Search results for ""Globe Pequot""

Superheroes! is the ultimate reference book about the men and women in tights who fight for what’s right and the comic book phenomenon that conquered the world. From their origins in stories created by barely grown men during an era of global war and printed on cheap paper for consumption by children, superheroes have grown into a popular culture whirlwind that has attracted millions of fans and crossed over into every form of media.Encompassing early coming books, indie outliers, and the mammoth fictional universes managed by DC and Marvel, Superheroes! chronicles the rise of a distinctly American invention, the modern-day evolution of the myths and legends of old. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Captain America, X-Men, the Justice League and the Avengers—they all represent our greatest hopes, and sometimes our darkest fantasies. Pop culture expert Brian Solomon tells a story that goes from the Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages of comic book history right up to the Modern Age of multimillion-dollar Hollywood movies, and beyond. Perhaps no fictional genre has endured and blossomed over the past eighty years the way superheroes have. Learn all about the creators who have brought them to life: artists like Jack Kirby and Jim Lee, writers like Stan Lee and Alan Moore, actors like Christopher Reeve and Robert Downey Jr., and directors like Tim Burton and Joss Whedon. They’re all here, in all their high-flying, eye-zapping, goon-punching glory. Up, up and away!

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Hamlet calls death "that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns."But he's wrong. Some do return.Each night after the applause dies, the curtain falls, the audience vanishes, the cleaners dust, and the lights are killed, great theatres become dark and silent places. But not always quite empty. That's when the theatre ghosts make their entrance and strut and fret their hour upon the shadowed boards, illuminated only by the ghost light, the solitary lamp that is required to burn through the night on every Broadway stage.Many of Broadway's busiest theatres continue to be just as busily haunted by spirits, some with well-known names and histories. Good Morning, Olive (named for one of the most beautiful and temperamental of Broadway's ghosts) is about the ghosts that haunt theatres in New York and around the world.Broadway is the playground of stars, so it's probably not surprising to learn that even its ghosts are stars. Meet some of Broadway's best known—and most active—celebrity ghosts. Don't worry: like Casper, they tend to be friendly. For the most part. There's something special about theatres, something especially conducive and welcoming to ghosts. Charles J. Adams III wrote, "By its very nature, a theatre is a vault within which every human emotion is at once imprisoned, impersonated, imitated, and elicited. Tangles of cords and ropes…tall curtains and backdrops which fade into high darkness…cubicles and trap doors and passageways."Good Morning, Olive takes readers on a tour of that world.

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Paul Dooley has been an actor for sixty-five years and has portrayed fathers in more than twenty-five movies. He is best known for his roles as the father in Breaking Away, Sixteen Candles, and Run Away Bride. While he was the on-screen dad to Julia Roberts, Molly Ringwald, Toni Collette, Robin Wright, and Helen Hunt, his personal life held a painful secret. In Movie Dad, Dooley reveals that before he became a father to Hollywood actresses, his own fatherhood was jeopardized when his ex-wife kidnapped his two children, Robin and Adam. His touching biography shows the shock and denial he experienced when he read the letter his ex-wife left that said, “I’m leaving. I’m taking the kids. We’re not coming back.” What followed was private detectives, court, and frantically looking for his children. When he only found dead-ends, he threw himself into work, and after twenty-five years as an actor, he was in the movies overnight. The success he found as a father on-screen is a story of wry irony, which he tells in Movie Dad.

