August 2024 Acquisitions

Books:

Rodney Barnes and Jason Shawn Alexander, Blacula: Return of the King, 2023.

Ed Brubaker et al, Friday Book Three: Christmastime Is Here Again, 2024.

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, 1991.

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886.

David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2016.

Vivek J. Tiwary, The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story, 2013.

Brian Wood, DMZ Vol. 2: Body of a Journalist, 2007.

Movies:

Better Off Dead, 1985.
Past Lives, 2023.

Music:

Aranbee Pop Symphony Orchestra, The Aranbee Pop Symphony Orchestra, 1991.

Black Crowes, Happiness Bastards, 2024. 

Blur, Live at Wembley Stadium, 2024

Steve Cropper and the Midnight Hour, Friendlytown, 2024.

English Teacher, This Could Be Texas, 2024.

Dee C. Lee, Just Something, 2024.

Madvillain, Madvillainy, 2004.

Glen Matlock and the Philistines, On Something, 2004.

Morrissey, Beethoven Was Deaf, 2024.

Pink Floyd, A Saucerful of Secrets, 1968.

Jimmy Reed, The Very Best of Jimmy Reed, 2000.

X, Smoke & Fiction, 2024.

"A Feat of Deceitful Legal Alchemy"

"Field nonetheless saw Davis's erroneous summary as an opportunity. A few years later, in an opinion in an unrelated case, Field wrote that 'corporations are persons within the meaning' of the Fourteenth Amendment. 'It was so held in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad,' explained Field, who knew very well that the Court had done no such thing.
"His gambit worked. In the following years, the case would be cited over and over by courts across the nation, including the Supreme Court, for deciding that corporations had rights under the Fourteenth Amendment."

Adam Winkler at The Atlantic explains how corporations became "people."

"The Further West One Comes, the More There Is to Like"

"San Francisco readily embraced the outré young Irishman. Wilde returned the favor. 'There is where I belong,' he told his hosts at one reception. 'This is my atmosphere. I didn't know such a place existed in the whole United States.' When the time came for him to leave San Francisco on April 8, even the railroad locomotives were said to have echoed one of his catchphrases, whistling 'too too!' as they left the station."

Roy Morris, Jr., in the Los Angeles Times discusses Oscar Wilde's 1882 visit to California.

"The Government Should Not Support the People"

"But the misery of his countrymen and women did nothing to shake Cleveland’s laissez-faire convictions. He refused to support any relief measure and instead urged Congress to reaffirm the gold standard, which he thought would lead inflation-wary businessmen to start hiring again. In 1894, when railroad workers stopped trains around the country in a sympathy boycott, Cleveland dispatched the U.S. Army to break the strike and persuaded a court to put the leaders of the protest in jail. His job, Cleveland might have said, was 'not to worry about those people.' After all, he would 'never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.'"

At The New Republic, Michael Kazin compares Mitt Romney to Grover Cleveland.

And in Newsweek, Andrew Sullivan compares Barack Obama to Ronald Reagan.

"Our Silence Will Be More Powerful than the Voices You Strangle Today"

"Four days later, it all came crashing down. On May 3, police had shot to death six strikers at the McCormick Works, where a long-standing labor dispute had turned the factory into an armed camp, and beaten dozens more. On May 4, anarchists held an outdoor indignation meeting at a square called the Haymarket to protest the police murders. Anarchist leader Samuel Fielden was wrapping up his speech when the police, led by the same inspector who had led the charge at McCormick the night before, moved in to disperse the crowd. 'But we are peaceable!' Fielden cried, and just then somebody wasn’t. Somebody threw a bomb at the police, the police open fire, and the course of American history changed."

Jacob Remes in Salon traces the history of May Day.

"General Garfield Died from Malpractice"

"Had Garfield been left where he lay, he might well have survived; the bullet failed to hit his spine or penetrate any vital organs. Instead, he was given over to the care of doctors, who basically tortured him to death over the next 11 weeks. Two of them repeatedly probed his wound with their unsterilized fingers and instruments before having him carted back to the White House on a hay-and-horsehair mattress.
"There, control of the president was seized by a quack with the incredible name of Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss. Dr. Doctor Bliss insisted on stuffing Garfield with heavy meals and alcohol, which brought on protracted waves of vomiting. He and his assistants went on probing the wound several times a day, causing infections that burrowed enormous tunnels of pus throughout the president’s body."

In The New York Times, Kevin Baker reviews Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine,and the Murder of a President.

"The Most Important Woman in the History and Geography of Southern California Never Lived"

"'Ramona's' romantic descriptions evoked the lazy 'days of dons' on their ranchos, where fiestas seemed to never end. The allure included a lush, year-round climate and a landscape of flowers and exotic fruit trees populated by dashing Zorro-like figures and flower-bedecked señoritas.
"This image prompted preservationists of that era to mount a campaign for the restoration of the California missions, many in dire need of repair.
"As the 20th century dawned, developers and their architects seized on the mania to popularize mission-style architecture.
"Featuring red-tile roofs and white stucco walls, ranch-style houses sprang up all over suburbia. While architects may deride the continuing 'Taco Bell' style imposed on gas stations and office towers, it all worked to create the "California lifestyle" that has drawn millions to the Golden State."

In a 2005 San Diego Union-Tribune article, Roger M. Showley interviews Dydia DeLyser, author of Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California.

Disinterred

"If indeed justice is done and truth is served, those visitors will be inspired by far more than certain particular dimensions of Grant. A superb modern general who, with Lincoln, finally unleashed the force required to crush the slaveholders’ rebellion, Grant went on, as president, to press vigorously for the reunification of the severed nation, but on the terms of the victorious North and not of the defeated South. Given all that he was up against—not simply from Confederates and Southern white terrorists but, as president, from high-minded factional opponents and schismatics from his own Republican Party—it is quite remarkable that Grant sustained his commitment to the freedmen for as long and as hard as he did. The evidence clearly shows that he created the most auspicious record on racial equality and civil rights of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson."

Sean Wilentz in The New Republic reviews Joan Waugh's U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth.

"A Politics Based on Realities, not Phantoms"

"A quarter century ago, Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale offered Americans substantial policy alternatives. In 2010, by contrast, we see the parties hammering each other over differences barely more perceptible than those of 1880. Republicans rage against the Democrats’ bailouts, takeovers, deficits—yet all three commenced under George W. Bush, not Barack Obama. Almost every concept in Obama’s intensely controversial health plan has at one point or another been advanced by a senior Republican, from Bob Dole to Mitt Romney. I type these words having just watched Fox News’s Glenn Beck liken President Obama’s call for voluntary national service to something out of Maoist China. Obama’s service program barely differs in form, content, and rhetoric from Bush’s program, which in turn was almost identical to the program created by the elder President Bush in 1989.
"Reading a speech like Ingersoll’s—or listening to today’s talk radio—you almost wonder whether strident rhetoric, then as now, functions more as a substitute for policy differences than as their expression."

David Frum in The Atlantic argues that Republicans today should emulate the Mugwumps of the 1880s.

Can't Live in a Tenement Yard

"He pursued his campaign with evangelical zeal. Riis believed that defective character led to poverty and that conscience-driven capitalism was the best solution. Although he pitied them, his reform crusade 'ascribed little or no role at all to tenement dwellers themselves,' Czitrom writes. This brand of noblesse oblige perhaps anticipated the public housing failures of Riis’s 20th-century admirer Robert Moses."

Matthew Power in The New York Times reviews Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom's Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York.

A Bridge to Sell You

In the New York Daily News, Kerry Burke and Bill Hutchinson report on this weekend's celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge.