Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

In 1972, renowned actor Ossie Davis brought to sonic life several of Douglass's visionary writings, plying his resonant voice to produce riveting renditions of the Douglass classics…

This is the extraordinary life of W.E.B. DuBois in his own words. The autobiographical account begins at age seventeen as DuBois left Massachusetts to attend Fisk University in 1885, and ends in the 1940s as DuBois describes his struggles with the NAACP.

Anyone learning American English for the first time will certainly find Mend Your Speech a useful educational tool for understanding the language's hard to pronounce words.

Volume 2 of this two-part compilation consists of short biographies and famous statements made by 14 influential American women who fought for gender equality in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Anachronism, chronology, synchronize: learn how these words are linguistically related on this 1959 Folkways release.

The visionary, designer, architect, poet, author and inventor who brought the term "synergy" into the realm of popular speech, Buckminster Fuller shares many of his original ideas in this series of monologues.

In this collection of prose and song, Langston Hughes narrates the history of the African-American people.

This recording of Gil Noble’s WABC-TV program, "Like It is" features an exclusive interview with Angela Davis done by her lawyer, Margaret Burnham, while she was jailed in NY and awaiting trial on the case of the Soledad Brothers in 1971.

This 1971 spoken-word recording presents short biographies and selected writings by or about 13 important women in American history who fought for women’s equality through their writing and professional and/or personal life.

This is the story of the election of the President of the United States. Out of the confusion and chaos of an election year, emerges the man who will fill the most powerful political office in the world. You are about to hear the living record of the campaign of 1956.