March 2025 Acquisitions

Books:

Mike Clifford, The Harmony Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock, 4th Edition, 1984.

Ta-Nahesi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze, Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, 2025.

Will Eisner and Gary Chaloner, The Complete Will Eisner's John Law, 2025.

Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers, A Pocket Style Manual Eighth Edition, 2018.

Bryan Hill et al, Postal, Vol. 4, 2016.

Joeph Loeb et al, Superman for All Seasons, 2023.

B. Clay Moore and Shane Patrick White, Endless Summer, Vol. 1: Dead Man's Curve, 2022.

Eric Stephenson and Jamie McKelvie, Long Hot Summer, 2005.

Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, 1918, 2022. 

Movies:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, 2008.

Music:

Roy Ayers, 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection, 2000.

Bad Brains, Rock for Light, 1983, 2021.

Dorothy Love Coates, The Best of Dorothy Love Coates and the Original Gospel Harmonettes, 1991.

Echo and the Bunnymen, Me, I'm All Smiles, 2006.

Horrors, Night Life, 2025.

Housemartins, The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death, 1987.

David Johansen, From Pumps To Pompadour: The David Johansen Story, 1995.

Wilko Johnson, Back in the Night: The Best of Wilko Johnson, 2002.

Kneecap, Fine Art, 2024.

Rain Parade, Last Stop on the Underground, 2024.

Sam and Dave, Soul Men, 1967.

Sylvester, The Original Hits, 1989.

20/20, Back to California, 2025.

Barbara Weathers, Barbara Weathers, 1990.

Link Wray, Rumble! The Best of Link Wray, 1993.

Various, Destination: Bomp!, 1994.

Various, Gone but Not Forgotten: A Tribute to Those Who Rocked, 1995.

Various, Millions Like Us: The Story of the Mod Revival 1977-1989, 2014.

Various, Suburban Annihilation: California Hardcore 1978-1983, 2023.

Various, Twisted Dream Machine: The Paisley Underground California's Psychedelic Renaissance: 1982-1986, 2024.

Various, Weird Scenes from the Hangout: Psychedelic & Freakbeat Dancefloor Anthems 1967-1982, 2024.

"He Showed the Way to the Modern World"

"Wilson championed—and came to symbolize—progressive reform at home and liberal internationalism abroad. So long as those causes commanded wide support, Wilson's name resonated with the greats of American history. In our time, however, the American left has subordinated the causes of reform and internationalism to the politics of identity, while the American right has rejected reform and internationalism altogether. Wilson's standing has been crushed in between."

David Frum at The Atlantic calls to "Uncancel Woodrow Wilson."

"The Challenge Was to Appeal to Both Wings of the California Republicans"

"Johnson, who had a 'Yosemite Sam' temperament, refused all such entreaties, stating in a telegram to Hughes' campaign manager that 'the men surrounding Mr. Hughes in California and who have been in charge of his tour, are much more interested in my defeat than in Mr. Hughes' election.' As far as Johnson was concerned, Hughes had thrown in his lot with the conservatives; there would be no rapprochement. And that meant Johnson and his California progressives would not lift a finger to help Hughes carry the state in November."

In Politico, Jeff Greenfield looks back to the 1916 presidential election.

"I Would Vastly Prefer a Limited Career with the Consciousness of Having Done the Right Thing"

"Finally, as the new postwar president, 'I thought the spirit of clemency was quite in harmony with the things we were trying to do in Washington; that Debs had never been guilty of any overt act; that he never countenanced destruction of government by force, and probably I could persuade him to become a factor in contributing to tranquility throughout the land.'"

Ron Radosh at The Bulwark tells the story of when President Warren Harding freed Eugene Debs from federal prison.

"Less a Contradiction Than an Example of the Unintended Effects of American Foreign Policy Rhetoric"

"Wilson was undoubtedly a racist—even by the standards of his time. His administration resegregated several federal agencies; he wrote sympathetically about the Ku Klux Klan; and he described Southern Black people as an 'ignorant and inferior race' who couldn't be trusted with political power.
"At the same time, his advocacy of 'self-determination' unintentionally inspired people fighting colonialism and European imperialism around the world."

