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Aphra Behn, Writer and Spy
Aphra Behn’s origins are mysterious, almost certainly because she wanted it that way. She was born around 1640, probably to parents of the professional class. Her father could have been a man named Cooper. Or he could have been a barber…
Josephine Baker: Superstar, War Hero and Activist
Josephine Baker was born in 1906 as Freda Josephine MacDonald in St Louis, Missouri. Her mother Carrie was a washerwoman and ex-vaudeville girl, her father was a drummer named Eddie Carson who ran off when Josephine was only a little girl.…
Fear of a Black Picture | The History Behind Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing
“What will cause the riot?” wrote Spike Lee in his diary back in 1989. “Take your pick: an unarmed Black child shot, the cops say he was reaching for a gun; a grandmother shot to death by cops with a shotgun; a young woman charged with…
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Radical Female Poet
Anna Laetitia Aikin, better known under her married name of Barbauld, was born on the 20th June 1743 in Leicestershire. Her father John Aikin was a Unitarian, a religion whose name comes from their rejection of belief in the "holy trinity"…
An All Too Brief History of the Modern Las Vegas
I’ve been to New York and I’ve been to Hollywood. The former might have the world’s most distinctive skyline and the latter might have all the glitz and glamour of the movie industry, even if you have to be an actual movie star to…
Ireland’s Immigration History| ‘The Black Siren’ of the 18th Century
Crow Street Theatre, Dublin, in March 1750. The playbill tells of a benefit concert organized "at the particular desire of persons of quality". The whole house is to be illuminated with wax lights, and the performance followed by a grand…
The death of Shakespeare: where, when, how?
April 23rd 2016 is the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. Although his plays and poems have lived on and are enjoyed across the globe, relatively little is known for certain about the man himself. This is particularly so for…
Evander Berry Wall, King of the Dudes
There’s an odd dignity to the title of “old money”, born from the strange notion that one should respect someone more if they have not earned their fortune, rather than less. This idea is, of course, strongly fostered by those in the…
When Elvis Met Nixon
The movie Elvis & Nixon will be released next month. Directed by Liza Johnson, it tells the story behind the most requested photo from the US National Archives, of the meeting between Elvis Presley and President Richard Nixon on…
How Premiership football fulfils Karl Marx’s prophecies
In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx argued that capitalism’s greatest achievement was the systematic destruction of tradition. Money or “the icy waters of egotistical calculation” will ultimately triumph over any traditional institution…