The Black Patriotic Songs of Shirley: Remembering a Black Children’s Writer Who Did Not Start Out that Way
On this Veterans’ Day, Shirley Graham Du Bois might be remembered in her own right as a veteran of some important battles in a long war.
By Gerald Early
When We Think of Vietnam, November May be the Cruelest Month
Diem’s assassination made an impossibly bad situation mind-numbingly, impossibly worse. Franklin D. Roosevelt once famously said of Nicaraguan dictator Anastazio Somoza, “Yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch.” No one said that about Diem.
How Calling on the Dead Helps Us Cope with Death
Calling the Spirits is a nifty survey of the western world’s supposed interactions with the spirits of the dead. Lisa Morton's book reveals that our quest for ghosts is an expression of humanity, a way to cope with how overwhelmed we are when we lose someone close to us, how unbearable it is to think that the person is gone forever.
The Day Ronald Reagan Transformed Himself and American Politics
Reagan’s speech on behalf of Goldwater in 1964 was an 11th-hour attempt to breathe life into the campaign, which, in fact, it briefly did. Reagan was taking a risk coming out for Goldwater, who was considered outside the political mainstream, for some, an extremist. But Reagan, knowing, as everyone did, that Goldwater was going to lose, stood to inherit a political constituency.
The Korean War: The Chinese Remember, While Americans Forget
The Korean War (1950-1953) is largely forgotten in the United States, although the United States lost about 35,000 men in that war. Many American students do not know we fought there as that war is overshadowed by World War II and the Vietnam War.
James Bond Rides Again
The soap opera element made “No Time to Die,” at times, deadening to watch, as if it had come to a complete halt and the audience is asked to take a bunch of unserious characters seriously as if they are anchored in a reality where actual people live. This is simply pretentiousness.
The Eyes that Watched Bette Davis’s Eyes
The first Davis movie I ever saw was "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" in about 1963 or 1964 when it was first telecast. I must have been eleven or twelve, and the film scared the heck out of me.
Yesterdays and the Long Goodbye
My sister’s death reminds me that life is about loss, learning to accept losing without rancor, without pity. I think that is what the blues are about, a persecuted people creating an art form about losing, the austere sublimity of losing, first slowly, then faster.
Miles Davis, Style Beyond Style
Miles Davis no longer belongs to his family. He belongs to the world and the family has no say in how the world wishes to treat him, how each new generation decides it wishes to understand him. This little speech had no effect. I was naïve to think it would.
What Our Campaign against Smoking Can Teach Us about Our Attitude toward the Unvaccinated
Smokers are not precisely analogous to the unvaccinated but there are important similarities. Smoking and COVID-19 are associated with severe respiratory illness. Both can harm the general public: second-hand smoke with smoking, and the easy passing of the coronavirus unless mitigated by mask-wearing and social distancing. It is the fact that the general public can be harmed that generated our response to the unvaccinated and to smokers.
Happy Birthday, Chico Hamilton, Drummer of the Age of Integration
Before the electric Miles Davis of the 1970s, before Chick Corea’s Return to Forever, or Weather Report, or the other fusion bands, there was Chico Hamilton, Charles Lloyd, and Gábor Szabó in the 1960s, who introduced the elements of avant-garde, rock-ish melodies, and youthful vibrancy that joined both Black and White musical sensibilities.
Leon Spinks Once Blew Up the World
The world gets blown up so often these days that everyone has gotten used to it. Leon Spinks’s nervous system was not what it used to be, and neither was anyone else’s.