Discover essays on Ziegfeld Girls, early modern dance, silent film, and the evolving popular culture of the early 20th century.
Edythe Baker was a distinctive figure in jazz world during the 1920s and 1930s, making her mark in a male-dominated profession. She excelled as a jazz pianist, composer, and recorder of popular music. Her beauty and talent also led her to both dance and play the piano in the renowned Florenz Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic. Performing…
Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History by Susanna Lee, as published in 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 and Chair of the Department of French…
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…
Revised March 26, 2025 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 the least for single women, both in the workplace and in the male imagination. Women dominated the ranks of telephone operators early on, starting with…
Revised March 25, 2025 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…