‘The Wire’ Stands Alone

(NYTimes) “The Wire” premiered on HBO on June 2, 2002. In the two decades since, its reputation has only grown, as has its audience. It is one of those series, like the original “Star Trek,” that future generations will refuse to believe struggled with low ratings during its entire run. (Let alone that it was nominated for an absurd two Emmys, and won exactly none.) Continued

Captain Chesapeake

Henry Reed

(LoC) James Henry Neel Reed, known as Henry Reed, was born on April 28, 1884, in the Appalachian Mountains of Monroe County, West Virginia. Reed was a master fiddler, banjoist, and harmonica player whose amazing repertoire consisted of hundreds of tunes, as well as multiple performance styles. His music conveyed tradition while setting new directions, and became a touchstone for academic research into the history of U.S. fiddle music.
Henry Reed learned the overwhelming majority of his tunes by ear and retained them by memory. He learned from elderly musicians such as Quince Dillion, who was born around 1810 and served as a fifer in the Mexican War and the Civil War. As a youngster, Reed learned to read music, played alto horn in a local band, and picked up a few additional tunes from sheet music. Continued 

Edward Everett Horton

(Wikipedia) Edward Everett Horton (March 18, 1886 – September 29, 1970) was an American character actor with a long career in film, theater, radio, television and voice work for animated cartoons.
Horton was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Isabella S. Diack and Edward Everett Horton. His mother was born in Matanzas, Cuba to Mary Orr and George Diack, immigrants from Scotland. Many sources state that Edward Everett Horton's grandfather and namesake was Edward Everett Hale, author of The Man Without a Country. Horton attended the Baltimore City College high school in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was inducted into that school's Hall of Fame. Continued 

Tallulah Bankhead

(Wikipedia) Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 – December 12, 1968) was an American actress, talk-show host, and bon vivant. ... Tallulah Bankhead died in St. Luke's Hospital in New York City of double pneumonia arising from influenza, complicated by emphysema, on December 12, 1968, aged 66, and is buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard, Chestertown, Maryland. Her last coherent words reportedly were "Codeine... bourbon." Continued

Dollar Princesses: The American heiresses who inspired Downton Abbey

 

(thedailybeast) ... Yet these American girls paid a price for their strawberry leaves and coronets. Most had grown up in modern homes with every modern convenience: electric light, indoor plumbing, and central heating. After marriage, they found themselves chatelaines of houses where taking a bath involved a housemaid making five trips from the kitchen in the basement, carrying jugs of hot water to fill a hip bath. The stately homes of England were all too often dark, dingy, and terribly cold. Cornelia Martin, who married the Earl of 
Craven, complained to her mother, “The house is so cold that the only time I take my furs off is when I go to bed.” 
Mildred Sherman from Ohio, who became Lady Camoys, gave up going to dinner at country houses in the winter because she couldn’t face the cold in evening dress. Continued

Columbia Records

 

(Wikipedia) The Columbia Phonograph Company was originally the local company run by Edward Easton, distributing and selling Edison phonographs and phonograph cylinders in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Delaware, and derives its name from the District of Columbia, which was its headquarters. As was the custom of some of the regional phonograph companies, Columbia produced many commercial cylinder recordings of its own, and its catalogue of musical records in 1891 was 10 pages long. Columbia's ties to Edison and the North American Phonograph Company were severed in 1894 with the North American Phonograph Company's breakup, and thereafter sold only records and phonographs of its own manufacture. Continued

The French Revolution for Dummies (and ‘Les Misérables’ Watchers)

 

Les Misérables has finally arrived in theaters!

Boy, the music is beautiful, but what the heck is going on?

The Daily Beast explains the history behind the story.

Continued

Cab Calloway

(Wikipedia) Cabell "Cab" Calloway III (December 25, 1907 – November 18, 1994) was an American jazz singer and bandleader.
Calloway was a master of energetic scat singing and led one of the United States' most popular African American big bands from the start of the 1930s through the late 1940s. Calloway's band featured performers including trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Adolphus "Doc" Cheatham, saxophonists Ben Webster and Leon "Chu" Berry, New Orleans guitar ace Danny Barker, and bassist Milt Hinton. Calloway continued to perform until his death in 1994 at the age of 86. Continued

Nobody handles Handel like you handle Handel

Steven Spielberg, Historian

(NYTimes) Having worked before at the intersection of Hollywood and history, helping a tiny bit with a respectable movie about the Cuban missile crisis called “Thirteen Days,” I approached the new movie “Lincoln” with measured expectations. I had seen how a film could immerse viewers in onscreen time travel without messing up the history too much. But that was the most I hoped for.
“Lincoln,” however, accomplishes a far more challenging objective: its speculations actually advance the way historians will consider this subject.
The movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president, makes two especially interesting historical arguments. Continued

Howard Rollins

(Wikipedia) Howard Ellsworth Rollins, Jr. (October 17, 1950 – December 8, 1996) was an American television, film, and stage actor. He is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Coalhouse Walker, Jr. in the film Ragtime, and for his portrayal of Virgil Tibbs in the NBC/CBS television series In the Heat of the Night. The youngest of four children, Rollins was born in Baltimore, Maryland where he studied theater at Towson State College nearby. Continued

