Though certain generations may have grown up trained to take cover under their classroom desks in the case of a nuclear showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union, few of us today can believe that we’d stand much chance if we found ourselves anywhere near a detonated missile. Still, the probable effects of […]

Years ago, back in 2016, we featured a 1950 Superman poster that urged students to defend the American way and fight discrimination everywhere. Today, we present another chapter from Superman’s little-known history as a Civil Rights defender. The year is 1946. World War II has come to an end. And now membership in the Ku Klux […]

Once, the United States was known for sending forth the world’s most complained-about international tourists; today, that dubious distinction arguably belongs to China. But it wasn’t so long ago that the Chinese tourist was a practically unheard-of phenomenon, especially in the West. That’s an important contextual element to understand when considering the work of photographer […]

Man Ray was one of the leading artists of the avant-garde of 1920s and 1930s Paris. A key figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements, his works spanned various media, including film. He was a leading exponent of the Cinéma Pur, or “Pure Cinema,” which rejected such “bourgeois” conceits as character, setting, and plot. Today […]

Two days after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer took to the airwaves. Before his radio broadcast was cut off, he warned his countrymen that their führer could well be a verführer, or misleader. Bonhoeffer’s anti-Nazism lasted until the end of his life in 1945, when he was executed by […]