At Slate, Joshua Keating calls Woodrow Wilson the "Accidental Anti-Imperialist."

"Formation Marked the Arrival of the United States as a Global Power Capable of Leading the World During Crisis"

"The United States has long possessed the natural resources and workforce to create great wealth; what it discovered in World War I was the ability to coordinate its industry to address not just national but global emergencies. Expecting the federal government to assume command of and direct industry in how to produce and distribute urgently needed goods does not amount to a radical usurpation of the functions of the private sector. It is, rather, a century-old American practice that amounts, as Bernard Baruch knew, to government leaders acting, as they are supposed to in dire moments, in the public interest."

David Greenberg at Politico tells the story of Woodrow Wilson and the War Industries Board during World War I.

"Music Buff Pissed 'Come Josephine In My Flying Machine' Left Off Pitchfork's 'Best Of The 1910s' List"

"'This is such typical Pitchfork horseshit—you're seriously telling me the greatest song by Blanche Ring doesn't even land a mention on their rankings?' said Sherman, shaking his head in disbelief as he noted that you couldn't take a step in the early 20th century without hearing Victrolas playing Ring's distinctive soprano as she sang about an aviator taking his dearest gal to the moon in a flying contraption. 'Oh, I'm sorry that Blanche goddamn Ring, the queen of the vaudeville circuit, doesn't meet your oh-so-precious standards for great music."

From The Onion.

"It Has Touched Almost Every Aspect of Cultural and Commercial Production"

"The school's founding proclamation made no mention of industry or new technology. Instead, it called for 'a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class pretensions that endeavoured to raise a prideful barrier between craftsmen and artists!' It aimed to break down barriers between art and different forms of craft. It dreamt of 'a new building of the future that will unite every discipline', which would 'rise to heaven from the hands of a million workers as a crystal symbol of a new faith'."

Rowan Moore at The Guardian marks the centennial of the Bauhaus.

"The Greatest Pandemic in History"

"The 1918 flu pandemic has been a regular subject of speculation over the last century. Historians and scientists have advanced numerous hypotheses regarding its origin, spread and consequences. As a result, many of us harbor misconceptions about it."

Richard Gunderman at Smithsonian presents "Ten Myths About the 1918 Flu Pandemic."

"Three Miles of Filth"

"However, as Richard Schickel noted in his biography of the director, 'D.W. Griffith: An American Life,' some regarded the film as slandering black Americans. Under the headline 'Capitalizing Race Hatred,' the New York Globe wrote: 'To make a few dirty dollars men are willing to pander to depraved tastes and to foment a race antipathy that is the most sinister and dangerous feature of American life.'"

Jeffrey Fleishman in the Los Angeles Times discusses the legacy of The Birth of a Nation.

"The Story of Image-Makers: Parade Planners and Playwrights, Hollywood and the Mail-Order Catalog"

"Among the variety of Klansman costumes in the film, there appeared a new one: the one-piece, full-face-masking, pointed white hood with eyeholes, which would come to represent the modern Klan. Maybe it was Griffith who brought those pieces of fabric together in their soon-to-be iconic form; after all, his mother had sewn costumes for his Klansman father. Or, given the heterogeneity of Reconstruction Klan costumes, maybe Griffith got the idea from another source altogether: Freemason regalia. Or maybe it wasn't Griffith's idea at all, but that of Paris-trained, Costume Designer Guild's Hall-of-Famer Clare West, who worked on the film: maybe she had witnessed confraternal processions in the streets of Europe, or just made it up.
"What we do know is that the blockbuster popularity of The Birth of a Nation gave free advertising to a traveling fraternal order organizer, former Methodist minister, and garter salesman, William J. Simmons. Simmons didn't just organize fraternities; he’d joined fifteen of them, including the Knights Templar and the Masons. The 1915 lynching of Leo Frank had inspired Simmons to form a new anti-Semitic, nativist fraternity. One week before The Birth of a Nation's Atlanta premiere, Simmons received his state charter for 'The Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Incorporated.' He sold hoods and robes ($6.50) sewn in a local shop, wrote a handbook—the Kloran—and, in 1920, hired publicists Edward Y. Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler to launch a massive campaign that attracted 100,000 new members in 16 months."

