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"Calder: The Conquest of Time" with Jed Perl Feb 19, 2018

Show notes

Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography, which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows us why Calder was–and remains–a barrier breaker, an avant-garde artist with mass appeal.

Born in 1898 into a family of artists–his father was a well-known sculptor, his mother a painter and a pioneering feminist–Calder went on as an adult to forge important friendships with a who's who of twentieth-century artists, including Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and Piet Mondrian. We move through Calder's early years studying engineering to his first artistic triumphs in Paris in the late 1920s, and to his emergence as a leader in the international abstract avant-garde.

Jed Perl is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He was the art critic for The New Republic for twenty years and a contributing editor to Vogue for a decade, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in New York City.

Description courtesy of Knopf.

"Pennsylvania Scrapple" with Amy Strauss Jan 29, 2018

Show notes

An essential food in Mid-Atlantic kitchens for hundreds of years, scrapple is the often-overlooked king of breakfast meats. Developed by German settlers of Pennsylvania, the slow food byproduct was created to avoid waste in the day's butchering. Pork trimmings were stewed until tender, ground like sausage and blended with the originating broth, cornmeal and buckwheat flour. Crispy slabs of scrapple sustained regional ancestors through frigid winter months and hard-worked harvests. Today, companies such as Habbersett and Rapa still produce scrapple as new generations of chefs create exciting ways to eat the staple. Join author Amy Strauss as she traces the sizzling history and culture of a beloved Pennsylvania Dutch icon.

Amy Strauss is a food and drink writer and editor living in Philadelphia.

Description courtesy of The History Press.

"How The French Saved America" with Tom Shachtman Jan 16, 2018

Show notes

To the rebelling colonies, French assistance made the difference between looming defeat and eventual triumph. Even before the Declaration of Independence was issued, King Louis XVI and French foreign minister Vergennes were aiding the rebels. After the Declaration, that assistance broadened to include wages for our troops; guns, cannon, and ammunition; engineering expertise that enabled victories and prevented defeats; diplomatic recognition; safe havens for privateers; battlefield leadership by veteran officers; and the army and fleet that made possible the Franco-American victory at Yorktown. Nearly ten percent of those who fought and died for the American cause were French. Those who fought and survived, in addition to the well-known Lafayette and Rochambeau, include François de Fleury, who won a Congressional Medal for valor, Louis Duportail, who founded the Army Corps of Engineers, and Admiral de Grasse, whose sea victory sealed the fate of Yorktown. This illuminating narrative history vividly captures the outsize characters of our European brothers, their battlefield and diplomatic bonds and clashes with Americans, and the monumental role they played in America's fight for independence and democracy.

Tom Shachtman has written or co-authored more than thirty books, as well as documentaries for ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and BBC, and has taught at New York University and lectured at Harvard and Stanford. He is currently a consultant to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's science and technology initiatives.

Description courtesy of St. Martin's Press.

"Death of an Assassin" with Ann Marie Ackermann Dec 18, 2017

Show notes

The first volunteer killed defending Robert E. Lee's position in battle was really a German assassin. After fleeing to the United States to escape prosecution for murder, the assassin enlisted in a German company of the Pennsylvania Volunteers in the Mexican-American War and died defending Lee's battery at the Siege of Veracruz in 1847. Lee wrote a letter home, praising this unnamed fallen volunteer defender. Military records identify him, but none of the Americans knew about his past life of crime. Before fighting with the Americans, Lee's defender had assassinated Johann Heinrich Rieber, mayor of Bönnigheim, Germany, in 1835. Rieber's assassination became 19th-century Germany's coldest case ever solved by a non–law enforcement professional and the only 19th-century German murder ever solved in the United States. Thirty-seven years later, another suspect in the assassination who had also fled to America found evidence in Washington, D.C., that would clear his own name, and he forwarded it to Germany. The German prosecutor Ernst von Hochstetter corroborated the story and closed the case file in 1872, naming Lee's defender as Rieber's murderer.

Ann Marie Ackermann is a former attorney with focuses on criminal and medical law. Eighteen years ago she moved to Bönnigheim, Germany, the town in which the assassination occurred, and is a member of its historical society. She has a number of academic publications in law, ornithology, and history.

Description courtesy of Kent State University Press.

"Charles Sheeler: Fashion, Photography, and Sculptural Form" with Kirsten Jensen and Shawn Waldron Nov 27, 2017

Show notes

Philadelphia native Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) is recognized as one of the founding figures of American modernism. Initially trained in impressionist landscape painting, he experimented early in his career with compositions inspired by European modernism before developing a linear, hard-edge style now known as Precisionism. Sheeler is best known for his powerful and compelling images of the Machine Age—stark paintings and photographs of skyscrapers, factories, and power plants—that he created while working in the 1920s and 1930s. Less known, and even lesser studied, is that he worked from 1926 to 1931 as a fashion and portrait photographer for Condé Nast. The body of work he produced during this time, mainly for Vanity Fair and Vogue, has been almost universally dismissed by scholars of American modernism as purely commercial, the results of a painter's "day job," and nothing more. Charles Sheeler contends that Sheeler's fashion and portrait photography was instrumental to the artist's developing modernist aesthetic. Over the course of his time at Condé Nast, Sheeler's fashion photography increasingly incorporated the structural design of abstraction: rhythmic patterning, dramatic contrast, and abstract compositions. The subjects of Sheeler's fashion and portrait photography appear pared down to their barest essentials, as sculptural objects composed of line, form, and light. The objective, distant, and rigorously formal style that Sheeler developed at Condé Nast would eventually be applied to all of his artistic forays: architectural, industrial, and vernacular.

