Discover essays on Ziegfeld Girls, early modern dance, silent film, and the evolving popular culture of the early 20th century.
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. This article is about the Broadway revue that Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. produced from 1907 to 1931 — not the 1945 MGM…
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…