Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The hope was to eventually identify the slaves’ descendants. By the end of December, one of Mr. Cellini’s genealogists felt confident that she had found a strong test case: the family of the boy, Cornelius Hawkins. Broken Promises There are no surviving images of Cornelius, no letters or journals that offer a look into his…
Although the term “supermodel” didn’t become popular in fashion lexicon until the mid-1950s, Audrey Munson would definitely have been considered one, if she’d begun her career at that time. Instead, Munson’s career happened many decades earlier, in the early 1900s. You’ve probably seen her work many times, even if you don’t realize it, because she served as a sculptor’s model for several famous statues. Here…
Yes, that poster is actually emitting light. (Photo: Caren Anderson/Velveteria/Used with Permission) For a magical time in the 1960s and ’70s, your wood-paneled basement hideaway wasn’t worth its weight in cheap weed and questionable acid without a collection of psychedelic blacklight posters. Combining Art Nouveau, Surrealism, Pop Art, and countless other artistic styles with the…
110 years ago next week, on April 18, 1906, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake centered near the city of San Francisco struck at 5:15 AM. The intense shaking toppled hundreds of buildings, but the resulting out-of-control fires were even more destructive. Broken water mains and limited firefighting capabilities allowed city-wide fires to burn for several days….
Richard Conniff When people talk about natural history museums, they almost always roll out the well-worn descriptive “dusty,” to the great exasperation of a curator I know. Maybe he’s annoyed because he’s spent large sums of his museum’s money building decidedly un-dusty climate-controlled storage sites, and the word implies neglect. (“Let me know,” the curator…
The Associated Press news agency entered a formal cooperation with the Hitler regime in the 1930s, supplying American newspapers with material directly produced and selected by the Nazi propaganda ministry, archive material unearthed by a German historian has revealed. When the Nazi party seized power in Germany in 1933, one of its first objectives was…
The National Review, a conservative magazine for the Republican elite, recently unleashed an attack on the “white working class”, who they see as the core of Trump’s support. The first essay, Father Führer, was written by the National Review’s Kevin Williamson, who used his past reporting from places such as Appalachia and the Rust Belt…
Wow: 10 years old, can you believe it. Hell of a decade, hell of a ride. Hey, though: the first ever tweet fucked sucked. It sucked. It was rubbish. It sucked. I mean what is that. Look at the way the word ‘Twitter’ is composed, here: no capital T, no i, no e, in fact…
Hillary Clinton apologized Friday after gay-rights and AIDS activists assailed her for saying Nancy Reagan helped start a “national conversation” about AIDS in the 1980s, when protesters were struggling to get more federal help in fighting the disease. Clinton, one of two contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, made her initial comments in an interview…
Nancy Reagan will be laid to rest this week after passing away at the age of 94 on Sunday. Wife to Ronald Reagan, the nation’s 40th president, the former First Lady is often remembered for her start in Hollywood, her glamorous time in the White House, and her role as her husband’s trusted confidante and…