on history and culture

I am uploading documents to the University's Blackboard system today, preparing to teach this course for a second time. The students will have many of the readings that I used last spring, but also two books, one of them an autobiography that blues singer B.B. King wrote with David Ritz and a picture-storybook by Lynda Barry titled The Good Times Are Killing Me. King's life will, among other things, allow us to see how his migration to Memphis from Indianola, Mississippi, helps tell a particular story about urban life for African Americans in the lower south during the first half of the 20th century. Barry's book, which concerns a friendship between a white girl and a black girl, permits us to to tackle many issues that concern the urban space, high among them, housing, identity, kinship and race. Notably, Barry, a noted cartoonist-artist,  brings black musicians into her narrative and because she does, I thought it would be great to pair these two books together. Together, they both create many opportunities to understand the difference between what it means to learn about culture as opposed to "history." I thought it would be important for the students to learn the difference as this is truly a history course even though the word "culture" is in its the title. While there is some overlap in what these two words mean, at stake will always be helping them to see how ideas, things and people change across time. That's what we try to do in a history class. As an aside, I will attend a B.B. King performance in Birmingham about two weeks into the semester. His life resonates partly because my maternal grandfather was one of his childhood playmates in  Mississippi. It will be good to see how seeing him live pushes my thinking about black life across time in the United States - especially in cities.