Discover essays on Ziegfeld Girls, early modern dance, silent film, and the evolving popular culture of the early 20th century.
Alfred Cheney Johnston’s photographs often travel the internet without authentic provenance. A print is scanned, the scan is pinned and reposted, and somewhere along the way a name is attached to it, but the name might well be wrong. Once a wrong caption is in circulation it is nearly impossible to recall. This page is…
When the prominent American psychologist G. Stanley Hall died in April 1924, The New York Times remembered him days later under an unusual headline: “Dr. G. Stanley Hall Studied the Flapper’s Personality.” The article devoted substantial attention not to Hall’s place among the founders of American psychology, but to an essay of his about the…
Sixteen forgotten silent film stars — overlooked actresses of the 1910s and 1920s, from Ziegfeld beauties to serial queens — once among the most famous women in America.
Alfred Cheney Johnston photographed the Ziegfeld Follies for a dozen years. His studio method, his letters, his failures, and why his pictures outlived him.
Salomania was the Salome dance craze that swept American and European stages between 1907 and the mid-1920s.
Mary Nolan, born Mariam Imogene Robertson, was an American Ziegfeld Girl and silent-film actress who also performed as Imogene “Bubbles” Wilson and Imogene Robertson. Best remembered for West of Zanzibar (1928), she later told her story in an eight-part 1941 memoir. She died in Hollywood in 1948 from a Seconal overdose; whether the overdose was…
Hilda Ferguson was one of the most talked-about showgirls of the 1920s Jazz Age: a Ziegfeld Follies revue star whose fame rested as much on scandal as on her famous shimmy dance—the era’s emblem of the flapper in motion. She kept company with bootleggers and gangsters, was questioned again and again about the unsolved murder…
A scholarly review of Cecily Devereux’s Salomania and the Representation of Race and Gender in Modern Erotic Dance (2023) — a feminist, postcolonial history of the Salome dance craze.
Who was Salome, and why won’t she leave us alone? The full story—from a nameless dancing girl in the Gospels to the femme fatale of Wilde, Strauss, and the modern stage.
Alfred Cheney Johnston, the Ziegfeld Follies photographer, is best known for his glamorous portraits of Ziegfeld Girls. He also made many nude and nearly nude photographs, although these were rarely published during his lifetime. Why did he make the nude photographs? They are quite different from his ordinary publicity photographs of clothed women. Alfred Cheney…