Sheet Music: the Original Problematic Pop?
A Johns Hopkins University curator of sheet music and pop culture discusses a “Middle East-inspired” sheet-music collection that’s anything but.
Going “Black to the Future”
How has Afrofuturism supported the imagining of other worlds in the face of the anthropogenic climate crisis?
From Saint to Stereotype: A Story of Brigid
Caricatures of Irish immigrants—especially Irish women—have softened, but persist in characters whose Irishness is expressed in subtle cues.
A Night at the Oscars
All (or at least a lot) of what you need to know before going to this year’s Academy Awards watch party.
The Annotated Oppenheimer
Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.
Freeing Birdman of Alcatraz
Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Production Code Administration could stop the production of a movie about murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud.
Land of the Free, Home of the Bootleggers
When technology made music mobile, the American South changed from one type of bootlegging industry to another: copying and selling records.
From Jamaica to the World: Contextualizing Bob Marley
Bob Marley’s life and music intersected with Pan-Africanism, the Rastafari movement, and post-colonial politics around the globe.
PG-13: Some Material May Be Inappropriate
The creation of the PG-13 rating in 1984 can be traced to a few key films: Poltergeist, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Gremlins.
Combustible Cinema? The Nitrate Film Issue
The early plastic called celluloid was made of nitrocellulose and camphor. It made for spectacular pictures. It also made for spectacular fires.