The New Republic publishes excerpts of  Alison Kinney's Hood.

"We Would Be Wrong to See This as a Mere Policy Change"

"Over a long career, he rose through the ranks from laborer to a position in midlevel management. He supervised an office in which many of his employees were white men. He had a farm in Virginia and a home in Washington. By 1908, he was earning the considerable salary—for an African-American—of $1,400 per year.

"But only months after Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as president in 1913, my grandfather was demoted. He was shuttled from department to department in various menial jobs, and eventually became a messenger in the War Department, where he made only $720 a year.

"By April 1914, the family farm was auctioned off. John Davis, a self-made black man of achievement and stature in his community at the turn of the 20th century, was, by the end of Wilson’s first term, a broken man."

 

Gordon J. Davis in The New York Times writes about how Woodrow Wilson's policy of re-segregating the federal government affected Davis's grandfather.

"Even the Triangle Workers Got One Day a Week Off"

"The men who owned the Triangle factory, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, didn't want 146 of the people who worked for them to die in agony. But they also never bothered to supply their factories with effective firefighting equipment of any kind because that cost money—and because they had a history of suspicious, end-of-the-season fires that conveniently burned up their heavily insured, surplus cloth.
"Public unions could have put policemen and firemen out of the Tammany machine's reach. Private unions could have protected the women working at the Triangle factory. Even in safer times, the need endures to guard workers from the worse tendencies of government and business."


Kevin Baker at The New Republic connects the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire to today's labor issues.

"My Only Hope Now Is That One Day This Vital American Institution Can Be Rebuilt"

"I expect the circumstances surrounding TNR's transformation will be framed as a matter of modernity versus tradition. There is certainly an element of this. At the magazine's 100th anniversary gala two weeks ago, where Hughes, Foer, Wieseltier, and Hughes’s new CEO, Guy Vidra, all spoke, the speeches took a sharply, awkwardly divergent tone. Foer and Weiseltier gave soaring paeans to the magazine’s immense role in shaping American liberal thought. Hughes and Vidra used words like brand and boasted about page views, giving no sense of appreciation at all for the magazine's place in American life. In a comic moment, Vidra mispronounced Foer's name. I happened to run into Wieseltier a few days after the gala, and when he asked me what I thought, I told him he and Foer won the debate."


In New York, Jonathan Chait writes a "Eulogy for The New Republic."


As does David Greenberg in Slate.


But Charles Pierce at Esquire says good riddance.

"Inside the Mind of the Assassin"

"The assassination set in motion an unintended chain of events that culminated in carnage such as the world had never seen. The 1914-1918 conflict killed and wounded more than 35m people, both military and civilian, through poison gas, starvation, shell fire and machine gun. Few had reckoned on such a long, drawn-out saga of futility and wasted human lives. The teenage Princip himself did not foresee world war. His aim was to liberate swaths of the future Yugoslavia from the Austro-Habsburg yoke and create a State of united South Slavic countries."


In the Financial Times, Ian Thomson reviews Tim Butcher's The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin who Brought the World to War.

