Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts

Monday, May 16, 2022

May 16: Louis "Studs" Terkel, American author

BORN MAY 16:

Louis "Studs" Terkel (1912-2008) was an American author and historian best known for oral histories of "everyday Americans." Born in NYC, at age 8 he moved with his family to Chicago, then America's "second city," with which he was ever after associated. Though he took a law degree at U of C, he went to work in radio, taking various jobs until he landed The Studs Terkel Program in 1952, which ran 45 years until 1997; on tis show he interviewed such diverse guests as Martin Luther King Jr., Leonard Bernstein, Bob Dylan, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, and Frank Zappa. In the meantime (late '40s and early '50s) he did the unscripted Studs' Place on TV, in which famous people and interesting characters passed through his greasy-spoon diner in Chicago. All this interviewing got him into the oral history racket, for which most of us outside of Chicago know him. In the '70s he wrote Hard Times, about the Great Depression, and Working, in which (per the subtitle) "People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do." In 1985 he won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for "The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two. The nickname "Studs," by the way, comes from the time he was reading James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy while acting in a play with another actor named "Louis."

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Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Apr. 27: Edward Gibbon, English historian

BORN APRIL 27:

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) was an English historian whose modern reputation rests almost solely on his monumental six-volume The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The work exhibited meticulous sourcing and a full frontal criticism of organized religion; it traces Western civilization (as well as the Islamic and Mongolian conquests) from the height of the Roman Empire to the fall of Byzantium in the fifteenth century.

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Sunday, April 10, 2022

Apr. 10: Lew Wallace, American writer

BORN APRIL 10:

Lew Wallace (1827-1905) was an American lawyer and a Union general in the American Civil War. (He also served on the military commission for the trials of the Lincoln assassination conspirators.) He later served as governor of the New Mexico Territory, during which time he completed his most famous work (while living at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe), Ben-Hur, subtitled A Tale of the Christ. It has been called "the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century," and is known to a certain generation of moviegoers for the epic 1959 film version, which won a record 11 Academy Awards in 1960. Published in 1880, it was the first book to dislodge Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin in sales, and was itself not bumped from the top of the US all-time bestseller list until 1936 with the publication of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. The protagonist, Judah Ben-Hur, was a Jewish prince from Jerusalem enslaved by the Romans at the beginning of the first century CE. Parallel to his narrative is that of Jesus, from the same region and around the same age. The two young men's lives intersect throughout the story, and Judah converts to Christianity late in the story.

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