Popular Culture
Shin-Kickers From History:Celebrate People’s History
The Celebrate People’s History project began in 1998. In the dead of the night, activist Josh MacPhee, aided by a half-dozen co-conspirators, pasted images of Malcolm X on boarded-up storefronts in Chicago’s West Side. Ten minutes after they started, they had attracted a small crowd of neighborhood residents. Some of them helped put up posters.…
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Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds and the History of Radio Broadcasting
You’ve probably heard this story before: On October 30, 1938, a 23-year-old theatrical boy-wonder named Orson Welles caused panic among radio listeners with the Halloween episode of his Mercury Theatre on the Air (1): an adaptation of H.G. Well’s The War of the Worlds.(2) Actors played the roles of correspondents who broke into an on-going…
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Chasing Chopin
I am a Chopin fan. I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out in Paris in the 1830s. I even wrote about the heroine of the Polish Revolution of 1830 in Women Warriors.* Those subjects (and so many more) come together in one delightful package in Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four…
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