Life Magazine Research Articles

Last Kiss The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript

Last Kiss The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript

Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory ed. by Barry Keith Grant, Malisa Kurtz (review)

Reviewed by: Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory ed. by Barry Keith Grant, Malisa Kurtz Christina Parker-Flynn Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory. Edited by Barry Keith Grant and Malisa Kurtz. University of Texas Press, 2016, 294 pages Each genre film, according to one of the most firmly established “rules” of film genre study, must exhibit qualities that determine its relationship to other examples in the genre. Barry Keith Grant and Malisa Kurtz’s Notions of Genre is no different. While claiming to be something unique, a study in genre through works written before the academic tradition (1970-) became firmly established, it also self-locates precisely within the types of writings one expects in a genre reader. Notions of Genre offers a compilation of essays on popular film from 1945 to 1970 that reflect an early and organic preoccupation with film genre theory, prior to its proper academic application. A distinguished film scholar well known for his Film Genre Reader, “the first scholarly anthology on film genre” released in 1986, Barry Keith Grant reveals his enthusiasm for the prehistory of film genre in the Introduction to its current, fourth edition (2013), in which he emphasizes the early significance of Robert Warshow’s article on the gangster film (1948) and André Bazin’s essay on the western (1952), both works included here in Notions of Genre, as the earliest contributions to genre theory (7). Grant and Kurtz use essays by more familiar authors—like Warshow and Bazin, who have been considered forefathers to genre study since the publication of Christine Gledhill’s The Cinema Book (1985)—to balance out their reintroduction of historically lesser-known work and authors. Grant and Kurtz divide the collection into four sections, the first two (“Comedy” and “Western”) directly indicative of film genre labels, and the last two (“The Fantastic” and “Crime and Punishment”) more universally applicable beyond the realm of film studies proper. The first section on “Comedy” is nicely anchored by the first two readings, James Agee’s “Comedy’s Greatest Era” and Siegfried Kracauer’s “Silent Film Comedy,” important and familiar works written by authors who clearly befit the book’s project. Though perhaps better known as a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, James Agee was one of the earliest and most steadfast film critics before the vocation truly existed, defending film’s artistry as a writer at Time and The Nation, and writing his most influential piece, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” included here, as a freelancer for Life Magazine. Kracauer’s essay largely argues that the physicality of slapstick comedy evoked “material life at its crudest” and therefore intrinsically “conformed to the spirit of the medium predestined to capture the fortuitous aspects of physical life” (36). Though Kracauer’s essay represents meta-level film Theory more than genre theory in a limited sense, both Agee’s and Kracauer’s texts lament the devaluation of physical comedy at the advent of sound cinema. The remaining four readings in the section range from 1963 to 1968 and all revolve around the same axis. In “Whatever Happened to Hollywood Comedy?” Dwight MacDonald illustrates how “the old magical world” of silent comedies disappears by mid-century, when contemporary films become too realistic to be amusing abstractly, with films like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad [End Page 59] World (1963) violating the “basic rules of comedy” (54). The last two essays explore film comedy systematically, with Donald W. McCaffrey charting “The Evolution of the Chase in the Silent Screen Comedy,” and Carolyn and Harry Geduld mapping the transformation of comedic characters upon the introduction of sound. Highlights of the second section on the “Western” include Bazin’s highly influential essay “The Western, or the American Film Par Excellence” and George Bluestone’s “The Changing Cowboy: From Dime Novel to Dollar Film,” another early work in adaptation studies, itself pioneered by Bluestone’s seminal book Novels Into Film (1957). Interestingly, despite being devoted to a genre not highly regarded for its representation of diversity, this section exemplifies the widest assortment of critical methods and authors of any in the book. Harry Schein, chemical engineer and founder of the...

Ghosts of American Literature: Receiving, Reading, and Interleaving Edna St. Vincent Millay's The Murder of Lidice

The history of Edna St. Vincent Millay's long World War II propaganda poem he Murder of Lidice reveals the transmedial logics that affected its publication and the media conditions that shaped its reception. After commissioning the poem in 1942, the Writers’ War Board coordinated a high-profile, strategically sequenced release, in which eight versions of the poem went public during a single week—periodical versions in he Saturday Review of Literature and Life magazine, a live performance featuring Hollywood actors, an NBC radio broadcast of that live performance, globally broadcast radio versions in three languages, and a book issued by Harper and Brothers. Comparing a set of fan letters (written in response to the NBC and Life versions) with a collection of interleaved book versions of the poem (books with newspaper articles stored between their pages) suggests how audiences might have been moved by the media of Murder's distribution as much as by the content of the poem itself.

