Harvesting potatoes on a collective farm near Kyiv in 1959, via the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/
Category: Past and Present
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2021791980/. -
WPA poster by Erik Hans Krause, ca. 1936–39.
Source: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98516190/.
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“The Children Were Watching,” dir. Robert Drew and Richard Leacock, USA 1961, 25 min. — This documentary doesn’t feel as old to me as I wish it did. In part that’s because I watched it in Trump’s America during an especially difficult year, but something deeper is at play. The film’s ongoing relevance represents an ambiguous answer to its directors’ main question: What were the children of a New Orleans neighborhood learning as they watched their parents during the conflicts surrounding school integration in November 1960?
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Shot in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, in 1934. Source: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2013647257/.
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I watched “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939) last night. Despite the many differences to today’s world and the oversimplification of the state political machine, the politics in the film strike me as relevant to our own time. Thing is, though, it would probably resonate with Americans regardless of ideological or party orientation. Anti-Trump people could take its anti-corruption and pro-democracy message to heart. Pro-Trump people could embrace how the Washington outsider triumphs, and credulous pro-Trumpers could go for the anti-corruption, pro-democracy stuff too. Finally, the rough-and-tumble quality of the political game would resonate across the political spectrum.
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Via JSTOR Daily, which describes an 1840 pamphlet “ a four-pronged approach to public healthcare that sounds remarkably like our own.”
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To stand in Mann’s study today, with editions of Goethe and Schiller on the shelves, is to feel pride in the country that took him in and shame for the country that drove him out—not two Americas but one. In this room, the erstwhile “Greatest Living Man of Letters” fell prey to the clammy fear of the hunted. Was the year 1933 about to repeat itself? Would he be detained, interrogated, even imprisoned? In 1952, Mann took a final walk through his house and made his exit. He died in Zurich, in 1955—no longer an émigré German but an American in exile.
Alex Ross (The New Yorker) -
WPA Federal Art Project in New York City, ca. 1936/37. The play was based on a novel about fascism happening here.
Source: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92516051/.