From a High Place

From a High Place
Author: Matthew Spender
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2000
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780520225480

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"One of the finest biographies of an artist I have ever read."—John Ashbery

Travelling Passions

Travelling Passions
Author: Gísli Pálsson
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2005
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781584655107

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"Vilhjalmur Stefansson is widely known for his groundbreaking Canadian Arctic explorations of the early 1900s. He acquired a reputation almost larger than life with his discovery of the Copper Inuit - a hitherto unknown people - his insistence on living as the local people did, and, with Natkusiak, his Inuit co-explorer, his adventurous forays onto barren ice for months at a time. He was a fixture in the New York Greenwich Village scene and, later in his life, taught at Dartmouth College. However, despite his detailed field diaries and the frenzy of publicity that followed his every move, his private life has remained largely unknown." "Then, in 1987, an accidental discovery in a flea market of hundreds of private letters and documents proved to be those belonging to Stefansson, and they told a story of private relationships, in particular with two southern women, Orpha Cecil Smith, to whom Stefansson was engaged, and the novelist Fannie Hurst, with whom Stefansson was involved for many years. Moreover, letters between some of Stefansson's friends as well as his own field diaries alluded to an important relationship Stefansson had with an Inupiat woman in the Arctic, Pannigabluk, and to their son, Alex." "Gisli Palsson has followed the trail of these sources and conducted many interviews with Stefansson's northern descendants, uncovering a complex and perhaps torn personality. In Travelling Passions, we have a much more complete picture of the man who figured so largely in the imagination of the early twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.

Romany Marie

Romany Marie
Author: Robert Schulman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006
Genre: Bohemianism
ISBN: 9781884532740

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America's fabled "Left Bank," Greenwich Village in New York City has been described, lauded, idealized and immortalized in numerous books -- but here, for the first time, prize-winning journalist Robert Schulman tells the story of perhaps the Village's most vibrant citizen, the redoubtable Romany Marie Marchand, the acknowledged Earth Mother of the whole scene. From 1914 until the late 1950s she literally set the table for the 20th century's American bohemian elite by running a series of taverns in the Village and establishing a creative hotbed for their ideas and innovations to play out.To these places came Buckminster Fuller, Will and Ariel Durant, e.e. cummings, Theodore Dreiser, John Sloan, Burl Ives, Zero Mostel, Edgar Varese, Brancusi, Isamu Noguchi, Diego Rivera and hundreds of other shining lights of literature, art, theater and academia. At Marie's taverns they found welcoming, fertile spaces where their ideas took root."You know what I am to them?" asks Marie. "I'm a legend. I'm an idea. Many times, when such people get together, the thing they do is to talk about me and to reminisce. Where they started, how their work began. Oh yes, they'll say, was that in Marie's Washington Square place, or in the one on Christopher Street? They can scarcely speak of their past without bringing in one of my centers, for that is what my places were -- not so much restaurants as centers for people to get off the edge of the ordinary."Derived from the exhaustive interviews conducted by Marie's nephew, Bob Schulman, first begun in the 1940s and now finally complete, Romany Marie: The Queen of Greenwich Village offers a fascinating and colorful glimpse into America's true Bohemia in the only way it can truly be offered: by one of its most influential and omnipresent members.

Impossible Heights

Impossible Heights
Author: Adnan Morshed
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2015-01-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 145294296X

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The advent of the airplane and skyscraper in 1920s and ‘30s America offered the population an entirely new way to look at the world: from above. The captivating image of an airplane flying over the rising metropolis led many Americans to believe a new civilization had dawned. In Impossible Heights, Adnan Morshed examines the aesthetics that emerged from this valorization of heights and their impact on the built environment. The lofty vantage point from the sky ushered in a modernist impulse to cleanse crowded twentieth-century cities in anticipation of an ideal world of tomorrow. Inspired by great new heights, American architects became central to this endeavor and were regarded as heroic aviators. Combining close readings of a broad range of archival sources, Morshed offers new interpretations of works such as Hugh Ferriss’s Metropolis drawings, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion houses, and Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Transformed by the populist imagination into “master builders,” these designers helped produce a new form of visuality: the aesthetics of ascension. By demonstrating how aerial movement and height intersect with popular “superman” discourses of the time, Morshed reveals the relationship between architecture, art, science, and interwar pop culture. Featuring a marvelous array of never before published illustrations, this richly textured study of utopian imaginings illustrates America’s propulsion into a new cultural consciousness.

