The Detroit Rebellion
From 1964 to 1972, at least 300 U.S. cities faced violent upheavals, the biggest led by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, in Detroit.
What Drove Buster Keaton to Try a Civil War Comedy?
“Someone should have told Buster that it is difficult to derive laughter from the sight of men being killed in battle.”
The Sorry State of Apologies
"Sorry" can be more than a mere word when it has real-world consequences.
Superbarrio: The People’s Superhero
Defender of the poor tenants and evictor of the voracious landlords, a masked lucha libre wrestler rose from the ruins of Mexico City’s 1985 earthquake.
The Exploding Women of Early Twentieth-Century “Trick Films”
In “trick films,” women were shown literally exploding over kitchen accidents—the early 1900s way of mining humor out of human tragedies.
The Linguistic Case for Sh*t Hitting the Fan
Idioms have a special power to draw people together in a way that plain speech doesn't.
Martin Luther’s Monsters
Prodigies, or monsters, were opaque and flexible symbols that signaled that God was sending some message.
Walter Rodney, Guerrilla Intellectual
Walter Rodney’s radical thought and activism led to his eventual killing by a bomb in Guyana, in 1980.
How Fritz Lang’s Flight from Nazi Germany Shaped Hollywood
German expressionism--imported to Hollywood by Jewish exiles--brought a lasting tradition of shadows, duality, and mirroring to mainstream American cinema.
“Beating the Bounds”
How did people find out where their local boundaries were before there were reliable maps?