This Modern Life.
AICN points the way to the trailer for Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, soon to be re-released at a theater (possibly) near you. Hmm…I wonder if free-market conservatives will try to protect Frederick...
View ArticleConsume and Progress.
Another wave of updates over at the Orals site: Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in...
View ArticleBrave New Century.
Slow and steady wins the race, I hope: George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 . T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and...
View ArticleDust, Discrimination, and Domestic Containment.
Some thanksgiving orals reading, for you and yours…read with lavish amounts of stuffing and cranberry sauce. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. C. Vann Woodward,...
View ArticleBarton Fitzgerald.
“In the summer of 1937, broke, in debt and trying desperately to dry out, F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he joined the legions of jerks with Underwoods…” The University of South Carolina...
View ArticleRewriting Roosevelt.
“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.” Or is quoting Orwell too shrill? Well, you tell me — A coalition of women’s groups are blocked from...
View ArticleNew Deal, Raw Deal.
“It was during the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman that such great progressive policies as Social Security, protective labor laws and the GI Bill were adopted. But with them came...
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Plot Foiled.
A quick book bash: I wasn’t going to write about Philip Roth’s The Plot against America, which I read a few weeks ago, until seeing C.S.A tonight crystallized my problems with it. I should say up front...
View ArticleWorst President Ever?
“Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case,...
View ArticleCreators, Kingfish, and consiglieres.
Some quality historicizing in today’s Washington Post Book World: Michael Kazin reviews Richard White’s new Huey Long biography, H.W. Brand’s looks at Godfrey Hodgson’s new bio of Edward House...
View ArticleOnly Yesterday.
By way of Ted at The Late Adopter, a bunch of 1940′s D-listers reminisce about the Depression Decade, VH-1 style, in I Love the ’30′s. Hey, isn’t that one of the Sonic guys? (The married one, not these...
View ArticleThe New Deal fights on.
“Despite sustained efforts to tear down the New Deal — from the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 to President George W. Bush’s ill-fated 2005 efforts to dismantle Social Security — the...
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Luce Canon (and FORTUNE’s fool).
“From the mid-1930s through the late ’50s, Time Inc. was probably the largest news organization in the world, with bureaus on every continent…The company’s success was partly a result of shrewd...
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Bank to Basics.
“The big U.S. banks were the source of the global financial crisis, in part because their bigness and their practices were copied by major banks around the world. What happens in this reform effort is...
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Tales of the Homefront.
“These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and...
View ArticleFDR: The View from the Inside.
“Tully took the president’s dictation for his famous Pearl Harbor speech. ‘Miss Tully had been with Roosevelt since his days as governor of New York,” said David S. Ferriero, archivist of the United...
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Anatomy of a Tantrum.
“This is the public option debate all over again. So I pass a signature piece of legislation where we finally get health care for all Americans, something that Democrats had been fighting for, for a...
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100 Years Ago, A Nation Awoke.
“At any rate, this was a terrible accident; 147 young people, they were all young men and women, were killed, lost their lives and a number of others were badly injured…This made a terrible impression...
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Tales of Wonder.
By way of io9, an impressive collection of vintage sci-fi pulp art. (You can still make your own here.) Note the editor above — Hugo Gernsback, sci-fi pioneer and the Man in the Mask. (He also appears...
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From Old Ones to New Deal.
“The sketch on the right side of this page of notes, with its annotations (“body dark grey”; “all appendages not in use customarily folded down to body”; “leathery or rubbery”) represents Lovecraft...
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