Another book in our Icons of America series has just been published: The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon, by Leo Braudy. Braudy, University Professor and Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature at the University of Southern California, has written the first comprehensive history
Marilyn Monroe figures prominently among iconography—her hair, her dress, her lovers, her status as a sex symbol—under the scrutiny of the public eye, she lived as one of mid-century America’s most famous women. Jerome Charyn, author of the new Icons of America biography: Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil, now out in
It’s hard to imagine a history of women in American film and literature without remembering Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. First published in 1936, iconic female characters like Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Hamilton Wilkes are fixed in our memory; the book itself was a Pulitzer-Prize winner and remains one
Carla L. Peterson will be at the Brooklyn Weeksville Heritage Center this Saturday from 1:30-3:30pm to launch her book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City. Seats are limited, so be sure to RSVP to events@weeksvillesociety.org or call (718) 756-5250. Peterson will be giving
The Facebook page for Jerome Charyn’s Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil has nearly reached 1,000 fans (more than the official Joe DiMaggio page!), and the book’s official publication date isn’t even until tomorrow! The page is loaded with stories about Joe and from fans, fun facts, videos, and photos from
What if this were a Leap Year? Anyone with a birthday on February 29 would tell you that it hangs in there somewhere every year, even without a date on the calendar. Black History Month would have an extra day and Women’s History Month would have to wait. Instead, we’ll
In September 1955, shortly after Emmett Till was murdered by white supremacists in Money, Mississippi, his grieving mother, Mamie Till Bradley, distributed to newspapers and magazines a gruesome black-and-white photograph of his mutilated corpse. Asked why she would do this, Mrs. Bradley explained that by witnessing, with their own eyes,
Boxing is arguably the most intense of individual sports—high stakes, blood, sweat, and (involuntary) tears, all eyes on you in the ring. It’s no mean feat to hold the title of world heavyweight boxing champion for nearly twelve years. In fact, it’s a record still held today, over sixty years
Not all slave owners were white. On the eve of the American Revolutionary War, South Carolina’s slave population was nearly double that of white Europeans, and while there were a still a handful of free blacks, “free” took a marginalized status in the face of color discrimination. Perhaps the richest
Because we want to hear from you about the Yale Press Podcast series, here is an interview with Eric J. Sundquist, author of King’s Dream: The Legacy of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech. Listen to or download the podcast here and be sure to read up on