Integral to The Beatles’ success was the sheer amount of music they played before they even made it big – from dancehalls in Britain to seedy nightclubs in Hamburg, armed with the advantage of playing little known numbers from “race music.”
March, 2015
Ice Work If You Can Get It
The first scene of Disney’s smash hit 2013 cartoon Frozen is an homage to an extinct American industry.
Missing Leonard Nimoy, Mr. Spock, …and Richard Hofstadter
The death on February 27 of the greatest icon of reason in popular culture – Leonard Nimoy, who created the role of Mr. Spock in Star Trek – speaks to our culture’s need of reason.
After the Dred Scott Decision, Citizenship was Determined in the Civil War West
On March 6, 1857, in the infamous Dred Scott decision, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Dred Scott, his wife Harriet, and their daughters Eliza and Lizzie had no right to sue for their freedom.
Roxcy Bolton and the Naming of Hurricanes
After Hurricanes Inez (1966), Gladys (1968) and Agnes (1968) swept through neighborhoods in Florida, feminist and community activist Roxcy Bolton had enough.
The Lessons of Pullman, A. Philip Randolph, Workers, and America
President Barack Obama came to Chicago on Thursday, February 19, to designate a 300-acre portion of the Pullman neighborhood of Chicago as a national monument. Pullman has no mountains, lakes, or rivers to justify its monument status; rather, it has a distinctive history.