Discover essays on Ziegfeld Girls, early modern dance, silent film, and the evolving popular culture of the early 20th century.
The Salome painting has a strange four-hundred-year arc. For most of that time she is a supporting character in someone else’s crime—a girl carrying a platter, doing the bidding of her mother, Herodias. Then, in the space of a few decades around 1900, she becomes the most dangerous woman in European art. That change was…
The following is a reprint of my 2021 article from Mystery & Suspense titled “Supernatural Detectives: Ten Supernatural Thrillers That Are Also Great Detective Stories.” For more on crime fiction, see my post Hard-Boiled Detectives: Unveiling Detective Fiction’s Thrilling Dark Influence. Any good mystery draws the reader into a sinister puzzle (usually involving murder) while…
The Ziegfeld Follies changed American entertainment in a big way. When Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., introduced the Follies of 1907 at the New York Theatre on Broadway, he took spectacle to a whole new level. It started as an uncertain experiment. It blossomed into an entertainment empire that ran until 1931 (with periodic revivals after Ziegfeld’s…
The following is my review of Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History by Susanna Lee, as published in Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy in March 2023. Susanna Lee’s Detectives in the Shadows is an incisive, entertaining jaunt through the hard-boiled genre from its pulp-fiction origins to the present. Lee, Professor…
Rereading Louise Brooks’s writing of her early years in New York City, published as Chapter One in Lulu in Hollywood, I’m struck by the unique blend of detail, candor, and lack of pretension or sentiment. She credits her success in the city to a soda jerk who tamed her accent, a waiter who refined her…
The telephone and “Hello Girls” were wildly disruptive when they arrived at the end of the 19th century. They were radical innovations that brought change, not least for single women, both in the workplace and in the male imagination. Women dominated the ranks of telephone operators early on, starting with Emma M. Nutt in 1878…
Women doctors now make up about 60 percent of practitioners under 35. The situation was very different in the past. No Women Doctors Need Apply In her book “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply”: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835–1975, Mary Roth Walsh recounts the terrible difficulty women faced in studying medicine and in…