174 posts tagged with History.
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Book: Alexandra Petri's US History
[Some] people look at our history textbooks and say, "Oh no! We have only one president's weird sex letters, and that president is Warren G. Harding! We need a book that fixes that! This is that book. [more inside]
Movie: Munich
After the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, the Israeli government secretly assigns Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana) to carry out a series of strategic retaliations. With the help of a driver (Daniel Craig), a forger (Hanns Zischler), a bomb-maker (Mathieu Kassovitz) and a former soldier (Ciarán Hinds), Avner conducts a worldwide operation, targeting 11 individuals. As the assassinations pile up, Avner begins to doubt the morality of his actions. [more inside]
Cunk on Earth: The Beginnings Season 1, Ep 1
Philomena Cunk's epic 5-part essay on civilization, tracing humanity's journey from prehistory to the present day. [more inside]
Movie: Amistad
In 1839, the slave ship Amistad set sail from Cuba to America. During the long trip, Cinque (Djimon Hounsou) leads the slaves in an unprecedented uprising. They are then held prisoner in Connecticut, and their release becomes the subject of heated debate. Freed slave Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman) wants Cinque and the others exonerated and recruits property lawyer Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey) to help his case. Eventually, John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) also becomes an ally. [more inside]
Movie: Young Mr. Lincoln
In this dramatized account of his early law career in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln (Henry Fonda) is born into a modest log cabin, where he is encouraged by his first love, Ann Rutledge (Pauline Moore), to pursue law. Following her tragic death, Lincoln establishes a law practice in Springfield, where he meets a young Mary Todd (Marjorie Weaver). Lincoln's law skills are put to the test when he takes on the difficult task of defending two brothers who have been accused of murder. [more inside]
Movie: Out of Africa
[TRAILER] Initially set on being a dairy farmer, the aristocratic Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) travels to Africa to join her husband, Bror (Klaus Maria Brandauer), who instead spends their money on a coffee plantation. After discovering Bror is unfaithful, Karen develops feelings for hunter Denys (Robert Redford), but realizes he prefers a simplistic lifestyle compared to her upper class background. The two continue on until a series of events force Karen to choose between her love and personal growth. [more inside]
Movie: Gandhi
[TRAILER] In the early years of the 20th century, Mohandas K. Gandhi (Ben Kingsley), a British-trained lawyer, forsakes all worldly possessions to take up the cause of Indian independence. Faced with armed resistance from the British government, Gandhi adopts a policy of "passive resistance," endeavoring to win freedom for his people without resorting to bloodshed. [more inside]
Movie: Mrs. Miniver
[TRAILER] English middle-class family, The Minivers, experience life in the first months of World War II. [more inside]
Movie: The Last Emperor
[TRAILER] A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic. [more inside]
Movie: American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally
The true story of American woman Mildred Gillars (Meadow Williams), dubbed "Axis Sally" for broadcasting Nazi propaganda to American troops, and her trial for treason against the United States after the war. Al Pacino plays her lawyer. [more inside]
Movie: Silence
Two 17th-century Portuguese missionaries, Father Sebastian Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver), embark on a perilous journey to Japan to find their missing mentor (Liam Neeson). While there, the two men minister to the Christian villagers who worship in secret. If caught by feudal lords or ruling samurai, they must renounce their faith or face a prolonged and agonizing death.t. [more inside]
Movie: Gangs of New York
Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a young Irish immigrant released from prison. He returns to the Five Points seeking revenge against his father's killer, William Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), a powerful anti-immigrant gang leader. He knows that revenge can only be attained by infiltrating Cutting's inner circle. Amsterdam's journey becomes a fight for personal survival and to find a place for the Irish people in 1860's New York. [more inside]
Book: "You Are Not Expected to Understand This"
"You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World.
