Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ...
Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits
This page features links to reviews of movies, documentaries and exhibits with a historical theme. Listings are in reverse chronological order. Descriptions are taken directly from the linked publication. If you have articles you think should be listed on the Pop Culture page, please send them to the editor editor@historynewsnetwork.org.
SOURCE: NYT (4-24-11)
The contents of the exhibition, “Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds,” were mined by a commercial treasure hunter and not according to academic methods, a practice that many archaeologists deplore, equating it with modern-day piracy.
In an April 5 letter to the top official at the Smithsonian, G. Wayne Clough, a group of archaeologists and anthropologists from the National Academy of Sciences — including Robert McCormick Adams, a former leader of the Smithsonian — wrote that proceeding with the exhibition would “severely damage the stature and reputation” of the institution.
The members of the National Academy of Sciences are not alone. In recent weeks organizations including the Society for American Archaeology, the Council of American...
SOURCE: Dissent Magazine (4-21-11)
Albert Auster and Leonard Quart are the authors of American Film and Society since 1945. This article is adapted from that book’s fourth edition, which will be published by Praeger this summer.
IN TIM O’Brien’s National Book Award–winning novel Going After Cacciato, a GI says of the Vietnam War, “Honest it was such a swell war they should make it a movie.” The sarcasm in that statement applies just as well to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—wars that have seen few triumphs, and that elicited public protest and political criticism. Hollywood, which never had a problem depicting America’s past wars, especially the First and Second World Wars, has had difficulty representing our most recent military struggles.
In our 1988 book How the War Was Remembered: Hollywood and Vietnam, we pointed out that there were no fiction films made during the...
SOURCE: Lee P. Ruddin (4-4-11)
Woodrow Wilson was the first American leader to travel to the UK as a guest of the Royal Family, in December 1918, and took much more in than just the capital; he boarded the royal train from London to visit his mother's birthplace and grandfather's church up in Carlisle. Dwight Eisenhower ventured even further north, visiting Ayrshire in 1959; after spending time at Chequers (the prime minister's residence in Buckinghamshire) and at Balmoral (the Queen's retreat in Aberdeenshire), the 34th President of the United States stayed at Culzean Castle in Scotland. More recent presidents have also opted to sample northern life: Jimmy Carter took a trip to Newcastle in 1977...
SOURCE: WaPo (4-9-11)
Desperate to keep the viewer’s attention and set itself apart from 95 percent of PBS programming about the men whose faces grace our folding money, filmmaker Michael Pack and writer Richard Brookhiser’s “Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton” (airing Monday night on WETA) employs everything from clips of HBO’s “The Wire,” to tuneful meandering through the streets of Hamilton’s Caribbean boyhood, to the sight of engineers lifting his house and moving it a few New York City blocks to preserve history.
“Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton” is the...
SOURCE: NYT (4-8-11)
Given that Mr. Ricketts, the 69-year-old founder and former chief executive of TD Ameritrade, built a fortune getting people to change an established habit and trade stocks online at a discount, it certainly doesn’t seem as if he is asking for the moon. And given that the other activities and business investments filling his semi-retirement have objectives that include ending congressional earmarks, getting Americans to eat bison meat and bringing a World Series trophy to the fans of the Chicago Cubs (he’s the new owner), this movie deal seems as if it should already be signed, sealed and delivered.
But it’s a bit...
SOURCE: NYT (4-8-11)
But in some crucial respects Vertov was also at odds with his environment: a propagandist who sometimes drifted off message, a stubborn individualist within a vast bureaucratic system, a tireless innovator of film form at a time when “formalism” was an all-purpose term of censure.
The subject of a career-spanning...
SOURCE: NYT (4-6-11)
Not only is such a sale by an old family unusual, those experts say, but the size of the collection and the variety of items provide a window on the life and times of both outsize and ordinary Americans in pivotal centuries.
Part of the collection, the Bushrod Washington Family papers, includes correspondence, legal documents, land deeds and other items, among them letters from and about the widow of Alexander Hamilton, inventories of slaves, and a recipe for cement sent to...
SOURCE: NYT (4-3-11)
Steinbeck’s book-length account of his journey, “Travels With Charley: In Search of America,” published in 1962, was generally well reviewed and became a best-seller. It remains in print, regarded by some as a classic of American travel writing. Almost from the beginning, though, a few readers pointed out that many of the conversations in the book had a stagey, wooden quality, not unlike the dialogue in Steinbeck’s fiction....
In the current issue of the libertarian monthly Reason, Bill...
