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This week, I'm going to recommend Stony the Road by Henry Lewis Gates Jr.

Looking for something to start a fight with that one annoying uncle at Thanksgiving?

Well, here's a good place to start.

Stony the Road, Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

is, well, exactly what it sounds like.

It's about the aftermath of the abolition of slavery and the Civil War

in the United States, and about the question of why, if there was a new birth of freedom

in Lincoln's America, it was then necessary for men like Martin Luther King Jr. to March

a hundred years later. To check it out, go to audible trial.com slash Japan.

Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 315, The World Cast Aside.

So for this podcast, we've covered a lot of the traditional arts of Japan and ranged through topics from calligraphy to puppet theater and back. But there's one big one, one classic, we haven't touched on before. No theater.

No has an enormously complicated history, complex enough in fact that I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time here trying to unpack its origins

because, well, they're complicated.

To put it simply, theater in Japan has a long history, and I do mean long.

Noe as a distinct art form traces its roots back to what we would call medieval Japan, the 1300s,

...