Kente is a hand-woven cloth of the Asante people of Ghana, made by interlacing warp yarns of different colours on a hand-operated loom. Its patterns carry meanings linked to Asante philosophy, moral values, history and belief. Oral tradition credits the craft's origin to two hunters, Opoku Kuragu and Kwakye Ameyaw, who around 1720 copied a spider's web in raffia, producing a first black-and-white cloth. Asante rulers later gave their lineages royal titles for weaving cloth for kings. Bonwire, in the Ashanti Region, is the community most associated with the craft, and families there still teach it to children from about the age of five.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.