By Torie Bosch (Editor), Kelly Chudler (Illustrator)
Few of us give much thought to computer code or how it comes to be. The very word “code” makes it sound immutable or even inevitable. “You Are Not Expected to Understand This” demonstrates that, far from being preordained, computer code is the result of very human decisions, ones we all live with when we use social media, take photos, drive our cars, and engage in a host of other activities. [more inside]
Movie: United 93
[TRAILER] A real-time account of the events on United Flight 93, one of the planes hijacked on 9/11 that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania when passengers foiled the terrorist plot. [more inside]
Movie: The Found Footage Phenomenon
The Found Footage Phenomenon is an independent documentary charting the origins of the found footage sub-genre, tracking it through to the technique's current form, and asking what the future is. [more inside]
Movie: The Lost King
An amateur historian defies the academic establishment in her efforts to find King Richard III's remains, which were lost for over 500 years. [more inside]
Movie: The Woman King
The story of the Agojie, the all-female unit of warriors who protected the African Kingdom of Dahomey in the 1800s with skills and a fierceness unlike anything the world has ever seen, and General Nanisca (Viola Davis) as she trains the next generation of recruits and readies them for battle against an enemy determined to destroy their way of life. [more inside]
Book: Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and ...
"How did a libertine who lacks even the most basic knowledge of the Christian faith win 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016? And why have white evangelicals become a presidential reprobate’s staunchest supporters? These are among the questions acclaimed historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez asks in Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, which delves beyond facile headlines to explain how white evangelicals have brought us to our fractured political moment." [more inside]
Book: The Southernization of America
A series of essays by two noted left of center personalities in the South (Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker) that looks at what went wrong in the US, and how we got to a place in the county where 40% of the electorate are flat out racists. [more inside]
Movie: Resistance
The true story of mime Marcel Marceau (Jesse Eisenberg) as he works with the French Resistance to save the lives of ten thousand orphans during World War II. This movie was tied as the number one box office film of the week of its release. Alas, that week was April, 2020 and that box office tally was $2,490. [more inside]
Servant of the People: Season 1 Season 1, Ep 1
A Ukrainian history teacher's rant about politics makes it to YouTube, which leads to him running for president of the country and winning. Now on YouTube and Netflix. [more inside]
Book: Warriors Don't Cry
Warriors Don't Cry: The Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High by Melba Pattillo Beals:
What Melba endured as a high school junior integrating Central High in 1957 can only be described as open warfare on African-Americans. The internal strength she exhibited, to get up and go to school every day, is something I can't even imagine. I didn't enjoy reading about this shameful time in US history, but I'm very glad I read the book. It should be required reading in every high school in America, because we clearly have not evolved past this as a society yet.
The Porter: Rotten Tomatoes Season 1, Ep 1
Train porters Junior Massey and Zeke Garret take action after a tragedy on the job. [more inside]
Book: The Lost Apothecary
This book was my prize from the white elephant book exchange at a Christmastime book club meeting. The story bounces back and forth between early 1800s London, where the secret apothecary exists to help women rid themselves of abusive or cheating husbands, and modern day London, where 30-something Caroline is rediscovering her love of history on a solo 10th anniversary trip that her husband missed because he was cheating on her. It's a really fun and well paced suspense story that will keep you interested until the last page as the historical story unravels while Caroline closes in on understanding what happened, 200 years later.
It's also a story of a woman reconnecting with the things that bring passion to her life, while coming to terms with her decision to junk it all 10 years ago to get married.
Book: WE HEREBY REFUSE: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration
We Hereby Refuse captures not only the wave of uncertainty that swept through the Japanese American incarceration camps during the second World War under Executive Order 9066, but also the remarkable surge of defiance that proliferated in response. [more inside]
Movie: Samurai Rebellion
The mother of a feudal lord's only heir is kidnapped away from her husband by the lord. The husband and his samurai father must decide whether to accept the unjust decision, or risk death to get her back. [more inside]
Podcast: Stuff The British Stole: A Tiger and a Scream
How a toy tiger became the symbol of a struggle between India and its former British colonisers [more inside]
Movie: The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
An exploration of the history of the Bee Gees, featuring revealing interviews with oldest brother Barry Gibb, and archival interviews with the late twin brothers Robin and Maurice. - IMDB. Trailer at HBO, YouTube, and Amazon. [more inside]
Book: Doomsday Book
For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.
But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin--barely of age herself--finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.
Podcast: Richest Hill: Richest Hill
A podcast about the past, present and future of one of America's most notorious Superfund sites in Butte, Montana - from Montana Public Radio, hosted by Nora Saks. [more inside]
Book: "Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America," by Ijeoma Oluo
"I am not arguing that every white man is mediocre. I do not believe that nay race or gender is predisposed to mediocrity. What I'm saying is that white male mediocrity is a baseline, the dominant narrative, and that everything in our society is centered around preserving white male power regardless of white male skill or talent."
