Day: June 7, 2018

How World War I Sparked the Artistic Movement that Transformed Black America

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Aaron Douglas. “Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction.” Oil on canvas, 1934. The New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division. Many associate post-World War I culture with Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s Lost Generation. But for black artists, writers and thinkers, the war changed the way they saw their past and their future. By Dr. Elizabeth J. West / 05.31.2017[…]

Early Modern Memes: The Reuse and Recycling of Woodcuts in 17th-Century English Popular Print

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Detail from The BEGGARS Delight, EBBA 34937. As explored later in the essay, this woodcut would be reused in many different contexts, the speech bubble variously filled accordingly — University of California, Santa Barbara, English Broadside Ballad Archive Expensive and laborious to produce, a single woodcut could be recycled to illustrate scores of different ballads, each new[…]

Early American Influences and Identity

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Josiah Dennis House, Dennis, Massachusetts / Photo by Thomas Kelley, Wikimedia Commons Was Puritan New England the “cradle” of America? By Dr. Kathy McGill Lecturer in American History George Mason University Puritan New England has long been given priority as a model for the development of America as a whole. There are a number of possible[…]

The History of Coffeehouses as Public Spaces

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William Lloyd’s Coffee House in London specialized in being the first in getting marine news, such as arrivals and shipwrecks. Merchants and traders profited from the transatlantic slave trade before abolition, not only in the buying and selling of slaves, but also in the whole marine business of ship insurance and mortgages to sea captains.[…]

An Ancient Australia Connection to India?

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An Aboriginal rock painting in Kakadu National Park of an early European ship. Wikimedia Commons, Google Art & Griffith University Is there a genealogical connection between the Indigenous people of Australia and India? By Dr. Darren Curnoe / 03.10.2016 Associate Professor Biological Anthropology and Archaeological Science UNSW Australia When was the remote Australian continent first settled? Where did[…]