Clik here to view.
Mance Lipscomb @ the 1961 Berkeley Folk Music Festival
From the berkeley folk music festival project. Mance Lipscomb @ the 1961 Berkeley Folk Music Festival Jubilee Concert in the Greek Amphitheater, University of California campus. Photograph: Cliff...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Talkin’ Folk Music—Panel Discussions @ the 1959 Berkeley Folk Music Festival
Jesse Fuller, Merritt Herring, Jimmy Driftwood, Sam Hinton, Shirley Collins, Alan Lomax, Jimmy Driftwood, Pete Seeger, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott talk folk music at the 1959 Berkeley Folk Music...
View ArticleRovings
june 2020 edition. Sounds The Californian Century, BBC Radio 4Nina, RadiolabThe Mekons, ExquisiteBob Dylan, Rough and Rowdy WaysChris Corsano, Everything About It Video (excerpt) (h/t Jesse...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Chuck Berry at the 1965 Berkeley Blues Festival
from the digital berkeley folk music festival collection. his heart’s beating rhythm and his soul keeps a-singing the blues. A few of the wonderful performance and portrait shots of Chuck Berry at the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Teaching Philosophy
My goal as a teacher is to help students develop skills of analysis and communication grounded in a deeper understanding of the past. I place questions of identity, social position, and power—of race,...
View ArticleSyllabus: Situation Critical—Writing Arts & Cultural Criticism in the Digital...
Online @ Visual Studies Workshop, SUNY Brockport, 13-17 July 2020 Instructor Dr. Michael J. Kramer Overview Interested in writing more effectively about the arts and culture in multiple modes, from...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Janis Joplin at the 1963 Monterey Folk Festival
the 1967 pop festival was not janis’s first time on stage at monterey, as this image from the berkeley folk music festival collection shows. Janis Joplin moved from local to national, and indeed...
View ArticleFolk Songs Containing Multitudes
bob dylan as art song classical music composer. I wonder if the significance of Bob Dylan’s late career, say since the fittingly titled “Love and Theft” in 1997, is less the lyrics or Nobel Prizes or...
View ArticleRovings
may 2020 edition. Sounds Keep Your Mind Free: Damon Locks, Tomeka Reid [videos by: Nzingha Kendall, Foolish Mortal and Lucie Romero], Nicole Mitchell, & Jeff ParkerBethany Ryker’s A440 /...
View ArticleShelter in Place
anna martine whitehead, questions of home @ pivot arts (un)touched – artists in quarantine, june 2020. Anna Martine Whitehead’s short dance video, Questions of Home, part of Pivot Arts’ (Un)Touched –...
View ArticleLife During Covid-19 Digital Pop-Up Exhibition
student “reports from the field” of COVID-19’s early months in the US. My spring 2020 course HST 380: Digital Methods for Historical Projects shifted from our intended goal of creating oral histories,...
View ArticleResounding Truth
two new podcasts remind us that while history involves longings for truth, not all historical longings are the same in the “post-truth” age. Two new podcasts, Wind of Change and The Last Archive,...
View ArticleRovings
april edition. Sounds Live @ National SawdustEES Quanrantine ConcertsZeena ParkinsIkue MoriClare ChaseOtis Redding, The SinglesTatsu Aoki and Friends, Hothouse GlobalJean Lambert-Wild, “Jazz...
View ArticleThe Utopian Moment of the Coronavirus Pandemic
covid-19 dares us to imagine a different future. It may sound counterintuitive, but the coronavirus pandemic is a utopian moment, maybe even a revolutionary one. In one fell swoop, the virus provided...
View ArticleStudent Showcase: Rochester, New York and the “Long Hot Summer” of July 1964
harry deVoe probes the historiography of urban civil rights uprisings during the 1960s. Professor Kramer’s comments: In the fall of 2019, students in my SUNY Brockport Department of History course...
View Article“Heroes”
i can remember standing by the wall(mart). I can rememberStanding, by the wallAnd the guns shot above our headsAnd we kissed as though nothing could fallAnd the shame was on the other sideOh, we can...
View ArticleRovings
march edition. Sounds 1865 Podcast Emerson String Quartet, Beethoven: The Late String Quartets Weyes Blood, Titanic RisingThis is the Kit, Moonshine FreezeTommy Jarrell, The Legacy of Tommy Jarrell...
View ArticleBook Review—Lipstick Traces: The Idea of Smoking in American Political &...
where there’s smoke in the american past…there’s probably a cigarette. x-posted from USIH Book Review. The Books Sarah Milov, The Cigarette: A Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University...
View ArticleDomestic Terrors
the search for home on homeland. Now in its final season, the Showtime series Homeland is, on the surface, about spy and intelligence work in the aftermath of 9/11, in the so-called War on Terror. It...
View ArticleAretha’s Occupy
mic check! forty years ahead of its time. “I’m about to give you all my money, and all I’m asking is that you return it honey.” So sang Aretha Franklin from the Wall Street sidewalk just outside the...
View Article
