Pop Culture Roundup

This August, Bullfrog Films launches Love and Solidarity: Rev. James Lawson and Nonviolence in the Search for Workers' Rights, Prof. Michael Honey's 38-minute introduction to tactics and philosophy of nonviolence in labor, civil rights, immigrant rights, and community organizing. Shown it to audiences across the country, it stimulates an important and timely conversation among students, Black Lives Matter and union audiences.

The University of Mississippi’s marching band will no longer play any variation of the song “Dixie” – a tradition some seven decades old at football games and other sporting events.

The University's Athletic Department confirmed to Mississippi Today on Friday that the song, which was the unofficial anthem of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, will no longer be played at athletic events.

The University of Kentucky will remove a veil from a controversial mural on the campus that depicts black slaves picking crops, the university announced on Thursday. It will surround the painting with “other works of art from a variety of perspectives that provide a larger narrative of our history, our aspirations, our shortcomings, and the progress we still must make,” wrote the institution’s president, Eli Capilouto, in a blog post.

From what the founding Grams family calls "a gravel-floored shed of jalopies" to today's vast selection of curiosities and collectibles, the Volo Auto Museum has quite a history.

Since that humble start in 1960, the operation draws as many as 250,000 visitors each year to see a collection of 400 cars and other attractions. The roster includes '50s favorites, vehicles featured on TV and in movies, muscle cars and celebrity wheels.

Beginning next year, some of the stories behind the eclectic inventory will be shared with a national viewership, as owners said they have signed a deal with the History Channel for a new series.

The working title is "Volo's House of Cars," and the initial run will be six daytime episodes. A History Channel representative declined to comment.

As I get older, I try to have more empathy for other people, for the ways we fail one another. I often fall short. Today, I am struggling to have empathy for Nate Parker, a man experiencing the height of his career while being forced to reckon with his past.

Mr. Parker wrote, directed, produced and stars in the movie “The Birth of a Nation,” which chronicles the life of Nat Turner and the slave rebellion he led in Virginia in 1831. The story the movie tells is important, and to see a movie like this getting mainstream attention is equally significant.

“The Birth of a Nation” made a big splash when it had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and was purchased by Fox Searchlight for $17.5 million. As the movie’s publicity machine roars to life in advance of the October release, there is renewed interest in Mr. Parker and his history with sexual assault. There are renewed questions about whether we can or should separate the artist from his art. I am reminded that I cannot.

Sweet, slight and thuddingly sincere, “Southside With You” is a fictional re-creation of Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date. It’s a curious conceit for a movie less because as dates go this one is pretty low key but because the writer-director Richard Tanne mistakes faithfulness for truthfulness. He’s obviously interested in the Obamas, but he’s so cautious and worshipful that there’s nothing here to discover, only characters to admire. Every so often, you catch a glimpse of two people seeing each other as if for the first time; mostly, though, the movie just sets a course for the White House. “You definitely have a knack for making speeches,” Michelle says. Yes he does (can).

While many Americans assume that the Holocaust was a well-kept secret until the concentration camps were liberated, anyone with a New York Timessubscription could have read about the atrocities during the Second World War. Regrettably, though, the persecution and murder of Jews was frequently buried by the ‘paper of record’. Of more than 23,000 front-page articles between 1939 and 1945, just 26 were about the Holocaust. This powerful documentary from the US director Emily Harrold recounts how and why the genocide of Jews was neglected and euphemised by the Times, and by extension, the American people.

If you have ever seen the 1931 film of “The Front Page,” based on the jauntily cynical play, you might have been startled by the moment when a wisecracking newspaperman silences his machine-gun-fast patter to raise his middle finger at the mayor and sheriff. Is this what the New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall was thinking of when he wrote that the film’s humor is “frequently harsh”?

Probably not. That’s because in the version of “The Front Page” that New York papers likely reviewed back in 1931, that hack keeps his middle finger in check and instead mock-salutes the mayor and the sheriff. As it turns out, the film seen in the United States for decades isn’t the same version that American audiences guffawed through back in the day. The one that Michael Pogorzelski and Heather Linville took out of old film cans in 2014 was surprisingly different from the familiar one.

Mr. Pogorzelski, 44, is the director of the Academy Film Archive, which is part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Oscars; Ms. Linville, 38, is one of its film preservationists. In 2014, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, deposited the Howard Hughes film collection with the academy archive, and the preservationists zeroed in on “The Front Page.” Archives are designed to store film under proper conditions, which is why collections like this sometimes land there. Other titles are piling up at the academy archive because people are dumping their films.

Yes, anybody can add color to old photos, but doing the job well remains a craft. Marina Amaral is a professional colorist. Her job isn't simply to add color, but to communicate an image's history. The Brazilian artist puts hours of research into her colorizations, contacting historians to get their expert opinions on the original colors of the subject material. Her projects often reflect significant historical moments like the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, or the self-immolation of Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk Thích Quang Duc in 1963, bringing a sense of modernity and immediacy to familiar images.

At the end of this month [August] 70 years will have passed since the publication of a magazine story hailed as one of the greatest pieces of journalism ever written. Headlined simply Hiroshima, the 30,000-word article by John Hersey had a massive impact, revealing the full horror of nuclear weapons to the post-war generation….

According to ITV’s lavish eight-episode drama beginning on Sunday night, Victoria was infatuated with her first Prime Minister. Alone, eighteen and a political innocent, Victoria falls for Lord Melbourne from day one of her reign.

Convincingly played by the cool, husky-voiced Rufus Sewell, Melbourne protects her from the machinations of her tiresome German mother the Duchess of Kent and the charlatan Sir John Conroy.

Melbourne flirts with Victoria and dances with her, but he draws the line at the passionate clinch that she so desperately wants. Victoria becomes so besotted that she visits Melbourne at his home, Brocket Hall and proposes to him. He turns her down.

None of this is true. We would certainly know if Victoria was in love with Melbourne. By some miracle her journal for these years escaped the savage editing of her daughter Princess Beatrice, who transcribed the later diaries, cutting the interesting bits and burning the originals.

Victoria’s frank, vivid and detailed account makes it abundantly clear that she didn’t fancy Melbourne, let alone contemplate marrying him.

The Globe theater has given a Ph.D. student an opportunity to bring scenes of Shakespearean insult to the stage.

Miranda Fay Thomas had long been struck by the T-shirts and other merchandise featuring baroque Shakespearean insults to be found at Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespeare’s Globe. And that led her to reflect on insulting movements and gestures within the plays: “Why is the thumb bite at the start of Romeo and Juliet worth getting into a fight over? What was so offensive about it? How did it become such a big deal?”