Twentieth Century
You think one vote doesn’t matter? Hah!
I have told this story here on the Margins before. But with the presidential election upon us and the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment swishing past, I think it’s important to remember right now that in the end the 19th Amendment was ratified thanks to one man’s vote. In August, 1920, 35 states…
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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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“Degenerate Art” in Nazi Germany
In the early decades of the twentieth century, radical new art forms flourished in Germany. Expressionism, futurism, surrealism, cubism, fauvism, and the Dada movement, while different in their forms, shared a common mood of revolt against the established norms of both art and society and the authorities that supported those norms. Despite the inherently revolutionary…
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