Culture Watch 
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2/12/2023
Light and Obliquity: Edward Hopper at the Whitney Museum
by Sam Ben-Meir
The Whitney's retrospective shows works by the painter that depart from the aesthetics of film noir and focus on the alienation and impersonalization of city life.
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2/5/2023
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.
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6/6/2021
Two Films Show the Historical Toll and Present Danger of Ethnic Violence
by Walter G. Moss
Two films show the dire consequences of ethnic antagonism during and after the second world war, and the potential for ideology to incite and justify violence.
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8/30/2020
Remember Punk Rock? Probably Not…: The Real Culture War of 1980s America
by Kevin Mattson
Digging beneath the aesthetics of punk to find its politics, Kevin Mattson's new book finds a counterculture of suburban youths who identified the unrestrained capitalism of the Reagan era as the true nihilism threatening America.
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8/23/2020
"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.
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8/16/2020
Curtain Up: Two Theater Companies Return to Live Performance, with Concessions to COVID
by Bruce Chadwick
“We want to remind the Berkshires, and the country, that the virus will be defeated and that in the meantime we must reclaim our lives and the arts is the way to do that,” said Nick Paleologos of the Berkshires Theater.
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8/2/2020
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.
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6/21/2020
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.
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5/10/2020
“The Last Dance” is the ‘Presidential Historian’ of Documentaries
by Jason Steinhauer
Viewers have embraced the ESPN Documentary "The Last Dance" as an escape and the best sports "fix" around. But its framing of leadership reflects a serious issue: the limits of how American media presents history.
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3/27/2020
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.
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3/15/2020
The Life and Times of Flamboyant Rock Music Impresario Bill Graham
by Bruce Chadwick
The New York Historical Society presents the rock & roll world of Bill Graham (1931–1991), one of the most influential concert promoters of all time, through August 23.
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2/24/20
New, Experimental West Side Story Is an Experiment that Goes Awry
by Bruce Chadwick
The play has lost its focus and sense of history.
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2/20/20
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.
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2/5/20
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice are Back, and the Sexual Revolution with Them
by Bruce Chadwick
The late 1960s was the heyday of America’s sexual revolution and nowhere was it bigger than in California.
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1/28/20
There’s Nothing Like a Good Ghost Story from the Past
by Bruce Chadwick
The terrifying and wondrous Woman in Black is an international hit. It's a play staged in 2020 that was written in 1987 about an event that took place in 1927.
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1/26/20
The Film “1917” and the Allegory of the Wooden-Headed
by James Ottavio Castagnera
Viewed with one eye on this current context, “1917” can surmount its surface characterization as an exciting “war movie” to become an allegory.
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1/21/20
1917: The War Movie at Its Very Best
by Bruce Chadwick
The movie is a story within a story – the two men within the greater war
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1/19/20
A Play About Historical Reenactors Grapples With American Identity
by Bruce Chadwick
Talene Monahon’s new play, How to Load a Musket, takes a deep, hard look at the re-enactors of two wars, the American Revolution and the Civil War.
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1/14/20
Annual Jewish Film Festival, Following New Wave of Anti-Semitism, Offers Hope and Inspiration
by Bruce Chadwick
Given the attacks on Jews all over the country, the Jewish Film Festival, one of the oldest in the United States, could not have come at a better time
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1/14/20
Depression Era Tenor Hits All the High Notes
by Bruce Chadwick
It is 1934, at the height of the Depression, and an opera company in Cleveland is trying to make enough money to stay in business.
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel