In a candid 1962 conversation with a Guardian editor, President Kennedy unpacked his views on Cuba, the Soviet Union, and nuclear war. What can Obama learn from him?
Fear of the unknown: would free radio broadcasts hurt gate receipts?
glove and radio from www.shutterstock.com
With owners deeply divided over radio, a 20-year tug-of-war would ensue.
Drawings by male warriors – like Black Hawk’s ‘Dream or Vision or Himself Changed to a Destroyer or Riding a Bufalo Eagle (1880-1881)’ – often depicted visions perceived during meditation and fasting.
New York State Historical Association, Fenimore Art Museum/John Bigelow Taylor
It might seem strange, especially given the nation’s decision to sever ties with George III in 1776.
Through his music, Lead Belly rejected the stereotype that country music was the domain of white artists, while blues music was reserved for blacks.
Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection depicts the fully-formed artist – a blues musician, yes, but also a performer of string-band, country and pop songs.
Ma Rainey was one of Paramount Records’ most popular artists.
JP Jazz Archive/Redferns
History is not a ‘thing’ to be memorized, as some in the Oklahoma legislature might believe, but a living process, to be understood in all its complexity.
A still shot from DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915).
The Hollywood Reporter
Last month President Obama welcomed the film Selma into the White House – a first-family showing that, as it happens, occurred a century after the first-ever screening of a movie inside the White House…
In Samuel Roth’s time, there was no Constitutional protection for expression deemed subversive, obscene or indecent.
Columbia News
Jay Gertzman, Mansfield University of Pennsylvania
In 1957, publisher Samuel Roth spent his 63rd birthday in federal prison. His appeal denied by the United States Supreme Court, he would end up serving every day of his five year sentence. The crime? He…
Selma director and co-writer Ava DuVernay has crafted a new and important vision of an oft-examined era in our nation’s history.
Stanley Wolfson/Library of Congress
Hollywood films that depict American history deeply influence our sense of national identity. Films that portray Civil Rights and Black Freedom history are particularly important. Beyond entertaining moviegoers…
The unfinished Crazy Horse memorial in Custer County, South Dakota.
Bernd00/Wikimedia Commons
More than a century after he died, the Lakota warrior Crazy Horse, who famously fought General Custer in the Battle of Little Bighorn, is thought of as transcendent force – attuned to the universe in a…
The movie Selma takes King – best known to Americans as an orator – and turns him into an organizer.
Wikimedia Commons
It’s been almost 60 years since Martin Luther King, Jr. became a household name during the 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, and some may find it astonishing that, until the recent release of Selma, he’s…
In a letter to the Abbe Morellet in 1779, Benjamin Franklin mused that the strategic location of the elbow is proof that God desires us to drink wine. After all, had God placed the elbow lower on the arm…
In 1984, British LGBT rights groups worked on behalf of striking miners.
Flickr
The film Pride, which won the Queer Palm Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is based on the true story of what seems to be a rare occurrence in human history: two oppressed groups (in this case…
Prior to the introduction of jets, most commercial airplanes were propeller driven, like the DC-3 pictured here. These planes had a limited cruising altitude – and experienced much more turbulence.
NOAA Photo Library
On an October day in 1894, a group of New York City’s leading doctors gathered to unveil a statue in honor of one of the greatest surgeons of his day and the founder of New York’s Women’s Hospital, J…
The Slave Trade painted by a French abolitionist artist.
This article was published in 2014. An updated version was published in 2017 Foundation essay: This article was part of a series marking the launch of The Conversation in the US. Our foundation essays…