History is made at night

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on this day, 19th May 1925. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by him with Alex Haley, was p...

54 by Italian collective author Wu Ming is a novel set in 1954, with a fine plot involving the mafia, secret services, communist ex-partis...

Closely related to the history of the flyer is the dance card - popular in the 19th century and beyond in Europe and the US, they set out th...

It started in Los Angeles last summer and is now being touted as the new breakdancing. From Hip Hop's new steps , New York Times, 20 Nov...

The International Working Men's Association (later know as the First International) was established in 1864, with its famous statement ...

I'm not going to claim that I got any great insights into the local musical/political/social milieus whilst lazing round in the sun in C...

It's taken my brain a while to make the connection between two of the recent themes at this site - the 1969 Moon landing and the death ...

Old home movies are a fascinating source for how people actually danced in the past. This is a great clip of a New Year's Eve party in 1...

More on Soho Nights from today's Guardian: '... in 1956, I heard about this new dance craze called hand-jiving. So I made a number...

I am hoping to get to the Photographers Gallery (London) next week for an exhibition on 1950s Soho Nights which apparently includes some im...

From Latin American Herald Tribune, 26 December 2008 : 'A 16-year-old boy died over the weekend in the central province of Cordoba after...

Around 1950 a new music and dance craze swept across the Americas - Mambo. It had emerged in Cuba during the 1930s as a series of variations...

London's decline as a port city in the second half of the twentieth century also saw the end of a transnational nightlife near to the do...

I am fascinated by old dancing manuals - this example is 'Ballroom Dancing Made Easy' by Robert Brandon, first published by C.Arthur...

"The Twist, superseding the Hula Hoop, burst upon the scene like a nuclear explosion, sending its fallout of rhythm into the Minds and...

"The limbo dance is a well-known feature in the Carnival life of the West Indies today... The limbo dancer moves under a bar which is g...

From the film Beat Street (1984), filmed at the Roxy in New York.

As previously mentioned the Roxy club in New York closed this month. It opened in 1979 as a popular roller disco and, since 1991, had hosted...

The Waltz was the focus of outrage as the dance spread from Austria and Germany to France and England in the late 18th and early 19th centur...

In previous posts we have looked at the revivalist jazz raves organised by Mick Mulligan and Cy Laurie in 1950s Soho. From the mid-1950s a ...