Many a high school English student has turned to a video of the 1950s film adaptation of Moby-Dick when faced with writing a report on lengthy sea tale. The plot […]
Category: biography
Happy birthday, Natalie Maines
Name one other banjo player who wears Prada. And I don’t mean Prada overalls. —Natalie Maines The lead singer of the breakout bluegrass trio the Dixie Chicks, Natalie Maines, was […]
Beyond “El Paso”: a story song survey
Story songs had won love from an admiring public since the days when drunken Vikings flung wandering skalds into a nearby volcano. When the wireless came along, story songs filled […]
Happy birthday, Marty Robbins
Country music superstar Marty Robbins was born on September 26, 1925. In three decades as a singer and songwriter Robbins placed a staggering 94 songs on Billboard’s country music charts. […]
For the love of wicked Feleena
There is a possibly apocryphal story about Loretta Lynn’s classic “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Supposedly, Lynn’s original version of the song included ten (or eight or twelve) verses. Hearing it, her […]
Happy Women’s Equality Day
Today, the enlightened everywhere celebrate Women’s Equality Day, commemorating not only the Nineteenth Amendment giving half of American humanity the right to vote outside of Wyoming, but recognizing all of […]
Happy Birthday to video and film innovator C. Francis Jenkins
Born on August 22, 1867, inventor C. Francis Jenkins was an innovator of early film and television technology. One of Jenkins’s inventions, the Phantoscope projector, led to today’s large-screen movies. However, […]
Ray Bradbury and the Twilight Zone
Ray Bradbury had made his name fusing science fiction with an abiding concern for humanity. What he had done in print, Rod Serling brought to early television. The anthology series The […]
Q&A with Locomotive to Aeromotive author Simine Short
Simine Short is an aviation historian who has researched and written extensively on the history of motorless flight. Her first book, Glider Mail: An Aerophilatelic Handbook, received numerous research awards worldwide and is […]
New in paperback: a pioneer, a president and a King
Three UIP titles are available in paperback editions today. Locomotive to Aeromotive: Octave Chanute and the Transportation Revolution Earth, water, air—Octave Chanute grappled with the very elements themselves. He built the massive […]
The Other Hawthorne’s Weird Tales
Julian Hawthorne hustled. An independent contractor par excellence, the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne reported on foreign wars and domestic politics, published novels, penned short stories, dreamt up theosophist blarney, raked […]
Illegal author José Ángel N.’s open letter to President Obama
José Ángel N. is an undocumented immigrant who lives in Chicago. In his memoir Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant, José Ángel writes of his own journey from Mexico to […]