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: U.S. History Season 7, Ep 20
This week, from the white void: Coronavirus spreads like crazy due to idiotic mass gatherings by US Americans, enabled by powerful idiots who refuse to take it seriously. And Now: For An Extra $150, Steve Gutenberg Brainstorms Names For Our Co-Worker's New Dog. The main story is on U.S. history, and many US Americans' ignorance of it, especially its history of slavery. On YouTube (28m) LWT is off next week. [more inside]
Alone: Season 6 — all episodes Season 6, Ep 0
Ten survivalists have a chance to win $500,000 by enduring the coldest location in the history of Alone: The Arctic. Participants grapple with a harsh storm out of the gate. [more inside]
Movie: 13th
An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality. [more inside]
Book: The Botanist and the Vintner
In the mid-1860s, grapevines in southeastern France inexplicably began to wither and die. Jules-Émile Planchon, a botanist from Montpellier, was sent to investigate. He discovered that the vine roots were covered in microscopic yellow insects. What they were and where they had come from was a mystery. The infestation advanced with the relentlessness of an invading army and within a few years had spread across Europe, from Portugal to the Crimea. The wine industry was on the brink of disaster. The French government offered a prize of three hundred thousand gold francs for a remedy. Planchon believed he had the answer and set out to prove it.
Gripping and intoxicating, The Botanist and the Vintner brings to life one of the most significant, though little-known, events in the history of wine.
Book: Chop Suey
In 1784, passengers on the ship Empress of China became the first Americans to land in China, and the first to eat Chinese food. Today there are over 40,000 Chinese restaurants across the United States. Now, in Chop Suey Andrew Coe provides some history of the American infatuation with Chinese food, telling its fascinating story for the first time.
It's a tale that moves from curiosity to disgust and then desire. From China, Coe's story travels to the American West, where Chinese immigrants drawn by the 1848 Gold Rush struggled against racism and culinary prejudice but still established restaurants and farms and imported an array of Asian ingredients. He traces the Chinese migration to the East Coast, highlighting that crucial moment when New York "Bohemians" discovered Chinese cuisine--and for better or worse, chop suey. Along the way, Coe shows how the peasant food of an obscure part of China came to dominate Chinese-American restaurants; unravels the truth of chop suey's origins; reveals why American Jews fell in love with egg rolls and chow mein; shows how President Nixon's 1972 trip to China opened our palates to a new range of cuisine; and explains why we still can't get dishes like those served in Beijing or Shanghai. The book also explores how American tastes have been shaped by our relationship with the outside world, and how we've relentlessly changed foreign foods to adapt to them our own deep-down conservative culinary preferences.
Andrew Coe's Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States is a fascinating tour of America's centuries-long appetite for Chinese food. Always illuminating, often exploding long-held culinary myths, this book opens a new window into defining what is American cuisine.
Book: The Little Ice Age
The Little Ice Age tells the fascinating story of the turbulent, unpredictable, and often very cold years of modern European history. Using sources ranging from the dates of long-ago wine harvests and the business records of medieval monasteries to modern chemical analysis of ice cores, renowned archaeologist Brian Fagan reveals how a 500-year cold snap began in the fourteenth century. As Fagan shows, the increasingly cold and stormy weather dramatically altered fishing and farming practices, and it shaped familiar events, from Norse exploration to the settlement of North America, from the French Revolution to the Irish potato famine to the Industrial Revolution.
Now updated with a new preface discussing the latest historical climate research, The Little Ice Age offers deeply important context for understanding today's age of global warming. As the Little Ice Age shows, climate change does not come in gentle, easy stages, and its influence on human life is profound.