Illuminating Roman Vishniac: A Career in Biological Photography and Cinematography.

Despite the fame of Roman Vishniac's photography of Jewish communities in pre-Holocaust Europe; what is relatively unknown today to the photography or science communities - despite the recognition it received at the time of its creation - is that Vishniac's major efforts in photography were neither documentary nor artistic. Rather, the vast majority of his lifetime of photographic work focused on the biological world. Reviewed here is the phenomenal scope and quantity of biological photography and cinematography produced by Roman Vishniac over a five-decade period. From zoo animals to the tiniest of microorganisms, from time-lapse studies of vascular physiology to widely distributed biology classroom films, from spreads in LIFE magazine to advertisements for an insect sting analgesic; Vishniac's ability to capture and create images - almost exclusively of living subjects - was sought after by scientific researchers, popular magazines, movie producers, news organizations and commercial entities. Vishniac's body of scientific photography, both still and ciné, often produced by him from initial concept through writing and shooting - in an age before the technological advances in imaging that we all now enjoy - and despite its later eclipse by his own earlier images, was regarded as the finest and most imaginative of its time.

Interpersonal Metadiscourse Markers in the “Monash Life” Magazine

Metadiscourse is a new concept of analyzing the discourse related to the relationship between the writer and reader. This can be the way of communicating used by writer to reader. Interpersonal metadiscourse markers are divided into two broad terms; they are interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers. The aims of this research are to identify and explain the interpersonal metadiscourse markers used in the “Monash Life” magazine. This magazine was chosen because it contains many articles in which the writers convey their opinions. The study used twenty two articles in the magazine. The note taking technique was used as the method of collecting the data. First, the articles were read intensively; second, the phrases or words categorized as the type of interpersonal metadiscourse markers were selected. The qualitative method was used to analyze the data. Every sentence or paragraph which contains the types of interpersonal metadiscourse markers were analyzed and classified. The theory of metadiscourse proposed by Hyland (2005) was used in this study. The result of the analysis shows that there were sixty one data that contain the interpersonal metadiscourse markers in the magazine. There were thirty four data found in the category of interactive metadiscourse markers, and twenty seven data in the category of interactional metadiscourse markers. It could be concluded that the use of interactive metadiscourse markers was more dominant than interactional metadiscourse markers in the Monash Life Magazine.

MPOWERing Global Students

Emanuel Smadja and Mike Davis had cofounded the start-up MPOWER Financing, which offered loans to high-promise international students in US colleges through an application process that opened up credit approval to more than just credit history. Their new lending approach relied on partnerships with universities, pooled private investments, and advanced risk analytics to estimate borrowers' postgraduation earnings and payback ability. Unlike traditional lenders, MPOWER opened application all nationalities and required no guarantees, cosigners, or collateral. Smadja and Davis had taken MPOWER far and fast, thanks to a tsunami of innovations in the financial technology (fintech) field. But the US political sands had shifted, and immigration had become a contentious legislative issue. As a lender to foreign nationals, MPOWER found itself at the intersection of market innovation and government policy, and Smadja questioned how to negotiate that vulnerable ground. He wondered if his company would have to adapt to an altered ecosystem. And if it couldn't, what were his options? Excerpt UVA-ENT-0220 May 25, 2018 MPOWERing Global Students Emmanuel (Manu) Smadja picked up the “Special Innovators and Disruptors Issue” of Washington Life magazine, whose cover was a photo of himself with four other up-and-coming tech entrepreneurs, and flipped to the cover story. He was elated, yet anxious, to see that his start-up was receiving high-profile attention: As an international student from France, Smadja found it hard to get the financial assistance he needed during his college years, relying on odd jobs and financial sacrifices from his family in order to graduate from the University of Virginia. He and co-founder Mike Davis began MPOWER to help the one million international students and more than two million domestic students across the United States whom they say don't have access to traditional student loan options. Putting down the magazine, Smadja's thoughts turned to the personal experience that had been the genesis of his company. As a French citizen, he had had difficulty financing his education in the United States. He recalled: . . .