Kirsten Jensen is the Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator at the James A. Michener Art Museum.

Shawn Waldron is the former Senior Director of Archives and Records at Conde Nast.

Description courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Press.

"Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father" with Thomas Kidd Nov 13, 2017

Show notes

Renowned as a printer, scientist, and diplomat, Benjamin Franklin also published more works on religious topics than any other eighteenth-century American layperson. Born to Boston Puritans, by his teenage years Franklin had abandoned the exclusive Christian faith of his family and embraced deism. But Franklin, as a man of faith, was far more complex than the "thorough deist" who emerges in his autobiography. As Thomas Kidd reveals, deist writers influenced Franklin's beliefs, to be sure, but devout Christians in his life—including George Whitefield, the era's greatest evangelical preacher; his parents; and his beloved sister Jane—kept him tethered to the Calvinist creed of his Puritan upbringing. Based on rigorous research into Franklin's voluminous correspondence, essays, and almanacs, this fresh assessment of a well-known figure unpacks the contradictions and conundrums faith presented in Franklin's life.

Thomas S. Kidd is distinguished professor of history and associate director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University.

Description courtesy of Yale University Press.

"George Washington: A Life in Books" with Kevin Hayes Nov 07, 2017

Show notes

Based on a comprehensive amount of research at the Library of Congress, the collections at Mount Vernon, and rare book archives scattered across the country, Kevin Hayes reconstructs in vivid detail the active intellectual life that has gone largely unnoticed in conventional narratives of Washington. Despite being a lifelong reader, Washington felt an acute sense of embarrassment about his relative lack of formal education and cultural sophistication, and in this sparkling literary biography, Hayes illustrates just how tirelessly Washington worked to improve. Beginning with the primers, forgotten periodicals, conduct books, and classic eighteenth-century novels such as Tom Jones that shaped Washington's early life, Hayes studies Washington's letters and journals, charting the many ways the books of his upbringing affected decisions before and during the Revolutionary War. The final section of the book covers the voluminous reading that occurred during Washington's presidency and his retirement at Mount Vernon. Throughout, Hayes examines Washington's writing as well as his reading, from The Journal of Major George Washington through his Farewell Address. The sheer breadth of titles under review here allow readers to glimpse Washington's views on foreign policy, economics, the law, art, slavery, marriage, and religion-and how those views shaped the young nation.

Kevin Hayes, Emeritus Professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, now lives and writes in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several books including "The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson" and "A Journey through American Literature."

Description courtesy of Oxford University Press.

"Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect" with Audrey Lewis and Christine Podmaniczky Oct 30, 2017

Show notes

This major retrospective catalogue explores the impact of time and place on the work of beloved American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009). While previous publications have mainly analyzed Wyeth's work thematically, this publication places him fully in the context of the long 20th century, tracing his creative development from World War I through the new millennium. Published to coincide with the centenary of Wyeth's birth, the book looks at four major chronological periods in the artist's career: Wyeth as a product of the interwar years, when he started to form his own "war memories" through military props and documentary photography he discovered in his father's art studio; the change from his "theatrical" pictures of the 1940s to his own visceral responses to the landscape around Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and his family's home in Maine; his sudden turn, in 1968, into the realm of erotic art, including a completely new assessment of Wyeth's "Helga pictures"—a series of secret, nude depictions of his neighbor Helga Testorf—within his career as a whole; and his late, self-reflective works, which includes the discussion of his previously unknown painting entitled Goodbye, now believed to be Wyeth's last work.

Audrey Lewis is curator at the Brandywine River Museum of Art.

Christine Podmaniczky is curator of the N.C. Wyeth Collections and Historic Properties at the Brandywine River Museum of Art.

Description courtesy of Yale University Press.

"The LaPorte Inheritance: An Historical Novel of French Azilum" with Deborah deBilly dit Courville Oct 23, 2017

Show notes

A mostly forgotten episode of US history is brought to life in fascinating detail by historian and author Deborah deBilly dit Courville. Working from primary sources such as letters and household accounts, she has reconstructed the rhythm and rationale of daily life at the 18th century French immigrant colony along the Susquehanna River known as Azilum. Told through the fortunes and fates of one of the colony's founding families, the LaPortes, the novel explores the attitudes, desires and motivations of the French nobles who sought refuge in the New World: people who, much as we do today, struggled, loved, mourned and planned for their futures, all against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the politics and vast uncharted wilderness that was the fledgling United States.

Deborah deBilly dit Courville is a member of the Board of Directors of French Azilum and is a historical interpreter at the LaPorte House located near Towanda, PA.

Description courtesy of Samothrace Press.

"Gettysburg Rebels" with Tom McMillan Oct 09, 2017

Show notes

"Gettysburg Rebels" is the gripping true story of five young men who grew up in Gettysburg, moved south to Virginia in the 1850s, joined the Confederate army – and returned "home" as foreign invaders for the great battle in July 1863. Drawing on rarely-seen documents and family histories, as well as military service records and contemporary accounts, Tom McMillan delves into the backgrounds of Wesley Culp, Henry Wentz and the three Hoffman brothers in a riveting tale of Civil War drama and intrigue.

Tom McMillan is the author of "Flight 93: The Story, The Aftermath and The Legacy of American Courage on 9/11." He has spent a lifetime in communications as a newspaper sports writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, among others, as a radio talk show host, and, for the past 21 years as VP of Communications for the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Description courtesy of Regnery History.

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