“One way to interpret American society in the second half of the twentieth century, for good or ill, is to see it as the triumph of rock and roll culture,” argues John C. Hajduk, professor of history at the University of Montana Western in the book at hand. This peculiar culture was a compelling force […]
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Tag: 1930s United States
From Ameche to Zozzled: A Glossary of Hard-Boiled Slang of the 1920s through the 1940s by Joe Tradii...
The hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and the many films noir later, apart from several other similarities, shared a special gangster jargon and streetwise language that lent an extra air of authenticity to those works. As the many weird expressions, prohibition-time lingo, proverbs and often sexists, racist and plainly offensive words used there quickly went […]
California Crazy. American Pop Architecture by Jim Heimann (2018)
Southern California has always had a special reputation when it comes to architecture and weird, very exceptional buildings or interior design. With the booming American automobile industry, the innovation of the highway system and long cruises by car instead of the endless train rides in the 1940s, came the thirst, hunger and need for supplies […]
Selling Folk Music: An Illustrated History by Ronald D. Cohen and David Bonner (2018)
This title was designed to portray the various setups, styles, collages, and the cover art of both scores, books, festival ads, piano rolls, and vinyl that was marketed and sold in packages that related to the musical content of “folk music” in the United States at a certain period. So there is not too much […]
A&R Pioneers: Architects of American Roots Music on Record by Brian Ward and Patrick Huber (2018)
Of the many record companies that existed in the 1930s, only a few big players survived; they did so by smart marketing, competitive prices and most of all by clever artist recording policies. The respective expert in such a recording company usually was the A&R person, short for artist and repertoire. He (as then with […]
Dark City. The Real Los Angeles Noir by Jim Heimann (2018)
With Dark City a very unusual portrait of an American city is now available. It impresses with many pictures of the city of angels that show the really shadowy sides, the ones that inhabitants from the early 1910s until the 1950s experienced, and that provided the soil and inspiration for many novels and movies. As […]
Cowboys and Gangsters: Stories of an Untamed Southwest by Samuel K. Dolan (2016)
While most American historical books concentrate on just one period of time, one group of individuals or precisely one cultural event in American history, in Cowboys and Gangsters, we encounter quite a gripping set of bygone and cultural crossroads. Author Samuel K. Dolan, a movie director, documentary writer and producer, tells of both the last […]
Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music by Barry Mazor (2015)
This very musical biography is the classical blueprint for a music biopic or future TV series, although this has not yet been realized by the film industry. Mazor’s extensive research project on music marketer and Okeh Records producer Ralph Peer is the exciting story of a young clerk working both in shipping and in his […]
Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation by Nicholas Sammond (2...
The mere mention of the word ”minstrelsy“ brings back numerous unpleasant, racist, stereotypical and humiliating issues of the past. It is interesting to find out then, that many of the most popular cartoon characters were actually modeled on or even continued the line of minstrelsy characters: the most popular would be Walt Disney’s (early) Mickey […]