It was the music of rebellion and youth. Artists traded witty improvisations onstage chronicling the pain and the promise of being black in America, inspiring inner-city and rural Southern audiences alike in nightclubs and on street corners.

That music was jazz.

Today, Jaspects, an Atlanta-based group of young musicians who were born in the hip-hop era, fuse rap and jazz melodies to introduce younger audiences to jazz and the broader ideas regarding African-American society.

For Jaspects, whose music has appeared in the movie "Hustle & Flow" and recently was featured in the CNN documentary series "Black in America," the lessons of jazz go beyond its artistic merits to questions about the ownership and control of black music in general.

Veteran saxophonist Jimmy Heath, who has performed with nearly all the jazz greats of the last 50 years, says that the music called jazz today began as a voice of the repressed....

Just before 1pm on a boiling hot day in 1944, a 10-year-old boy sat down to lunch at a grand country house in the hills near Stuttgart. An earnest young man, and the heir to one of Germany's most noble families, Berthold von Stauffenberg was in awe of the Nazi regime and talked excitedly about joining the Hitler Youth. But, 800 miles away, his father, Claus, had other plans. A colonel and a trusted member of the Führer's inner circle, he was, at that precise moment, trying to kill Hitler with a briefcase full of explosives. 'It was the closest anyone came to killing him,' says Berthold, now 74 and a fierce guardian of his father's legacy. 'He did what he did, and sacrificed his life, through sheer moral duty.'

Claus von Stauffenberg was a 'good German' amid a nation of demonised villains. An extraordinarily brave soldier and a charismatic leader, his attempt to kill Hitler on 20 July at the Nazi leader's eastern HQ - known as the 'Wolf's Lair' - will receive the Hollywood...

Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, liked to claim – only half in jest – that he had helped to create the CIA.

During the Second World War Fleming worked as personal assistant to John Godfrey, the hard-driving head of Naval Intelligence, who was Fleming’s model for M in the Bond series.

Part of Fleming’s job was to liaise with General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s newly minted wartime answer to MI6. The two men got on extremely well, and when Donovan was preparing plans for a new American intelligence service in 1941, he asked Fleming to write him a blueprint.

Fleming’s 72-page memo on how a US service might look contains a description of the ideal secret agent, which has strong echoes of James Bond (although Fleming would not sit down to write the Bond books for another decade).

The perfect secret agent, wrote Fleming, “must have trained powers of observation, analysis and...

Quentin Tarantino, master of cinematic violence, is about to stir up a hornet's nest in Germany with a war film that depicts Nazi soldiers having their brains bashed out with a baseball bat wielded by a vengeful American.

And far worse. Even by the stomach-curdling standards of the US director-maker of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs the new film is a veritable blood bath.

Filming starts in Berlin on October 13 and the controversial director is already in the German capital making his final casting decisions. The star role is to be played by Brad Pitt. His character, Lieutenant Aldo Raine, leads a group of American Jewish soldiers who are dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe to wreak revenge on the Germans and destroy their morale.

The tone of the film, provisionally entitled Inglorious Bastards, is set early on by Lieutenant Raine in a pep speech to his men. According to a leaked version of the script, the officer says: "Every man under my...

I had long wanted to visit Dayton, Tenn., the town that tried schoolteacher John Scopes. I knew the story mostly from Stanley Kramer's 1960 movie "Inherit the Wind." My son knew of it because his high-school science teacher showed it in class. It is the American way: Hollywood is our history teacher.

In "Inherit the Wind," Dayton is fictionalized as "Hillsboro." The town's small-minded leaders arrest a startled science teacher in his classroom for serving up Darwin's theory of evolution. The teacher's attorney, played by Spencer Tracy, heroically defends his freedom to teach science. The fundamentalist prosecutor, played by Fredric March, is reduced to a babbling fool, and at movie's end drops down dead as if struck by a disappointed God.

How would a town remember a story like that?

I visited Dayton this summer on a family road trip. It is a quiet town with five stoplights, a Laz-E-Boy plant, a pantyhose plant and an...

A passionate revolutionary saga will sweep across British television screens this autumn. The lavish four-part drama, The Devil's Whore, from the pen of Peter Flannery, creator of the hit serial Our Friends in the North, stars Dominic West, of The Wire, as Oliver Cromwell. Andrea Riseborough, fresh from her role as Margaret Thatcher in BBC4's The Long Walk to Finchley, will play alongside him as a young gentlewoman of the court, drawn into the English Civil War.

And right at the centre of this story of Roundhead versus Cavalier is a family legacy that has become increasingly personal to Martine Brant, co-writer of the £7m Channel 4 epic. Researching the screenplay for more than a decade, she discovered that her beautiful Oxfordshire home, Wytham Abbey, played a key part in the conflict that ripped England apart during the 17th century.

'Cromwell actually stayed here as he planned the siege of Oxford,' said Brant this weekend. 'It was originally a manor that...

Over the next few weeks, Carl Toepel will send out letters, along with a donation of at least $2, to every major-party candidate for the United States Senate.
And while other people might write expressing views on the Iraq war or the economy, Dr. Toepel will have just one request: A campaign button, maybe a bumper sticker, even a pencil with the candidate’s name. Just something.

“I don’t know that I will say I’m a collector,” said Dr. Toepel, a 69-year-old retired elementary school principal from Sheboygan, Wis. “That I don’t emphasize. They might think that’s odd.”

Perhaps, but here in the ballroom of the Riviera Hotel & Casino at the 2008 American Political Items Collectors National Convention, Dr. Toepel has no such fear. He is joined by about 300 fellow aficionados who understand the appeal of gathering, studying and selling memorabilia related to politicians and who empathize with his frustration over owning items from every current senator but...

Pop singer Victoria Beckham is a descendant of a 19th century German communist who was close to Karl Marx, a German historian was quoted as saying on Monday.

Beckham, born Victoria Adams and now wife of soccer player David Beckham, is the great-great-great-granddaughter of revolutionary and artist Carl Heinrich Pfaender, said Hans Mueller, a historian from the southwestern city of Heilbronn.

Mueller told news agency ddp he had researched the life of Heilbronn native Pfaender, who lived from 1819 to 1876 and was a close associate of Marx and Friedrich Engels. Pfaender took part in the failed revolution of 1848 and was forced to flee to London where he worked as a miniaturist and painter to make ends meet, he added...

I read during the week that Ridley Scott has suspended filming on his Robin Hood epic, Nottingham, because he has realised that the onset of autumn threatens the greenness of his Sherwood Forest.

Not that the man's horticultural naivety alarmed me especially. I do not expect Sir Ridley to know the exact timings of the carotenoid and anthocyanin pigmentation advance as late-summer chlorophylls dwindle in English leaves, any more than I would expect Hollywood to plough millions of dollars into an action movie concept from Alan Titchmarsh.

(Although I did briefly wonder if Sir Ridley had deliberately set his breakthrough 1982 movie, Blade Runner, in a dimly lit futuristic cityscape only because he was worried about getting the trees wrong.)

No, what worried me was Sir Ridley's dismal, unimaginative, high-Tory, blatantly sociopathic interpretation of English history and literature.

Robin Hood “seen through the eyes of the Sheriff of...