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Culture Watch


  • Reflecting on Netflix's "Women at War"

    by Walter G. Moss

    The Netflix series focuses on the relationship of several French women to the mass carnage of the opening months of the First World War. 


  • "Hamilton" as a Meditation on History and Memory

    by Bennett Parten

    In a moment in which Confederate monuments are finally coming down and we are re-thinking how we tell our history, Hamilton is a sign of hope. It’s a sign that while history is something we can never resign from, we can always enter the narrative and, like Eliza, construct a history of our own. 


  • Who’s Our Roy Cohn?

    by Andrew Feffer

    Two documentaries on the notorious lawyer and fixer portray Roy Cohn as a figure of evil, but don't examine the social and political context of power in New York City. 


  • Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods: How Bad is It?

    by Jerry Lembcke

    A historian of public perceptions of the Vietnam War (who served as a military chaplain there) warns that Spike Lee's latest film traffics in stereotypes of both American veterans and the Vietnamese people while reinforcing right-wing narratives about the war.


  • DC Comics and the American Dilemma of Race

    by Patrick L. Hamilton and Allan W. Austin

    Superhero popular culture has always been embedded within American racial attitudes, reflecting and even contributing to them in ways that reveal goodwill is not sufficient, in and of itself, to fix our problems.


  • A Tale of the Great Migration

    by Bruce Chadwick

    Blues for an Alabama Sky, a new play by Pearl Cleage, tells the story of a handful of those people. It is a deep, rich play in which their stories are carried out against the cultural backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance.