Category: Uncategorized
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A Walkabout Bull Run
This past Spring Break, I had the opportunity to go and visit one of the most famous Civil War sites in the country: Manassas. Or, Bull Run? I don’t know, the place has two names, very confusing. It is physically in Manassas, Virginia, but there’s also a nearby creek named Bull Run, so take your…
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Gone with the Times: An Unfortunate Masterpiece
Get the Smelling Salts Well, I’m tired. Quite literally a 4-hour marathon. Not your typical marathon, sitting in my $20 folding chair from Target as opposed to running on a street somewhere, but nevertheless a true test of my ADHD (self-diagnosed). Now where do you even start with a film like this? I guess I’ll…
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Just Deserters: Free State of Jones Review
Intro Free State of Jones was directed by Gary Ross (Hunger Games, Seabiscuit) and released in 2016. It follows the life of Newton Knight, a Civil War medic who deserts his post due to discrepancies with Confederate wartime policy. It is largely based on a true story, with “largely” being the keyword, was a box…
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Glory, Hallelujah
Sound the Trumpets It’s that time again . . . Time to watch, react, and write about another, surely, highly historically accurate piece of American cinema. And this week it was quite a treat, where I got to watch Glory for the first time. Released in 1989, starring Hollywood icons Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and…
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Lincoln: An End to All Compromises
To Start Civil War history is an incredibly popular, as well as passionate, subject. Scores of Civil War media have been produced over the 150 years since fellow countrymen were at war, and I get it. It was a very complicated time in our American history, a nation split in two by opposing ideologies. The…
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Claudio, the Bridge Builder
Intro No, he didn’t actually build bridges. But, Claudio Monteverdi provided a bridge between two early musical periods, the Renaissance and the Baroque. In fact, Monteverdi is really the first recognizable name in music history. Before him, you had your Willaert’s, du Fay’s, Ockeghem’s, and Palestrina’s, but none of them you may have heard of.…
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It Was the End of the World as We Knew It (And Did We Feel Fine?)
Before You Start Freaking Out Big disclaimer: this post WILL be a tad bit off-topic. I had a hard time picking something I really resonated with among the possible topics in the Seventeen Moments, BUT this article about the “detente” period in the late 60s and 70s got the ball rolling for me. The Detente…
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State of Play: Soviet Olympic Dominance
Preface I’m going to start off by saying the majority of my information comes from Wikipedia (collective boooooo from professors) but I did work myself to collect some of the figures expressed in this post by compiling information from various stat tables. Other than that I also drew a lot of info from the Seventeen…
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Shock Value of Success: Rebel to the Grain
High Maintenance Taste DISCLAIMER: I’m using a lot of information from the Seventeen Moments in Soviet History site under the topic “Upheaval in the Opera”. I’ll include a hyperlink here for future reference! Now, where to begin? I guess we’ll start with Stalin’s taste in art. Let’s just say he’s a little more . .…