Waterloo Packer: Selling Slaughter

In 1941, the Rath Packing Company of Waterloo, Iowa published a book titled Waterloo Packer: The Story of the Rath Packing Company to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in the meatpacking industry. Modelled on Life magazine, Waterloo Packer co-opted the photoessay format to commercial ends. Examining archival documentation and looking at other American industrial publications, this article illuminates Waterloo Packer’s conception by executives of the Rath Company and consultants from advertising agency Young and Rubicam; and it contextualises Waterloo Packer as the most innovative of a series of ‘industrial biographies’ produced in the USA at midcentury. Through close reading of Waterloo Packer as phototext, this article demonstrates how the Rath Packing Company deployed photographic imagery to present a controlled and sanitised vision of industrial-scale slaughter.

FR-11 A HURRICANE REOPENS AN OLD WOUND

You have accessJournal of UrologyHistory Forum1 Apr 2018FR-11 A HURRICANE REOPENS AN OLD WOUND Lawrence Wyner Lawrence WynerLawrence Wyner More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.juro.2018.02.3031AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES In August 2017, the AUA Didusch Museum received a bundle of 184 original medical illustrations hurriedly packaged by a woman in St. Petersburg, Florida who wanted to preserve them from oncoming Hurricane Irma. These intricate charcoal sketches were the work of Miss Tod Dee Craig, who drew them over fifty years ago before she tragically took her own life. The drawings were the property of Dr. Perry B. Hudson, who had published many of them in his atlas of prostatic surgery in 1962 and again in his book on radical perineal prostatectomy in 1996 - the woman had taken care of him in his later years before he passed away in June 2017, just shy of his hundredth birthday. METHODS Dr. Hudson was an early proponent of the perineal approach for prostatic diagnosis and surgery. Not only was Dr. Hudson a staunch advocate of this technique, but he also continued to promote its use even after the mainstream urological community gravitated towards refining the retropubic approach. RESULTS A Navy veteran, Dr. Hudson was freshly trained from Johns Hopkins in 1951 when he accepted a position at the age of 33 at New York's newly-built Francis Delafield Cancer Hospital of Columbia University Medical Center. In the heady days of the post-war boom in scientific research, he designed a study to evaluate the utility of prostate cancer screening in a cohort of over a thousand men living in the "flophouses" of lower Manhattan's Bowery district. Many of these men were veterans suffering from PTSD, who had slid into homelessness through no fault of their own, during an era when there was no governmental safety net. Over the next 15 years, Dr. Hudson and his residents screened the volunteers for prostate cancer by performing open perineal prostate biopsies; those with cancer found on frozen section underwent simultaneous radical perineal prostatectomy along with aggressive hormonal therapy. CONCLUSIONS Dr. Hudson found an incidence of prostate cancer of 10% in this cohort. Overall mortality was 20% in the group with negative biopsies and 30% in the group diagnosed with prostate cancer who underwent treatment. His initial findings were published in major medical journals, and the study was even featured for the lay public in a 1958 Life Magazine spread; however, no one raised any ethical issues about it until 1966, when an editor at the journal Cancer challenged Dr. Hudson, and the study was terminated. More recently it has also been criticized on its design and the methods used to recruit subjects. Nonetheless, the Bowery series remains the first attempt to study a hypothesis which is still being hotly debated today; that is, that the early diagnosis and aggressive treatment of prostate cancer saves lives. © 2018FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 199Issue 4SApril 2018Page: e1244-e1245 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2018MetricsAuthor Information Lawrence Wyner More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

Reflections on My Lifetime Teacher: Dr. Willem J. Kolff.

Reflections on My Lifetime Teacher: Dr. Willem J. Kolff.

Women, Workers and Race in LIFE Magazine: Hansel Mieth's Reform Photojournalism 1934-1955 by Dolores Flamiano

