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Fifty years ago this month, Lou Reed nearly destroyed his own career with one double album. Metal Machine Music sold 100,000 copies during the three weeks of summer 1975 between its release and its removal from the market. More than a few of the many buyers who promptly returned it would have been expecting something […]
Though now in his seventies, Jackie Chan continues to appear on the big screen with regularity. For most world-famous actors, that’s hardly notable, but it’s not as if Sir John Gielgud, say, had spent decades filming scenes of hand-to-hand combat and sustaining severe injuries in the performance of elaborate stunts. Viewers of New Police Story […]
In histories of early photography, Louis Daguerre faithfully appears as one of the fathers of the medium. His patented process, the daguerreotype, in wide use for nearly twenty years in the early 19th century, produced so many of the images we associate with the period, including famous photographs of Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily […]
They say that history is written by the victors, but that isn’t always true: sometimes it’s embroidered by the victors. Such was the case with the Bayeux Tapestry, which commemorates the build-up to and successful execution of the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Created not long after the events it depicts in what we […]
Back in 2008, Bob Boilen (host of All Songs Considered) and NPR music critic Stephen Thompson attended a noisy concert where they struggled to hear Laura Gibson perform. Jokingly, Thompson suggested that Gibson perform at Boilen’s office desk instead. She did. And, with that, the NPR Tiny Desk Concert was born. Since then, more than […]
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This is the second part of our series (I) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. As we’ve discussed, pre-modern peasant farmers make up the vast majority of human beings in in the past. Last week we started by looking at the basic … Continue reading Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part II: Starting at the End →
Homer’s Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War. Traditionally, that war has been dated to the late Bronze Age, approximately c. 1200 BCE. However, the Iliad itself was not written that early in history. There is wide agreement that Homer—or whoever the true author of the Iliad was—lived much, much later than this. […]
Among the kings of England there have been eight Henrys, eight Edwards, and six Georges but there has only ever been one John. His successors did not want to be associated with the stain the name had in the minds of the English people. Considering what the monk Matthew Paris penned (writing decades after […]
“I wanted to show the whole picture of the Black Panther Party. Most of the media focused on the rallies and looked for controversy. I wanted to show what it was like behind the scenes and portray a more complete, complicated portrait of the Panthers.” – Stephen Shames photographs The Black Panthers, 1967 – 1973 … Continue reading "Photographing The Black Panthers: All Power To The People (1967 – 1973)" The post Photographing The Black Panthers: All Power To The People (1967 – 1973) appeared first on Flashbak.