50 Years of the Jetsons: Why The Show Still Matters

(Smithsonian) It was 50 years ago this coming Sunday that the Jetson family first jetpacked their way into American homes. The show lasted just one season (24 episodes) after its debut on Sunday September 23, 1962, but today “The Jetsons” stands as the single most important piece of 20th century futurism. More episodes were later produced in the mid-1980s, but it’s that 24-episode first season that helped define the future for so many Americans today.
It’s easy for some people to dismiss “The Jetsons” as just a TV show, and a lowly cartoon at that. But this little show—for better and for worse—has had a profound impact on the way that Americans think and talk about the future. Continued

‘Copper’ Resurrects the Five Points

(NYTimes) ... Ostensibly the new series is about a former boxer and Civil War veteran turned police detective, Kevin Corcoran (played by Tom Weston-Jones), an Irish immigrant who returns to the Five Points after serving in the Union Army’s 71st Regiment to find his daughter dead and his wife missing. New York is really the main character.
Where “Gangs” signed up as technical adviser Luc Sante, whose 1991 book “Low Life” evoked “The Gangs of New York,” Herbert Asbury’s 1928 nonfiction confection, “Copper” is rooted in fiction — Jack Finney’s “Time and Again,” which Ms. Wayne read in high school at Manhattan’s Hewitt School, and “The Alienist” by Caleb Carr, which she read more recently (as well as “Low Life”). But the creative team also decided to hire a full-fledged historian, Daniel Czitrom, who teaches American cultural and political history at Mount Holyoke, to keep “Copper” believable. (Mr. Fontana is himself a self-styled would-be historian who started college as a history major.) Continued

Woody Guthrie

(Wikipedia) Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie (July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) was an American singer-songwriter and folk musician whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children's songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists displayed on his guitar. His best-known song is "This Land Is Your Land." Many of his recorded songs are archived in the Library of Congress.
Such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Pete Seeger, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg, Jeff Tweedy and Tom Paxton have acknowledged Guthrie as a major influence. Continued

Take a trip through the Grateful Dead Archive Online

(boingboing) UC Santa Cruz launched the Grateful Dead Archive Online last Friday with tens of thousands of items. But it wouldn't be a Grateful Dead archive if all you could do was look at stuff, so you can also:
• Add your own photos and stories - you can even tell us a story over voicemail.
• Use the map to search for things related to a particular Dead show and venue - like photos, backstage passes, and envelopes that fans sent in to request tickets, and tapes from performances hosted at archive.org. Continued

Photo of Jerry Garcia by Susana Millman

The Stephen Colbert of the Civil War

(NYTimes) “A nickel-plated son of a bitch.” That was how David R. Locke, an Ohio newspaperman and the most daring comedian of the Civil War, described his alter-ego: Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby. Locke’s persona made him the most influential humorist of the era.
His jokes seemed to be in everybody’s mouth, and he became so popular in England that readers there assumed all Americans spoke in Nasby’s tattered dialect. Continued

Photo: Portrait of P. V. (Petroleum Vesuvius) Nasby by Thomas Nast 

A marker for Norman Chaney

(Baltimore Sun) Only people who know where to look would be able to pay respects to Norman Chaney, who is buried in an unmarked grave in Baltimore. But if fans of the chubby "Our Gang" star have their way, he'll soon have the headstone he's done so long without.

Chaney, the son of a Baltimore electrical worker, won a national contest in 1929 to become "Chubby," the new "fat kid" in the popular film series, replacing the original Chubby, who had grown out of the role. 

But with his impossibly round face and impish charm, Chaney eclipsed his predecessor — becoming the fat kid people remembered. Continued

The Top Man at ‘Mad Men’ Isn’t Mad Anymore

(NYTimes) THERE is an almost Sisyphean sensation that comes from navigating the network of hallways, elevators and escalators at the Los Angeles Center Studios here that lead at last to the dimly lighted office of Matthew Weiner and asking him, point blank, what he plans for the new season of “Mad Men.” It is a futile feeling because, as any true acolyte knows, he is not going to give a straight answer to the question.
Even at this stage in the life cycle of his award-winning, television-landscape-reshaping period drama, Mr. Weiner — no mythological figure, just a grinning, 46-year-old mortal in a fleece pullover on a cool California morning — is too protective of his property to give up what he considers spoilers, which is essentially any information about the show at all.
And even though an excruciating 17-month hiatus will have elapsed between the last new “Mad Men” episode and its fifth-season premiere, scheduled for March 25 on AMC, Mr. Weiner, creator, lead producer and animating force, will not disclose any concrete details about the roguish 1960s advertising executive Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) and his coterie of frustrated strivers and failed monogamists, or even the year in which the new season is set. Continued

John Cusack on his new film The Raven

(thisisnottingham.co.uk) ... Both on screen and in the flesh today, raven-haired Cusack looks much younger than his 45 years, thanks in part to losing 25 pounds to play the drunken, impoverished poet.
"I went on a strict diet to look super-thin for The Raven, because he was underweight," says the actor.
"He was world famous but dirt poor and he once showed up the White House drunk."
Directed by V For Vendetta's James McTeigue, in the gothic-looking film set in old Baltimore, Poe has to track down a serial killer inspired by the crimes in his dark works of fiction, who's kidnapped his fiancee Emily. Continued