December 13, 2011, Filed Under: ArtOccupy Wall Street 1939 AD A bearded and robed figure, whip in hand, chases well-healed bankers and brokers in top hats down Wall Street. Their retreat, a frenzied stampede of cash, coins and streaming ticker tape, is followed by ranks of protestors carrying signs and banners reading, “Democracy,” “Racial Equality,” “Social Security,” and “Right to… read more
December 8, 2011, Filed Under: Photography, Research + TeachingFellow discusses work on wartime photography collections Anne Tucker, curator of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, discusses her research on wartime photography collections found at the Ransom Center. Her work covers collections ranging from Roger Fenton’s documentation of the Crimean War to the World War I photographs of Jimmy Hare to Edward Steichen’s images of the… read more
December 6, 2011, Filed Under: Photography, Research + TeachingFellows Find: Implicating History: Susan Meiselas and the Trafficking of Photographs about Nicaragua Erina Duganne, Assistant Professor of Art History at Texas State University, visited the Ransom Center on a Marlene Nathan Meyerson Photography Fellowship for a month during the summer of 2011 to review photographs by Susan Meiselas in the Magnum Photos collection. This research relates to her forthcoming book that… read more
November 30, 2011, Filed Under: Film, Research + TeachingScreenwriter Paul Schrader’s papers open for research In the late 1970s, screenwriter Paul Schrader began writing a script titled Born in the U.S.A., and he asked Bruce Springsteen to write a song for the film. The script sat on Springsteen’s table until one day, while working on a song called “Vietnam,” he noticed Schrader’s script, sang the… read more
November 29, 2011, Filed Under: Exhibitions + EventsIn the Galleries: Ogden Nash’s padlocked collection of poetry “All of these books are worse than opium… I would rather have a child of mine use opium than read these books,” declared Senator Reed Smoot of Utah in March 1930, speaking from behind a desk towering with “smutty” books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Robert Burns’s poetry. In 1929,… read more
November 22, 2011, Filed Under: Exhibitions + EventsIn the Galleries: Censorship of "The Sex Side of Life" In 1919 Mary Ware Dennett (1872–1947) published The Sex Side of Life, a sex-education pamphlet for young people that she originally wrote for her sons. The U.S. Post Office declared the pamphlet obscene in April 1922, and Dennett struggled on her own to get the ruling reversed, all the while… read more
