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
CAESAR Who is it in the press that calls on me? I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music, Cry ‘Caesar!’ Speak; Caesar is turn’d to hear. SOOTHSAYER Beware the ides of March. Some might say that the death of Caesar on this day in 44 BCE was the
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
We have a winner for our Representing Justice contest! Congratulations to Cynthia (and her aspiring artist-judge daughter, Ashley) for this winning portrayal of Justice!! Swiftly delivered from the gavel on-high, Justice is found for this particular criminal with what we can only guess will be a hard times sentence
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