Slumming

Slumming
Author: Chad Heap
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2008-11-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226322459

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During Prohibition, “Harlem was the ‘in’ place to go for music and booze,” recalled the African American chanteuse Bricktop. “Every night the limousines pulled up to the corner,” and out spilled affluent whites, looking for a good time, great jazz, and the unmatchable thrill of doing something disreputable. That is the indelible public image of slumming, but as Chad Heap reveals in this fascinating history, the reality is that slumming was far more widespread—and important—than such nostalgia-tinged recollections would lead us to believe. From its appearance as a “fashionable dissipation” centered on the immigrant and working-class districts of 1880s New York through its spread to Chicago and into the 1930s nightspots frequented by lesbians and gay men, Slumming charts the development of this popular pastime, demonstrating how its moralizing origins were soon outstripped by the artistic, racial, and sexual adventuring that typified Jazz-Age America. Vividly recreating the allure of storied neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village and Bronzeville, with their bohemian tearooms, rent parties, and “black and tan” cabarets, Heap plumbs the complicated mix of curiosity and desire that drew respectable white urbanites to venture into previously off-limits locales. And while he doesn’t ignore the role of exploitation and voyeurism in slumming—or the resistance it often provoked—he argues that the relatively uninhibited mingling it promoted across bounds of race and class helped to dramatically recast the racial and sexual landscape of burgeoning U.S. cities. Packed with stories of late-night dance, drink, and sexual exploration—and shot through with a deep understanding of cities and the habits of urban life—Slumming revives an era that is long gone, but whose effects are still felt powerfully today.

Collected Memoirs

Collected Memoirs
Author: Ruth Gruber
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 842
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1504052978

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Three poignant and powerful memoirs from the award-winning journalist, human rights advocate, and “fearless chronicler of the Jewish struggle” (The New York Times). Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for her biography of the pioneering Israeli nurse, Raquela Prywes, Ruth Gruber lived an extraordinary life as a foreign correspondent, photographer, humanitarian, and author. This collection is comprised of three of her most gripping memoirs, covering many of the most significant historical events in the first half of the twentieth century. Ahead of Time: At the tender age of eighty, the trailblazing journalist looked back on her remarkable first twenty-five years: growing up in a Brooklyn shtetl; entering New York University at fifteen; becoming the world’s youngest person to earn a PhD at nineteen in Cologne, Germany; being exposed to Hitler’s rise to power; and becoming the first American to travel to Siberia at the age of twenty-four, reporting on Gulag conditions for the New York Herald Tribune, in this “beautifully crafted” memoir (Publishers Weekly). “Ruth Gruber’s singular autobiography is both informative and poignant. Read it and your own memory will be enriched.” —Elie Wiesel Haven: In 1943, nearly one thousand European Jewish refugees were chosen by President Roosevelt to receive asylum in the United States. Working for the secretary of the interior, Gruber volunteered to shepherd them on their secret route across the Atlantic from Italy. She recorded the refugees’ dangerous passage, along with the aftermath of their arrival, which involved a fight to stay in the US after the war ended. The “remarkable story” was made into a TV miniseries starring Natasha Richardson as Gruber (Booklist). “[A] touching story . . . [Ruth Gruber] has put us into the full picture and humanized it.” —The New York Times Inside of Time: Unstoppable at ninety-one, Gruber, “with clarity, insight and humor,” revisited the years 1941 to 1952, recounting her eighteen months spent surveying Alaska on behalf of the US government, her role assisting Holocaust refugees’ emigration from war-torn Europe to Israel, and her relationships with some of the most important figures of the era, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Golda Meir (Publishers Weekly). “Gruber bore witness, spoke bluntly, galvanized public opinion, inspired people to action.” —Blanche Wiesen Cook, Los Angeles Times