BoJack Horseman: A Quick One, While He's Away Season 6, Ep 8
As BoJack comes to term with his life and actions, others dig into and expose his past. Hollyhock goes to a party in New York City, while Kelsey Jannings presents her pitch for a superhero movie with a woman's perspective. [Mid-season finale]
Movie: Last Days in Vietnam
During the chaotic final weeks of the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese Army closes in on Saigon as the panicked South Vietnamese people desperately attempt to escape. [more inside]
Book: One Summer
In One Summer Bill Bryson transports readers on a journey back to one amazing season in American life. Over a few months in 1927 Lindbergh made his historic flight, Babe Ruth hit 60 HRs, The Jazz Singer was filmed, and the first working TV was demonstrated. Also, KKK membership was growing rapidly, Eugenics was becoming accepted as normal, thousands of Americans were dying from alcohol purposely poisoned by the federal government, and thousands more died when the Mississippi river flooded and the Federal government ignored it as not their problem.
It was one hell of a summer.
Lodge 49: Circles Season 2, Ep 6
Liz attends Champ's housewarming party, and discovers that there's more happening at Orbis, while Dud finds Blaise, as Blaise found Jackie's story. "We're stuck in a circle, but the magic is just there, just beyond. Merrill knew."
Book: Fishing
In this history of fishing—not as sport but as sustenance—archaeologist and best-selling author Brian Fagan argues that fishing was an indispensable and often overlooked element in the growth of civilization. It sustainably provided enough food to allow cities, nations, and empires to grow, but it did so with a different emphasis. Where agriculture encouraged stability, fishing demanded movement. It frequently required a search for new and better fishing grounds; its technologies, centered on boats, facilitated movement and discovery; and fish themselves, when dried and salted, were the ideal food—lightweight, nutritious, and long-lasting—for traders, travelers, and conquering armies. This history of the long interaction of humans and seafood tours archaeological sites worldwide to show readers how fishing fed human settlement, rising social complexity, the development of cities, and ultimately the modern world.
Book: Tasting the Past
In search of a mysterious wine he once tasted in a hotel room minibar, journalist Kevin Begos travels along the original wine routes—from the Caucasus Mountains, where wine grapes were first domesticated eight thousand years ago, crossing the Mediterranean to Europe, and then America—and unearths a whole world of forgotten grapes, each with distinctive tastes and aromas. We meet the scientists who are decoding the DNA of wine grapes, and the historians who are searching for ancient vineyards and the flavors cultivated there. Begos discovers wines that go far beyond the bottles of Chardonnay and Merlot found in most stores and restaurants, and he offers suggestions for wines that are at once ancient and new.
Book: Chaucer's People
The Middle Ages re-created through the cast of pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales.
Among the surviving records of fourteenth-century England, Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry is the most vivid. Chaucer wrote about everyday people outside the walls of the English court—men and women who spent days at the pedal of a loom, or maintaining the ledgers of an estate, or on the high seas. In Chaucer’s People, Liza Picard transforms The Canterbury Tales into a masterful guide for a gloriously detailed tour of medieval England, from the mills and farms of a manor house to the lending houses and Inns of Court in London. [more inside]
Movie: The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot
A legendary American war veteran is recruited to hunt a mythical creature.
Podcast: Making Gay History: Stonewall 50 - Episode 1 - Prelude to a Riot
In this first episode of Making Gay History’s Stonewall 50 season, we hear stories from the pre-Stonewall struggle for LGBTQ rights. Travel back in time to hear voices from the turbulent 1960s and to understand the tinderbox that was Greenwich Village on the eve of an uprising. [more inside]
Warrior: The Blood and the Sh*t Season 1, Ep 5
Transporting precious cargo via stagecoach through the Sierra Nevada, Ah Sahm and Young Jun are forced to spend the night with three strangers at a frontier saloon in the middle of nowhere. The detour turns perilous when a notorious outlaw, Harlan French, shows up with his henchmen, looking for a lucrative payday. [more inside]
Warrior: The White Mountain Season 1, Ep 4
Big Bill finds himself compromised by his gambling excesses, but discovers a possible solution after an opium-den raid. Penny reveals the circumstances that prompted her to marry Mayor Blake, who's determined to show voters he won't tolerate San Francisco's "Yellow Peril." [more inside]
Warrior: John Chinaman Season 1, Ep 3
Accused of assault and perhaps worse, Ah Sahm gets a cold shoulder from the Hop Wei, with his fate in the hands of an unexpected ally. Buckley talks to Mai Ling about straining the relationship between the Long Zii and Hop Wei, while Leary pressures gentleman industrialist Byron Mercer, Penny's father, to hire his men for the cable-car track job.
Book: The Library Book
On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who? [more inside]