Josh Kun, associate professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication, urges readers to reconsider the relationship between American identity and popular music in this effort, which was awarded the 2006 American Book Award. In it, he shows how the history of race in the Americas can be studied through the history of popular music. By infusing popular music with contemporary debates about identity, he shows how America’s myriad racial and ethnic groups have created music to tell their stories that have contributed to the country’s heterogeneous nature.