Popular music around the world

Records, radio and television carried new kinds of music around the world after 1950: rock and roll, soul, reggae, Afrobeat, hip hop and K-pop, often from young people with something to say.

Date: 1950 to nowXII · The world since 1945
Place: Memphis · Liverpool · Kingston · Lagos · The Bronx · SeoulThe whole world
Laid out as: A theme across timeOne idea followed through the eras it crosses.
Lessons: 6 planned, none written yet
Themes: Music, theatre and entertainment
Communication and media
Society, family and daily life
Peoples, cultures and civilisations

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

IRock and roll
IILiverpool and the Beatles
IIIReggae and Jamaica
IVFela Kuti and Afrobeat
VHip hop in the Bronx
VIStreaming and K-pop

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

Sister Rosetta Tharpe
The Beatles
Bob Marley
Fela Kuti
DJ Kool Herc
Umm Kulthum

Objects

Vinyl records
Sound systems

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestry Our species and the Old Stone Age Farming and the New Stone Age First cities and the Bronze Age The Iron Age and growing states The classical world After the empires Medieval networks and empires Oceans crossed Revolutions and the first factories Industry, empire and world war The world since 1945

1950 to now. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

The alphabet outline
Chess outline
Vaccines and the end of smallpox outline
Learning to fly outline
Modern sport outline
Genes, from Mendel to the genome outline
Votes for women around the world outline
The atomic age outline
The Second World War outline
Computers outline

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?