Reviewed by: Women, Workers and Race in LIFE Magazine: Hansel Mieth's Reform Photojournalism 1934-1955 by Dolores Flamiano Carol Zuegner Women, Workers and Race in LIFE Magazine: Hansel Mieth's Reform Photojournalism 1934-1955. Dolores Flamiano. Ashgate Publishing Co., 2016, 288 pp. $149 hardback. The life of German-born photographer Hansel Mieth reads like fiction—from traveling through Europe as a teenager under a boy's disguise, to working as a fruit tramp, to being the second woman hired at LIFE magazine (after Margaret Bourke-White). Mieth's life was all too real. In "Women, Workers and Race in LIFE Magazine: Hansel Mieth's Reform Photojournalism 1934-1955," Dolores Flamiano highlights the boundaries and borders Mieth continually encountered and often crossed: gender, nationality, class, and race. An in-depth cultural exploration of Mieth's photographs, buttressed by her unpublished memoir and oral histories, the book raises questions about gender, documentary versus photojournalism, and the power of the photojournalist (versus the power of magazine editors) to frame a story. Flamiano divides Mieth's career into four phases: an apprentice photographer in the early 1930s, when she was a migrant farm worker and a photographer with the San Francisco Public Works Administration; her professional career with LIFE, which started in 1937 in New York; freelance photography and farming in California beginning in 1941; and, after the 1973 death of her longtime companion and husband Otto Hagel (also a photographer), a period of renewed interest in Mieth's work. Mieth had no formal training as a photographer, but she had a deep interest and experience in the causes of social reform and change. She came to LIFE reluctantly because she was more interested in social reform photography than photo stories on celebrities. Flamiano says LIFE magazine wanted Mieth's ability as a candid photographer, especially her skill with visual storytelling and the photo essay. In the heart of the book, Flamiano examines a series of photo essays—including one called "Garment Workers at Play" and featuring women union workers—aiming to contrast Mieth's motivation in taking the pictures with what actually appeared in the magazine. Mieth developed an interest in science stories, and "embraced scientific progress as a vehicle for social change," Flamiano writes. That part of Mieth's career at LIFE is illuminated by a photo essay on a rhesus monkey colony on Puerto Rico. One photo she took on that assignment became a Picture of the Week – and one of her most famous photos, reprinted and even mentioned in her New York Times obituary. But it was the stories about social reform that drew Mieth. Her work targeted the intersection of gender and race. She published a LIFE photo essay in 1938 called "Negroes: The U.S. Also Has a Minority Problem," and went to a predominantly African-American community in South Carolina in 1940 for a photo essay that she thought would center on an African-American nurse. But the magazine editors recast the story (titled "Birth Control: South Carolina Uses It for Public Health") in a different light that left Mieth appalled and disenchanted both with LIFE and her editors' story choices. The most compelling chapter of Flamiano's book shows some of the photos taken by Mieth that never appeared in LIFE. An especially interesting example is a photo essay about Heart Mountain, a Japanese internment camp of 11,000 in Wyoming. LIFE killed the story in 1943, but Mieth's photos of the camp have emerged in various collections and exhibitions. Mieth's career at LIFE declined during World War II, when she and Otto Hagel moved to a California farm, photographing a few social reform stories. Mieth claims the two were blacklisted during the Cold War because they refused to appear before the before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Though that claim is disputed, Hagel and Mieth's work was clearly marginalized in the post-war climate. Flamiano's examination of Mieth's life, work, and the culture in which she worked offers a fascinating exploration of the constraints and treatment of gender, race, and class in the context of magazine photojournalism. The books would have a place in both undergraduate and...

Discovering the South: One Man's Travels Through a Changing America in the 1930s by Jennifer Ritterhouse