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Spanning more than fifty years of modern music history, Peter Asher: A Life in Music highlights every turn in Peter Asher's amazing career. Over a dozen years of research has gone into telling his story, with numerous interviews conducted with Asher, along with first-hand observations of him at work in various recording studios around Los Angeles. The author also had access to Asher's archives, which offered rare photographs and other career memorabilia to help illustrate this biography.Over one hundred artists, friends, and colleagues agreed to be interviewed, and they help to provide insight into Asher's personality and working methodology. Included are singers Jackson Browne, David Crosby, Marianne Faithfull, Carole King, Kenny Loggins, Graham Nash, Aaron Neville, Randy Newman, Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, JD Souther, and James Taylor; producers Lou Adler, Mike Curb, Richard Perry, Al Schmitt, and Sir George Martin; musicians Hal Blaine, Andrew Gold, Danny Kortchmar, Paul Shaffer, and Waddy Wachtel; and actors Kevin Kline and Robin Williams. Many of these participants also provided previously unseen photographs. Asher was also one of the first producers to list the musicians that played on his sessions, realizing how important they were to the success of each project. These mini-portraits not only contribute to the telling of his story, they ultimately give the reader a history lesson on the last fifty years of popular music. Of course, Asher's life and work did not occur in a vacuum, and David Jacks places his progress in context with what was occurring in the culture that surrounded him, from the pervasive doldrums that America was experiencing right before the Beatles (and Peter and Gordon) exploded upon its shores to the civil rights tensions that surrounded the interracial tour Dick Clark sent through the Southern US in 1965, to the end of the 1960s and the public's need for a soothing confessional tone in their music after a decade of turmoil, which artists like James Taylor provided.Asher has also had a unique insider's view into the changing world of the music business—from the mid-1960s explosion of British artists to the 1970s corporate takeovers of independent labels, from the MTV era of the mid-1980s to the modern era of 360 degree deals and digital streaming. He is practically alone in his success as a hit-making artist, a hit-making producer, and a manager for hit-making talent. His ability to produce projects with such a broad range—rock, pop, folk, country, rhythm and blues, jazz, dance, Latin, classical, comedy, and Broadway and movie soundtracks—is almost unheard of. And in a business rife with shady characters, his intelligence, honesty, and business sense has earned the respect of all he's worked with. Still producing exciting work in the entertainment industry, Peter Asher has quite a story to tell.

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In the early months of 1966, a handsome, hardworking thirty-five-year-old Canadian-born actor named William Shatner was cast as Captain Kirk in Star Trek, a troubled, low-budget science-fiction television series set to premiere that fall on NBC. Star Trek struggled for viewers and lasted only three seasons, but it found a huge, rabidly dedicated audience when it premiered in syndication following its cancellation—turning Shatner into a pop-culture icon and launching him on a career path he never could have imagined after graduating from McGill University with an economics degree twenty years earlier. As he approaches his ninetieth year, he's still working at a furious pace as a man of boundless contradictions: by turns one of the most dissected, disliked, revered, respected, mocked, imitated, and beloved stars in the show business firmament. Shatner takes a comprehensive look at this singular performer, using archival sources and information culled from interviews with friends and colleagues to transport readers through William Shatner's remarkably bumpy career: his spectacular failures and triumphs; tragedies, including the shocking death of his third wife, Nerine; and, ultimately, the resilience Shatner has shown, time and again, in the face of overwhelming odds. Author Michael Seth Starr unravels the mystery of William Shatner, stripping away the many myths associated with his personal life and his relationships with fellow actors, presenting a no-holds-barred, unvarnished look at the unique career of an inimitable performer.

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The most frequently asked question about writing musicals is, "Which comes first, the music or the lyrics?" As anyone on Broadway will tell you, the answer is, "The book." Tony-winning book writer Robert L. Freedman takes you through the process of writing a new musical, including story structure, song placement, dialogue, character development, and more that led to the creation of A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, the 2014 Best Musical Tony winner. With candor and insight, Freedman describes the challenging and rewarding growing pains of what the critics called "Hilarious!" and "Ingenious!" and said "Ranks among the most inspired and entertaining new musical comedies I've seen in years."

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Anne & Emmett is an imaginary conversation between Anne Frank and Emmett Till, both victims of racial intolerance and hatred. Frank is the thirteen-year-old Jewish girl whose diary provided a gripping perspective of the Holocaust. Till is the fourteen-year-old African-American boy whose brutal murder in Mississippi sparked the modern American civil rights movement. The one-act play opens with the two teenagers meeting in memory, a place that isolates them from the cruelty they experienced during their lives. The beyond-the-grave encounter draws the startling similarities between the two youths' harrowing experiences at the hands of societies that couldn't protect them. In memory, Anne recounts hiding in a cramped attic with her family after German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered the Nazi military to round up Jewish people throughout Europe, and put them in concentration camps in route to gas chambers. At the age of fifteen, Anne died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in March 1945, a few weeks before British troops liberated the camp. Emmett tells Anne how he, in 1955, ended up being brutally attacked by two white racists who beat and tortured him before shooting him in the head and tossing his body into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton-gin fan tied to his neck. This happened after he whistled at a white woman while visiting his uncle in Money, Mississippi.

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The vast space of the American West that has been designated as the state of Montana is such a diverse and varied landscape that it’s been said it could easily be sliced up into several smaller states. And with its smorgasbord of industry, history, culture and the various worldviews held by its residents, getting a bead on Montana’s personality is a challenge. That may be because Montana, in fact, has several fairly distinct personalities. This book examines those personalities, through the lens of seven geographic and cultural regions commonly recognized in the state. While Montanans share a few attitudes and love of the land that attracts them to Big Sky country, it’s the differences between the regions that truly give the state its unique flavor. Through interviews, photos, history and personal observations, Therriault profiles each region and in the process gives a more complete view of the state as a whole. Along the way the reader will learn why some people choose to live where they do, how they view the rest of the state, and what some of the factors are that give each region its singularity.

