|
Discover 20 Historical Christmas Recipes: Fruitcake, Gingerbread, Figgy Pudding & More, Top 10 Alternative Christmas Movie Lists: Horror, Action, Comedy & More ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
|
| |
|
It will no doubt come as a relief to many readers that Santa Claus appears to have been a Union supporter. We know this because he appears distributing gifts to soldiers from that side of the Mason-Dixon in one of his earliest depictions. That illustration, “Santa Claus in Camp” (above), first appeared in the…
|
|
|
|
| |
|
One can hardly consider the Christmas season for long, at least in the English-speaking world, without the work of Charles Dickens coming to mind. That owes for the most part, of course, to A Christmas Carol, the novella that revived the public culture of a holiday that had been falling into desuetude by the…
|
|
|
|
| |
|
Die Hard is a Christmas movie. That once-contrarian categorization has increasingly been accepted over the past couple of decades, at least since an editor with whom I’ve often worked first declared it in a Slate roundup. As a result, John McTiernan’s sturdy piece of one-building eighties Hollywood action may have displaced It’s a Wonderful Life as…
|
|
|
|
| |
|
When discussing a musician like Fela Kuti, many of our usual terms fail us. They fail us, that is, if we came of age in a musical culture in which artists and bands put out an album of ten or so lyrics-forward songs every two or three years, promoting it on tour while also…
|
|
|
|
| |
|
However celebrated by historians, scrutinized by archaeologists, and descended-upon by tourists it may be, Pompeii is not exceptional — not even in the fate of having been buried in ash by Mount Vesuvius in the year 76, which also happened to the nearby town of Herculaneum. Rather, it is the sheer ordinariness of that…
|
|
|
|