Reviewed by: Discovering the South: One Man's Travels Through a Changing America in the 1930s by Jennifer Ritterhouse Monica Maria Tetzlaff Discovering the South: One Man's Travels Through a Changing America in the 1930s. By Jennifer Ritterhouse. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xviii, 363. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-3094-6.) In Jonathan Daniels's best-selling book A Southerner Discovers the South (1938), Jennifer Ritterhouse finds a vehicle to take the reader on a journey through some of the hot spots in southern race relations during the New Deal years. In doing so, Discovering the South: One Man's Travels Through a Changing America in the 1930s joins a growing body of scholarship on the long civil rights movement. By examining the writing of this influential white, southern, liberal newspaper editor in 1937, Ritterhouse asks readers to imagine themselves as passengers in Daniels's "big, comfortable Plymouth" along [End Page 498] with a historian in the backseat offering commentary based on "hindsight and a huge amount of historical scholarship" (pp. 15, 16). Ritterhouse's goal is to write history rather than biography, using Daniels's stops in Raleigh, North Carolina; Lookout Mountain, Nashville, and Memphis, Tennessee; Scottsboro, Tuskegee, and Birmingham, Alabama; Marked Tree and Hot Springs, Arkansas; and Atlanta, Georgia, to tell a story about the nation and the South. The national story may be a bit of a reach, but the southern story is strong. Ritterhouse argues that the civil rights movement could not have "taken off and gained as much ground" in the 1950s and 1960s "if the United States had not already entered the long civil rights era—if it had not emerged into new political and human rights territory through New Deal–inspired journeys like that of Jonathan Daniels" (p. 15). She is careful to say that her book examines the long civil rights era rather than the long civil rights movement because Daniels was not an activist but rather "a mostly sympathetic observer" (p. 297n24). Ritterhouse acknowledges her debt to Charles W. Eagles's Jonathan Daniels and Race Relations: The Evolution of a Southern Liberal (Knoxville, 1982), but Eagles devoted only a few pages to A Southerner Discovers the South. Ritterhouse focuses on Daniels's 1937 journey, crystallizing a moment in American history when the New Deal was at the height of its power and yet limited in its ability to make racial and class changes in the South. Ritterhouse deftly weaves in jottings from Daniels's journal and the latest historical scholarship on the Scottsboro Boys to describe increasing efforts to fight back against an unjust criminal justice system maintained by white southerners. She examines the interplay among communists, socialists, and liberals, those further to the left who pushed liberals like Daniels to take a stand against segregation and to call for federal intervention against lynching. Ritterhouse notes that Daniels supported a fairer system of segregation but contrasts Daniels's views with those of more committed radicals, including members of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, whom he interviewed for A Southerner Discovers the South, and the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, which he declined to join. Sometimes the quotations of other historians seem a bit long, but overall, they add depth to the story. Carefully chosen Farm Security Administration photographs by Dorothea Lange and others are interspersed throughout the book, helping readers visualize many of the people and scenes that Daniels encountered. Ritterhouse links Daniels's book with a widely seen book of photographs on southern poverty, Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell's You Have Seen Their Faces (New York, 1937). Daniels had hoped that Life magazine would print an abbreviated version of his journey with photographs, and he took time to take the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt on a southern tour, but their collaboration was never published. Ritterhouse's use of photographs thus makes Daniels's journey more vivid for the present-day reader. The sections on Lowndes County and Birmingham, Alabama, places that became prominent in the 1960s civil rights struggle, are especially compelling. Ritterhouse describes the Dickson family's murderous and coercive efforts to exploit black convict laborers in Lowndes County...

Techniques for Survival: IV. The Study of Character: Vol. 34, No. 4, May 1972

Techniques for Survival: IV. The Study of CharacterVol. 34, No. 4, May 1972 Oscar Cargill "The Study of Character" concludes Professor Cargill's four-part series. Part I, "On Being Head," appeared in the November 1971 Critic; Part II, "Consensus in Literature," in January 1972; Part III, "Where Parrington Left Us," in March. No one who knew Oscar Cargill and his work could help feeling a sense of tragic loss, professional as well as personal loss, in learning of his fatal heart attack on April 18. We are grateful that he was able to complete this memorable series of academic reminiscences, and we are honored in presenting this fine concluding essay to our readers. - Ed. The controversy over the farcical television show All in the Family is the most vital current event in that medium just as The Forsyte Saga was conspicuously the most valuable offering before it. Though Archie Bunker and Soames Forsyte are far apart in the social strata, each is a very fallible human being, each is important as a personality rather than for any story he helps to unfold. Galsworthy's protagonist had all the faults of the British upper-middle-class, but is somehow redeemed by his infatuation with his daughter, who is a feminine mirror of his own limitations; Archie Bunker is a lower-middle-class American whose deep-set racism is balanced off by his support of a Polish son-in-law and daughter while the former earns a college degree. The fact that Archie cannot be consigned outright to purgatorial fires is the basis of the attack upon the TV show by Laura Z. Hobson in an article in the Times and by Life magazine, which produced a real Archie who thinks that his screen prototype is an admirable fellow. An adequate reply to Archie's attackers seems to have been phrased long ago by Thomas Hardy in defending his Tess of the D'Urhervilles for the possible harm it might do to infirm minds: Of the effects of such sincere presentation on weak minds, when the courses of the characters are not exemplary and the rewards and punishments ill adjusted to deserts, it is not our duty to consider too closely. A novel which does mortal injury to a dozen imbeciles, and has bracing results upon intellects of normal vigor, can justify its existence, and probably a novel was never written by the purest-minded author for which there could not be found some moral invalid or other whom it was capable of harming. [End Page 187] Judgment is immediately forced, in viewing All in the Family; it is not an aesthetic judgment which must be made, however, but an ethical one. Indeed, there is very little that can be called aesthetic in the show: neither the setting, the roles, nor the action can be put in that category, though perhaps by a long stretch the acting may. Jean Stapleton, as Edith Bunker, is so convincingly and benevolently stupid that even a dull viewer might suspect that art is involved. We are forced to settle first, however, whether Archie's intolerance strengthens intolerance in others or, by farcical exaggeration, dissipates it. I will not vouch for the other 44,999,999 viewers, but I hold All in the Family to be a wholesome satire of bigotry and quote St. Jerome to its contemners: "If an offence come out of the truth [even an exaggeration of the truth], better it is that the offence come than that the truth is concealed." The priority of moral judgment over aesthetic judgment is a natural fact obscured to criticism by its hatred of didacticism, of manipulation. When Noah Webster lectures Doctor Johnson for taking "low" words out of Shakespeare's comedies for his dictionary, we are justly annoyed with the American lexicographer for his prudery. To distinguish right from wrong, however, cuts deeper than to discriminate the beautiful from the ugly—that is, to get at the utmost essentials, survival is more important than taste, whatever other relations may be drawn between the two. One's experience with students confirms this, for more participate voluntarily in a discussion of what is right or wrong...

