Born in Baltimore to parents who had been born slaves, Eubie Blake took up music early. His parents bought him a pump organ and got him music lessons and by the age of fifteen, he was playing in a ragtime band. Ragtime, that syncopated piano music that paved the way for jazz, was just taking off, and despite his parents’ disapproval, Blake was going with it. He published his first rag in 1914, and in 1915 met Noble Sissle, his long time collaborator. The two played together as the Dixie Duo and were to be the first African-American performers to find success with white audiences without resorting to blackface, slapstick, or corny dancing. Blake and Sissle were a class act and in presenting themselves so, they showed that black performers should be judged on their skills and talent, not on their ability to play to racial stereotypes. The duo collaborated on Shuffle Along, the first musical written, directed and performed by African-Americans to appear on Broadway. Sissle and Blake broke up in the mid-1920s, but Blake continued to perform solo, in nightclubs and theatres, at Harvard and Carnegie Hall, on television and in recordings, until his death at the age of 96 in 1983.

The father of science fiction, Jules Verne envisioned a world where air travel was commonplace, men explored the cosmos, and lived in underwater boats—long before any of these things were considered possible. After a conventional French childhood in the city of Nantes, Verne moved to Paris to study for the bar. Verne’s imagination, however, ranged far beyond the dry humors of the law and he began to write. In 1857, Verne met publisher Pierre Jules Hetzel, who advised Verne to make his work more commercial by toning down scientific detail and focusing more on characters. Under Hertzel’s mentorship, Verne found immense success. By the mid-1860s, Verne was one of France’s most popular writers, and his stories, via translation, found audiences in American and England, as well. The late 19th century was a time of great scientific innovation, and Verne’s novels capitalized on these advances, mixing rip-roaring adventures through time, to the center of the earth, or in the depths of the sea, with just enough science to lend an air of irresistible air possibility to the stories. Verne died in 1905, and did not live to see many of the things he had predicted—glass skyscrapers and high-speed trains among others—come to pass, but perhaps Verne did not need to wait for progress to catch up with him. He had always lived in the future.

When Ed Sullivan agreed to have the Beatles on his program, the band was already huge in Great Britain, but they had not made much of a splash in the U.S. Their single She Loves You wasn’t getting airplay, and an appearance on American Bandstand had garnered laughs from an audience amused by the quartet’s mop-top haircuts. They’d been having problems finding an American record label as well; no British music group had ever been more than a one-hit wonder on the American charts and no one in the music industry seemed to think that the Beatles would do any better. But the group’s clever manager, Brian Epstein, persuaded the venerable TV host to showcase the band, and then used the promise of this exposure to get a record deal with Capitol Records. I Wanna Hold Your Hand hit the radio on December 26, and Beatlemania exploded. The Beatles arrived in the U.S. on February 7th to a hysterical reception, and their three consecutive appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, February 9, 10th and 11th, had a record breaking 73 million viewers—40 percent of the U.S. population of the time.

Widely regarded as one of America’s most sparkling sopranos, Leontyne Price broke through many of the color-barriers that had kept African American singers from reaching their full potential. Price studied voice at Central State College in Ohio and won a scholarship to Julliard School in New York City. After her success in the Broadway shows Four Saints in Three Acts and Porgy and Bess, Price was asked by NBC TV to sing in a televised production of Tosca, the first time a black singer appeared on American television in a starring role. In 1960, she became the first black singer perform a leading role at La Scala Opera House, the most important opera venue in the world. In 1961, she sang the leading role of Leonora in Il Trovatore at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and received a forty-two minute ovation. Price would go on to perform twenty four seasons at the Met, during which time she would become one of the premier interpreters of the opera composer Verdi. Though she gave her last formal performance in 1997 at the age of 70, in 2001 Price came out of retirement to sing God Bless America at a September 11th tribute at Carnegie Hall, her voice as powerful and moving as ever.

With her most famous designs—the hot-pants and the mini-skirt—British designer Mary Quant helped birth a youth-oriented fashion revolution. With her husband as backer, Quant opened her first shop in 1955 where she sold her own clothing designs. In the late 1950s, skirt-lengths were longish and the prim matron look was in, but Mary Quant’s designs were anything but serious and grown-up. She created easy to wear dresses in bright bold colors, which, when worn with flat shoes and brightly patterned tights, created a bold youthful look that was perfectly in keeping with the "Swinging Sixties". Though other designers claimed to have also have innovated the mini-skirt, Quant helped to popularize it. Her hems were short, the designer said, to make it easier for women to run to catch the bus, and thus Quant explained the early 1960s woman—young, fashionable, and in a hurry. Her clothes were mass produced and mass-marketed and therefore accessible to a wide audience. In 1966, the designer, who had no formal design training, was awarded an Order of the British Empire for her contribution to British fashion.

With their self-titled debut album, rock band Led Zeppelin exploded onto the music scene in 1969. The twin falsettos of singer Robert Plant’s voice and guitarist Jimmy Page’s riffs were anchored by the dull roar of John Paul Jones’ bass and John Bonham’s drums. This was a new sound, and it was destined to popularize in a new kind of rock and roll: heavy metal. Page and Plant were both huge fans of the American Blues, and several songs on Led Zeppelin had their obvious roots in that genre. The traditional blues chords were married to a ferocious rhythm section to create a thundering sound that would be widely imitated by other heavy metal bands, but never surpassed. Led Zeppelin was not all about thunder; the album was punctuated with two acoustic numbers that illustrated Page’s interest in Eastern music and further illustrated the band’s love of traditional blues. Though the album’s cover featured a photograph of the Hindenburg in flames, Led Zeppelin did not "go down like a lead zeppelin" as The Who’s drummer Keith Moon had predicted. Instead, the band went on to be one of the most influential rock acts of all time.

The Blue Danube waltz is arguably one of the world’s most familiar classical compositions. Its composer, Johann Strauss the Younger, came from a distinguished musical family; his father, Johann Sr, was also noted composer, as were both his brothers. Though Strauss composed operettas, polkas, marches and ballets, he was most celebrated for his waltzes, of which The Blue Danube proved to be the most famous. Originally composed with accompanying lyrics, The Blue Danube premiered at a concert hosted by the Vienna Men’s Choral Association. In 1868, Strauss reworked the piece without lyrics for the World’s Fair in Paris, and it was this version that became popular, becoming Austria’s unofficial anthem. Though today the waltz is not often found on the dance-floor, The Blue Danube remains recognizable due to its numerous appearances in movies and on television. The composition can be heard in such varied places as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, several Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck cartoons, the Japanese cult-film Battle Royale and The Simpsons. The comedy troupe Monty Python’s Flying Circus even performed an exploding version of The Blue Danube on their popular comedy show.