Blog
COMMENTING: Click title or date to see options. IMAGES: Most can be enlarged with a click. TOPICS: See the archive page for categories, and use the search page.
📽️ Arte is streaming classic postwar Italian cinema at the moment. I watched “Bellissima,” dir. Luchino Visconti (Italy, 1951), and starring the brilliant Anna Magnani. (See Pat Kewly’s review in PopMatters for a good overview.)
In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings, and locked the survivors in internment camps. Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about this race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa. This report breaks that silence by rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report lays bare new information and shows that the massacre was the result not of uncontrolled mob violence, but of a coordinated, military-style attack on Greenwood.
– Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, quoted in press release, “Justice Department Announces Results of Review and Evaluation of the Tulsa Race Massacre,” January 10, 2025.
I watched the Ukrainian movie “Sniper: The White Raven,” dir. Maryan Bushan (Ukraine, 2022), which was filmed before Russia’s full-scale invasion. The protagonist comes to this work after Putin’s little green men invade his country and murder his family. The film offers a moving counterpoint to the dark comedy, “Donbass,” dir. Sergei Loznitsa (Ukraine, 2018). The latter presents glimpses of life in territory controlled by Russia, mixing local politics, disinformation, and violence in ways that blur the boundary between reality and alternative factuality. 🇺🇦
“To the Man on the Northeast Regional” by Charlotte Clymer, charlotteclymer.substack.com… 🏳️⚧️
I’m assuming the poignant service for Jimmy Carter in the National Cathedral went over TFG’s head and he got bored. Mercifully, the CSPAN camera didn’t linger on his mug for very long.
I love the art deco lettering on this modernist “Air Show” building from the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, “A Century of Progress.”
Source: The Newberry Library Digital Collections, Modern MS Monroe Exposition vol. 28 no. 37.
Public Domain Image Archive, pdimagearchive.org.
“Digitization Complete for World-Renowned Franco Novacco Map Collection,” www.newberry.org….
Newly digitized map collection makes over 750 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps available online.
Had to cut short a walk this afternoon because I was not dressed for the wind, which was making 19°F / -7°C feel like 5°F / -15°C.
Besides marking a massive mob attack on the Capitol four years ago, this date reminds me of the early signs of the coronavirus pandemic a year before that and of my parents' tumble down the stairs in that same period, my father landing on my mother. That’s also when I finished writing “Blogging Histories of Knowledge in Washington, DC,” meeting with my coauthor in Frankfurt a.M. via FaceTime from a hotel room in North Conway, NH.
I had to relocate to NH for eldercare 20 months after that. That means I’ve lived up here for 40 months now, though I still haven’t got used to all the changes. Except for becoming a grandfather—that part has come easy to me. My grandchild is a joy.
Women installing assemblies and fixtures in the tail fuselage of a B-17F bomber (Flying Fortress) under construction at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California, in October 1942. Photo by Alfred T. Palmer for the U.S. Office of War Information.
Source: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017878924/.
🇺🇦 Excellent satirical primer on the Russo-Ukrainian War: a half hour of military and foreign policy animations by @Freeonis in 2024 (in Ukrainian with English subtitles), youtu.be…
Poster from the Spanish Civil War, ca. 1936–39. The main text reads, “We charge the rebels as assassins! Innocent children and women die. Free men, repudiate all those who support fascism in the rearguard.” The text, bottom right, with the arrow pointing at the mother and child reads, “Here are the victims.” Note, too, the black and red triangle of the Anarchists in the lower right-hand corner.
Source of image and main text translation: Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego, https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb5188576r. This page also offers historical context and analysis.
A book that manages to historicize a century of strongman regimes in an accessible and readable way while maintaining intellectual and scholarly rigor is a helluva thing. If you haven’t yet read Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020), I highly recommend it.
21°F / -6°C outside with a real feel of 11°F / -11.5°C, and people are still ordering iced coffee drinks.
Who would the strongman past and present be without those crowds that form the raw material of his propaganda? His secret is that he needs them far more than they need him.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
Propaganda is also a system of attention management that works through repetition.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
At its core, propaganda is a set of communication strategies designed to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking, and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
Molly White, “Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia,” www.citationneeded.news…
I enjoyed rewatching “Saboteur,” dir. Alfred Hitchcock (Universal Pictures, 1942). It offers plenty of action and suspense from Los Angeles to New York City, inside and outside, with positive patriotic messaging that could put twenty-first-century billionaires and MAGAheads to shame.
“The old and the new” – front-page cartoon by Bryant Baker for Puck, December 28, 1910. Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011648851/.