Advancing the Civil Rights Movement: Race and Geography of Life Magazine's Visual Representation, 1954-1965 by Michael DiBari Jr.

Advancing the Civil Rights Movement: Race and Geography of Life Magazine's Visual Representation, 1954-1965 by Michael DiBari Jr.

Joris Karl Huysmans jako kritik umění a jeho pražské odezvy

This text focuses on Joris-Karl Huysmans as an art critic and on his influence on the Czech environment. As during his lifetime, Huysmans’s critical work as well as his personal life underwent significant transformations, his work found favorable response among several different opinion groups, which engaged in controversies with one another. The circle associated with the Moderní revue (Modern Review) magazine presented Huysmans as a decadent and focused on his texts such as A rebours (1884). Of the Moderní revue circle, particularly Antonín Procházka’s and Karel Hlaváček’s texts featured inspiration by Huysmans. The Volné směry (Free Styles) magazine, on the other hand, perceived Huysmans as a naturalist and a defender of impressionism. Huysmans influenced particularly Miloš Jiránek and František Xaver Šalda; the latter wrote an extensive obituary of Huysmans. Huysmans was further mentioned in Rozhledy (Horizons), a periodical which voiced opinions which were less limited in breadth, and his conversion made him an attractive figure also for the Catholic Nový život (New Life) magazine, which however did not focus on his critical thought on art. Generally speaking, Huysmans’s reviews were widely read in the Czech Lands, although their selection was limited. Czech art periodicals found his reviews interesting for his daring style and a broad range of themes, which also included little-known artists, caricatures and posters.

Making Visual Rhetoric More Difficult

Making Visual Rhetoric More Difficult

The Spanish American War’s ‘Most Durable Hero’: Admiral Pasquale Cervera and Popular Heroic Values in the United States, 1898–1909

The United States honored a host of military heroes during the Spanish American War including Pasqual Cervera y Topete, the enemy admiral who had experienced a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Santiago Bay, Cuba (3 June 1898) at the hands of US naval forces. Over the course of the war and in the year that followed, American public opinion of the admiral became positive and increasingly laudatory. By late 1899, Life Magazine, followed by other popular publications, claimed that Cervera was a better war hero then Admiral George Dewey and other American officers who had been wildly celebrated for their wartime heroics. The enemy admiral’s heroic rise was possible because of a fundamental change in the relationship between the press and the nation’s war heroes that sped up each champion’s ultimate decline. In the late nineteenth century Americans sought chivalrous, selfless men of action for their heroes. As journalists began covering each war hero’s daily life as they did other celebrities, however, they discovered character flaws in the nation’s homegrown champions. This examination of Cervera’s gradual rise as an American hero through his death in 1909 includes an overview of the American hero-making process and lifecycle and how celebrity journalism shortened the reign of most war heroes. After identifying the complicated set of values the nation sought in its war heroes at the end of the century, this study will also explain why journalists considered naval heroes as better representatives of those cherished ideals than those from the Army (including volunteer Theodore Roosevelt) until well after the end of the war. Roosevelt was honored as a hero during the war and won the 1899 New York gubernatorial election largely because of his wartime popularity, but was not considered selfless because of his clear political ambitions. American hero-worship of Cervera developed slowly, was considerably more subdued than the public enthusiasm displayed for America’s native-born champions, and was undoubtedly bestowed, in part, as a criticism of the failure of American heroes to live up to the heroic narrative created for them by reporters and biographers. Cervera’s ranking as Life’s ‘most durable hero’ of the war, while seemingly nonsensical, begins to make more sense when the Spanish admiral is reconfigured as a national cultural hero instead of an American military champion. Despite his enemy status, Cervera came to epitomise important military values of the day, because of the rapid decline of the nation’s American-born war heroes brought about by celebrity journalism.