November 2013 Acquisitions

Books:
John Albano et al, Showcase Presents Jonah Hex, Vol. 1, 2005.
Alfred H. Burne, The Crecy War, 1999.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes, 1963.
Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 1977.
Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty, Return to Perdition, 2012
Max Allan Collins et al, Road to Perdition 2: On the Road, 2011.
Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon B. Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973, 1998.
Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, Batman: Mad Love and Other Stories, 2011.
Hannah Dolan et al, Lego Star Wars: Character Encyclopedia, 2011.
Jon Evans and Andrea Mutti, The Executor, 2011.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 1988.
David McCullough, Truman, 1993.
Peter Milligan and James Romberger, The Bronx Kill, 2010.
Ann Nocenti et al, Catwoman, Vol. 3: Death of the Family, 2013.
Scott Snyder et al, Batman, Vol. 2: The City of Owls, 2013.
Scott Snyder et al, Talon, Vol. 1: Scourge of the Owls, 2013
Ilan Stavans, Becoming Americans: Immigrants Tell Their Stories from Jamestown to Today, 2009.
Victoria Taylor, Lego Super Heroes: Ready for Action!, 2013.
Jules Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, 1983, 1997.

DVDs:
Inception, 2010.
Lego Batman: The Movie--DC Super Heroes Unite, 2013.

"A Constant Reminder that We Live in a Hydraulic Society"

"First, worried that the aqueduct couldn't meet its needs, Los Angeles shouldered aside San Diego's plans to tap the Colorado River and took over that project for itself. That may help to explain San Diego's abiding resentment of all things Angeleno, its persistent opposition to water planning that might benefit the city and its often fruitless quest for an 'independent' water supply of its own, no matter what the cost.
"Second, to ensure that it was getting all the water the aqueduct could convey, Los Angeles determined to strangle agricultural water use in the Owens Valley. This prompted the valley's armed resistance. The aqueduct was repeatedly blown up, and at one point, it was seized by the embattled farmers, who shut it down entirely.
"Los Angeles ultimately won that conflict. The Owens Valley economy was devastated and the city wound up owning most of the area, which it attempted to run as a virtual colony. For half a century, investments in valley business were actively discouraged."

William Kahrl in the Los Angeles Times marks the centennial of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

"The First Liberal Democratic President Took Office Exactly 100 Years Ago This Spring"

"Yet Wilson, together with his allies on Capitol Hill, also laid the foundation for the 20^th century liberal state. He signed bills that created the Federal Reserve and progressive income tax rates, secured humane working conditions for merchant seamen and railroad workers, restricted child labor and curbed the power of large corporations. After the U.S. entered the war in Europe, his administration began operating the railroads, lifting the hopes of leftists who had long advocated public ownership of what was then a rich and vital industry.
"In 1916, Wilson accepted renomination with a speech that defined political conflict in terms that remain surprisingly fresh. Our programs, he told his fellow Democrats were 'resisted at every step by the interests which the Republican Party … catered to and fostered at the expense of the country, and these same interests are now earnestly praying for a reaction which will save their privileges, for the restoration of their sworn friends to power before it is too late to recover what they have lost.'"

Michael Kazin in The New Republic calls Woodrow Wilson "The Forgotten President."

"One of the Great Masters of Adventure"

"The serial, needless to say, was a hit, though no one yet knew that ERB would soon become a phenomenon. His editor at All-Story quickly asked him to write a historical novel, which the obliging author produced in a few weeks, only to have the chivalric romance rejected. Eventually, it would be revised and rejected again. Putting 'The Outlaw of Torn' aside, Burroughs took up his own new idea, its action set largely in Africa (where he had never been). Drawing on the classical legends of the heroic Romulus and Remus, who were suckled by a wolf, and adding a touch of Mowgli from Kipling’s 'The Jungle Books,' Burroughs created one of the most famous fictional characters of modern times. In the November, 1912 issue of All-Story—only a few months after the conclusion of John Carter’s adventures on Mars—there appeared, published in its entirety, 'Tarzan of the Apes.'
"Readers went crazy."

Michael Dirda in Salon writes an appreciation of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Styles for 1912

"The exciting portion of the 2012 primary season may be winding down, but one hundred years ago one of the most dramatic elections in American history was just getting underway. Which made us wonder: what would it be like to cover the 1912 race the same way we cover the current contest? An experiment then: blogging the 1912 election."

Gabriel Snyder at The Atlantic Wire introduces the 1912 Project.