Alan Freed became one of a handful of White DJs who pushed rhythm and blues on his show, becoming such a force in the industry that he could almost make or break records with his airplay and he could influence how the independent record companies who produced R & B, rockabilly, and rock and roll, dealt with their artists by recommending performers to certain labels. His influence was monumental.
Reading Shirley Chisholm’s 1973 book “The Good Fight” was something of a revelation for my students, as it offered not just an insider’s view of Black political thinking and organizing in the early 1970s but also a look at how a major institution like the Democratic Party operates and how difficult it is to mount what was in Chisholm’s case a true insurgent candidacy.
Giving thanks, as Melanie Kirkpatrick reminds us, is an American preoccupation, a powerful religious and civic expression of our nation. Kirkpatrick’s fear is that the left’s attempt to banish gratitude unravels our country by denying it any dimension of humanity except its quest for power.
Some might be inclined to think that F. H. Buckley, a Trump supporter and conservative, must be a bit tongue-in-cheek with this. But he is not. He makes a plausible case that the country can separate, despite the Civil War which seemed to cement the states for good, and that it really ought to.
Gene Mauch taught me something about the pain and inevitability of losing, the harshness of fate, the indifference of the gods to your pleas. Sometimes losing can have a bigger impact on you than winning.
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.
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.
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.
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 (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.
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 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.