Ranking Bush and Obama as Foreign Policy Presidents: A Scorecard

In 1948, Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. published the first academic survey of historians evaluating US presidents in Life magazine. That survey and subsequent ones ranked the presidents ...

American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood ed. by Austen Barron Bailly

Reviewed by: American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood ed. by Austen Barron Bailly Patricia Oman Austen Barron Bailly, ed., American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood. New York: Delmonico Books/Prestel, 2015. 240pp. $60.00. In 1937, Thomas Hart Benton went to Hollywood on assignment for Life magazine and ended up taking commissions for movie publicity art for several decades. This book explores his multifaceted relationship with Hollywood: as a bemused but fascinated outsider, as a critic and supporter of Hollywood-endorsed American myths, and as an artist willing to bridge the gap between high and low art. American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood is a beautiful and critically significant publication that accompanies a traveling exhibition of the same name organized collaboratively by the Peabody Essex Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. With over 230 illustrations, including eighty-two full-color plates, the book could serve as a career retrospective of the artist. In fact, the book includes full-color reproductions of many of Benton’s major and/or famous works, including the American Historical Epic mural series [End Page 124] (1920–28), lithographs commissioned by 20th Century Fox for the 1940 film adaptation of Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, and his shockingly violent wwII propaganda paintings, including Exterminate! (1942) and Invasion (1942). One of the highlights of the book is Sarah N. Chasse’s “Benton, Hollywood, and History: A Timeline,” which is a chronological montage of images relating to Benton’s career as a painter and book illustrator, from photographs of the artist at work, to book covers, to stills from influential films. This photo essay brings together many of the book’s themes and makes a convincing visual connection between Benton and Hollywood. Another highlight is the collection of sixteen graphite and ink drawings that Benton made in 1937 based on his experiences in Hollywood. These drawings, which vary from rough sketches to polished scenes, demonstrate his fascination with the mechanics and intricacies of the Hollywood industry. The fact that most of these drawings are held in private collections also attests to the hard work that went into organizing this project. Perhaps the most entertaining highlight of the book is a previously unpublished (and unfinished) essay titled “Hollywood Journey” by Benton himself. Based on his 1937 visit to Hollywood, Benton observes unflinchingly, “A moving picture story conference while it deals with emotional charged fictions is not by any means a conference of artists free for a moment from economic pressures and engaged in the simple business of finding a vehicle for the expression of their life experiences. The moving picture Art is predominantly an economically conditioned Art. Its forms are like gambling in the stock market. They are plays for a cash return” (24). His description of the movie “Napoleon,” a businessman who has an “absolutely unapproachable genius” (25) for selecting stories that will make money, would not be out of place in a Mark Twain satire. Considering the number of commissions he received from Hollywood, the critical nature of this essay may be the reason the prolific Benton never finished or published it during his lifetime. Navigating the book is like navigating a Benton mural, however. One doesn’t know quite where to begin, and the reader is sometimes expected to work harder than anticipated to understand the modernist juxtapositions of text and image. Nine long essays and six mini-essays are organized into small (unnamed) thematic units, with full-color figures and plates interspersed throughout. Some of these units make the link between Benton and [End Page 125] Hollywood explicit. Editor Austen Barron Bailly’s long essay “True West: Thomas Hart Benton and American Epics” works well as a unit with John Herron’s mini-essay “John Ford, Thomas Hart Benton, and the American Frontier” and Margaret C. Conrads’ mini-essay “The Grapes of Wrath in Pictures.” Barron Bailly argues that Benton independently produced the fourteen-panel American Historical Epic “to participate in public debates about who and what was authentically American” (32), critiquing Manifest Destiny and the violence behind American colonization. In later western landscapes of the 1950s and 1960s, she argues...

Spectral Soldiers: Domestic Propaganda, Visual Culture, and Images of Death on the World War II Home Front

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Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography

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