Letter & Speech from ‘Meet John Doe’
A quick search yielded no hits, so here’s the letter from Frank Capra’s 1941 film, Meet John Doe.
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Untruths abound in Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” a short story that glimpses into a soldier’s re-acclimation to American life following World War I. At center is an individual, profoundly changed by experience, and his struggle to reintegrate into a seemingly unaffected society. Lies, at once both corrosive and comforting (for the individual and community respectively)
We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself (Totally, yes! A response.)
Note: This piece considers this 2017 op-ed printed in the New York Times. It was written shortly thereafter and has not been updated to reflect the myriad of new complaints one can now levey against the company. Though Facebook has now long enjoyed a seemingly immovable place in the American public consciousness, when conversation swirled
Primary Source Analysis: Brecht/Mussolini
Note: The following short analysis was originally submitted to HIST 795 at Queens College in the Fall 2016 semester. By the time German writer Bertolt Brecht penned “The Legend of the Dead Soldier” towards the end of World War I, the horrors of the war were fresh in the minds of many of its participants
“The Blockbuster,” a Primary Source Analysis
Note: The following short essay looks at Robert Lindsey’s “All Hollywood Loves a Blockbuster—And Chips Off the Old Blockbuster,” an article published in the New York Times in May 1976. The analysis was originally submitted for course credit at Queens College in October 2016. I later covered the topic in greater detail here. It has long
‘Play It Again, Sam’: Re-selling and Re-watching Hollywood’s Classics, 1946-49.
For most of the studio era in Hollywood, movies were defined by a particular sense of impermanence. Produced in a matter of weeks and circulated only until they failed to earn more than the potential of the new film on deck, the life of most motion pictures in the thirties and forties was decidedly short-lived.
William Faulkner: “On Privacy”
In the mid-19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson helped define a uniquely American brand of individualism and personal liberty when he wrote “Self-Reliance”, an ode—in essay form—to the man who “in the midst of the crowd” was able to maintain his unique sense of self. Just over a century later, William Faulkner, in his 1955 essay
Ladies’ Home Journal & The End of World War II
“War,” began Dorothy Thompson in her August 1943 column in Ladies’ Home Journal, “has a curious way of speeding up all historical processes and pushing people and their societies much more rapidly into the future.” Few might have debated her point having witnessed the United States’ technological advancements and the economic boom of its massive
Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men” & The Dynamics of Mass Murder
When one considers the full effects of the Nazis’ Final Solution, it is easy to assume a uniformly efficient and orderly method to their ideologically driven madness. Yet, in Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, we instead see a side of the Holocaust marked by fits of doubt, tears, vomit, and drunken stupor. That this perspective lacks