Ahead of Time

Ahead of Time
Author: Ruth Gruber
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2010-10-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1453203141

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The renowned journalist and Jewish activist looks back on her first 25 years in “one of the most evocative journalistic autobiographies to appear” (Publishers Weekly). In this fascinating memoir, Ruth Gruber recalls her first twenty-five years, from her youth in Brooklyn to her astonishing academic accomplishments and groundbreaking journalistic career. She shares her experiences entering New York University at fifteen and just five years later becoming the world’s youngest person to earn a PhD. She recounts her time in Cologne, Germany, studying during Hitler’s rise to power, and her adventures in Europe and the Arctic as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. Spirited and compelling, Ahead of Time is a striking account of the early years of a woman at the center of the twentieth century’s turning points.

The Shores of Bohemia

The Shores of Bohemia
Author: John Taylor Williams
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2022-05-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0374722625

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An intimate portrait of a legendary generation of artists, writers, activists, and dreamers who created a utopia on the shores of Cape Cod during the first half of the twentieth century. Their names are iconic: Eugene O’Neill, Willem de Kooning, Josef and Anni Albers, Emma Goldman, Mary McCarthy, Edward Hopper, Walter Gropius—the list goes on and on. Scorning the devastation that industrialization had wrought on the nation’s workforce and culture in the early decades of the twentieth century, they gathered in the streets of Greenwich Village and on the beach - fronts of Cape Cod. They began as progressives but soon turned to socialism, then communism. They founded theaters, periodicals, and art schools. They formed editorial boards that met in beach shacks and performed radical new plays in a shanty on the docks, where they could see the ocean through cracks in the floor. They welcomed the tremendous wave of talent fleeing Europe in the 1930s. At the end of their era, in the 1960s, as the postwar economy boomed, they took shelter in liberalism when the anticapitalist movement fragmented into other causes. John Taylor “Ike” Williams, who married into the Cape’s artistic world and has spent half a century talking about and walking along its shores with these cultural and political luminaries, renders the twisting lives and careers of a generation of staggering American thinkers and creators. The Shores of Bohemia records a great set of shifts in American culture and the ideas and arguments fueled by drink, infidelity, and competition that made for a fifty-year conversation among intellectual leaders and creative revolutionaries. Together they found a community as they created some of the great works of the American Century. This is their story. Welcome to the party!

Transnational Traditions

Transnational Traditions
Author: Ava F. Kahn
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2014-11-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814338623

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No other single work in the field systematically focuses on this subject, nor covers the range of themes explored in this volume.

Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn

Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn
Author: Jan Whitaker
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2015-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1250089816

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The Gypsy Tea Kettle. Polly's Cheerio Tea Room. The Mad Hatter. The Blue Lantern Inn. These are just a few of the many tea rooms - most owned and operated by women -- that popped up across America at the turn of the last century, and exploded into a full-blown craze by the 1920s. Colorful, cozy, festive, and inviting, these new-fangled eateries offered women a way to celebrate their independence and creativity. Sparked by the Suffragist movement, Prohibition, and the rise of the automobile, tea rooms forever changed the way America eats out, and laid the groundwork for the modern small restaurant and coffee bar. In this lively, well-researched book, Jan Whitaker brings us back to the exciting days when countless American women dreamed of opening their own tea room - and many did. From the Bohemian streets of New York's Greenwich Village to the high-society tea rooms of Chicago's poshest hotels, from the Colonial roadside tea houses of New England to the welcoming bungalows of California, the book traces the social, artistic, and culinary changes the tea room helped bring about. Anyone interested in women's history, the early days of the automobile, the Bohemian lives of artists in Greenwich Village, and the history of food and drink will revel in this spirited, stylish, and intimate slice of America's past.