Catalog Search Results
Language
English
Description
In Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, the time is 1901 and the place is America's collective memory. But Thornton Wilder's Our Town is not the sentimental nostalgia piece most people perceive. This program hosted by Eli Wallach offers wide-ranging and extraordinarily deep insights into the play from those who arguably know it best: Our Town alumni who over the years have brought the play to life on stage and screen. Interviews with Paul Newman (Stage...
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English
Description
Congregational music during worship owes its origin to Martin Luther, who used it to proclaim his bedrock message of the Protestant Reformation: God's grace as the sole ingredient for salvation. This elegant program explains how Luther changed the mode of public worship by integrating music into the divine service so that all Christians-not just the clergy-could express and celebrate their belief. It also highlights Luther's biography, from his time...
63) Becoming Visible
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English
Description
This program guides the viewer through the works and contexts of ethnic writers from 1945-1965. Starting with the works of Ralph Waldo Ellison, Philip Roth, and N. Scott Momaday, we explore the way writers from the margins took over the center of American culture.
64) Migrant Struggle
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English
Description
Americans have often defined themselves through their relationship to the land. This program traces the social fiction of three key American voices: John Steinbeck, Carlos Bulosan, and Helena María Viramontes.
65) Utopian Promise
Language
English
Description
When British colonists landed in the Americas, they created communities that they hoped would serve as a "light onto the nations." But what role would the native inhabitants play in this new model community? This program compares the answers of two important groups, the Puritans and Quakers, and exposes the lasting influence they had upon American identity.
Language
English
Description
Jazz filled the air and wailed against the night. Caught in the sway, American prose writers sought out the forbidden, the slang, the dialects, and the rhythms of the folk and of everyday life. Writers such as Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald forged a new style: one which silhouetted the geometry of language, crisp in its own cleanness.
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English
Description
My subject in fiction, Flannery O'Connor tells us, "is the action of grace in the territory held largely by the devil." One might do well to ask what, if not the devil, haunts the American South in this era between the wars. This program uncovers the revisioning of Southern myths during the modernist era by writers William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston.
68) Social Realism
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English
Description
This program presents the authors of the American Gilded Age, such as Edith Wharton, and juxtaposes them with social realists like Anzia Yezierska. These writers expose the double world that made up turn-of-the-century New York: that of the elite and that of the poorest of the poor. Which of these realities is the more truly American?
69) Masculine Heroes
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English
Description
In 1898, Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier as the defining feature of American culture, but American authors had uncovered its significance much earlier. This program turns to three key writers of the early national period, James Fenimore Cooper, John Rollin Ridge, and Walt Whitman, and examines the influential visions of American manhood offered by each author.
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English
Description
Even as the poets were fostering a rebellion, contemporary prose writers began creating a new American tradition comprised of many strands, many voices, and many myths about the past. This program explores the search for identity by three American writers: Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Leslie Feinberg.
71) Native Voices
Language
English
Description
Native Americans had established a rich and highly developed tradition of oral literature long before the writings of the European colonists. This program explores that richness by introducing Native American oral traditions through the work of three contemporary authors: Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), and Luci Tapahonso (Navajo).
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English
Description
For many, the 1960s mark the true end of modern America. Whereas the modernists remained serious about the transcendent nature of art, the artists of the 1960s wanted an art that was relevant. They wanted an art that not only spoke about justice, but also helped create it. This program explores the innovations made in American poetry in the 1960s by Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Adrienne Rich.
74) Regional Realism
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English
Description
Set in the antebellum American South, but written after emancipation, Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains a classic of American literature. This program compares Twain's depiction of Southern vernacular culture to that of Charles Chestnutt and Kate Chopin, and in doing so, introduces the hallmarks of American Realism.
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English
Description
Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa tells us that the border is "una herida abierta [an open wound] where... the lifeblood of two worlds is merging to form a third country, a border culture." This program explores the literature of the Chicano borderlands and its beginnings in the literature of Spanish colonization.
Language
English
Description
The Enlightenment brought new ideals and a new notion of self-hood to the American colonies. This program begins with an examination of the importance of the trope of the self-made man in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, and then turns to the development of this concept in the writings of Romanticist Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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English
Description
Amidst the chaos following World War I, Ezra Pound urged poets to "Make it new!" This call was heeded by a large range of poets, ranging from T. S. Eliot to Jean Toomer. This program explores the modernist lyrics of two of these poets: William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes. What is modernism? How did these poets start a revolution that continues until this day?
Language
English
Description
Impressed with how European music could have a "German sound," a "French sound," and so on, Aaron Copland returned from his years in Paris to New York City, intent on capturing the essence of the "American sound. This documentary presents an artful blending of the life and music of one of America's great modern composers. The many milestones in Copland's long career are discussed by his biographer, Howard Pollock, while stirring images of Copland's...
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English
Description
This installment of the Famous Composers series introduces the life and work of French composer Joseph-Maurice Ravel. Opening with pictures and a description of the composer's birthplace, the seaport of Ciboure in Basque country, the film characterizes Ravel's childhood and family as modest but pleasant. He entered the Conservatoire de Paris at 14, and while he was a piano major, he was also greatly influenced by literature, and the film discusses...
80) Gustav Mahler
Language
English
Description
Moved as a boy by the charming simplicity of an organ-grinder's song, Mahler brought "street sounds" into his symphonies. As conductor, he demanded dynamic stage design and lighting and insisted on darkness in the hall, changing the nature of the conductor's role and introducing modern stagecraft. Even his appointment as director of the Vienna Court Opera at the precocious age of 37 was revolutionary. This program charts Mahler's life and professional...