On this day in 1849, American author and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore, Maryland at the age of 40. Known primarily for mysterious and macabre stories in a Gothic or Romantic style, Poe wrote both poems and short stories, and frequently published in newspapers and magazines. One such short story, Ligeia, first…
In observance of International Women’s Day, here are just a few of our many titles found by using the keyword “women”. Each title on this list is available on DVD in the Media section of the J.D. Williams Library. Non-fiction/Documentary: Miss Representation P94.5.W65 M577 2012 Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines HQ1233.W663 2012…
This week marks ten years since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, creating a path of devastation from its landfall in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi through to the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. Adding insult to injury was the failure of the levee system in New Orleans, which caused catastrophic flooding in many of the…
Julian Bond, former chairman of the NAACP, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and an advocate for civil rights died on August 15, 2015 at the age of 75 due to complications of vascular disease. There have been lots of great write-ups about his lifelong activism including in the New York Times and the…
If you can’t get enough soccer, after watching this year’s Women’s World Cup — which the American women won after defeating Japan 5-2 — you might consider a few of our DVDs. History of Soccer MEDIA GV942.5.H578 2001 This 7-disc documentary series examines the history of soccer and its culture around the world, and includes…
While the purpose of this blog is to highlight items in our media collection on both DVD and VHS, I do want to point out that we now have a three-year license to the streaming PBS Video Collection via Alexander Street Press. It features 376 titles — all streaming! — from PBS standards such as…
May 6, 2015 marked the 100th birthday of Orson Welles (1915-1985), one of the greatest American actor-director-writers of the 20th century. Known for his infamous radio broadcast War of the Worlds, his films Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, and The Trial, and his performances in Macbeth, Othello, and The Third Man, Welles was considered the…
B.B. King died today at the age of 89. What is now a world-renowned Blues Archive here at UM Libraries began with a donation by B.B. King of over 8000 of his personal recordings in 1982-83. My colleague, Blues Archivist Greg Johnson, has written about his experiences with Mr. King, including an on stage interview…
Forty years ago this week, on April 30, 1975, the city of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, and signaled the end of the Vietnam War (1961-1975). The city was quickly renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Knowing that the fall was imminent, Operation Frequent Wind, the largest helicopter evacuation in history, rescued American civilian and military personnel…
Günter Grass, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, died today at the age of 87. Known primarily as a novelist, a poet, an essayist, a playwright, a sculptor, a printmaker, as well as a speech writer for German chancellor Willy Brandt, Grass campaigned for peace and for the environment, and initially opposed…