 3500 miles of ocean that separated America from Europe, especially when one contemplates what life was like in the United States for a Black American in the opening decades of the twentieth century.

The figures to be considered—Eugene Bullard, Ada “Bricktop” Smith, and Josephine Baker—were blessed with a variety of notable qualities, not least the determination and capacity to overcome the seemingly impenetrable obstacles based on race, gender, and social class, which, for generations, had circumscribed the lives of African Americans who did not have the opportunity to leave the United States for a more salutary locale.