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Long before the screen placed the face of Mary Pickford before the eyes of millions of Americans, this girl, born August 13, 1860 as Phoebe Anne Oakley Moses, had won the right to the title of “America’s Sweetheart.” Having grown up learning to shoot game to help support her family, Annie won first prize and met her future husband at a shooting match when she was fifteen years old. He convinced her to change her name to Annie Oakley and became her husband, manager, and number-one fan for the next fifty years. Annie quickly gained worldwide fame as an incredible crack shot, and could amaze audiences at her uncanny accuracy with nearly any rifle or pistol, whether aiming at stationary objects or shooting fast-flying targets from the cockpit of a moving airplane. Despite struggles with her health and even a long, drawn-out legal battle with media magnate William Randolph Hearst, Annie Oakley poured her energy into advocating for the U.S. military, encouraging women to engage in sport shooting, and supporting orphans.

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During the rise of second-wave feminism in the ‘60s and ‘70s, political activists were not the only ones at work to usher in a more equitable world. In the music world, female rock performers were pursuing a revolution of their own: rejecting the industry’s manufactured pop personas and the unacknowledged labor they contributed to male-led groups, women took control of their own music, messages, and images. Even while they often used music to critique rampant chauvinism, they made some of their greatest impacts by paving the way for subsequent musicians to simply be true to themselves. In this way, they helped to transform the music business and society more broadly.In She’s a Badass, rock critic Katherine Yeske Taylor interviews more than a dozen of these influential, fearless women about their experiences in an era when female rockers were not given the same respect and opportunities as their male peers. Each chapter focuses on an individual artist, taking an in-depth look at her most memorable experiences in the music business that helped cement her place on the list of influential artists. From Suzi Quatro (the first female rock star to front her own band, singing and playing bass as well as writing her own songs) through superstar singer-songwriter Jewel, She’s a Badass reveals the incredible talent, determination, and humor these women deployed in order to further the feminist cause while building brilliant musical careers.

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Have you ever been curious about what it takes to get an original Broadway musical to opening night? Ted Chapin, college student at the time, had a front row seat at the creation of Stephen Sondheim's Follies, now considered one of the most important musicals of modern time. He kept a detailed journal of his experience as the sole production assistant, which he used as the basis for Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies, originally published in 2003. He was there in the drama-filled rehearsal room, typing the endless rewrites, ferrying new songs around town, pampering the film and television stars in the cast, travelling with the show to its Boston tryout and back to New York for the Broadway opening night. With an enthusiast's focus on detail and a journalist's skill, Chapin takes the reader on the roller-coaster ride of creating a new and original Broadway musical. Musical theater giants, still rising in their careers, were working at top form on what became a Tony Award-winning classic: Stephen Sondheim, Harold Prince, and Michael Bennett. Many classic Sondheim songs like "I'm Still Here," "Losing My Mind," and "Broadway Baby" were part of the score, some written in a hotel room in Boston.Celebrate the 50th anniversary of Follies with Ted Chapin. A new afterword brings the history of the show forward, diving into recent productions around the world, new recordings, and the continued promise of a film version.

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I hear with my breath, I get frightened with my breath. When I fall in love the breath knows it first. I feel furious and the breath registered the emotion, long before the brain catches on.—Beatrice ManleyOriginal and quirky, this collection of expert advice and observations once reserved for actors has been specially formatted for a new generation and a broader audience interested in: Breathwork Mindfulness Personal Presence Presentation and Authenticity Improvisation. Performing. Fear. Fame. Laughing. Being Sexy. Emotions. Ego. Technique. Timing. Doing Nothing. Just Doing It. In her wry, entertaining, and astute style, master of her craft Beatrice Manley dispenses wide-ranging insights and nuanced wisdom accumulated from a lifetime on the stage.

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Moving Pictures takes a novel historical approach to the making and recording of Rush's album by the same name. This 1981 release was a landmark record, not only for Rush, but also for the entirety of progressive rock.There's nothing else like it in the Rush catalog. Permanent Waves and Hemispheres were important releases in their evolution as a progressive band, but neither provided the necessary commercial firepower to blast the Canadian trio into the stratosphere of rock stardom. Moving Pictures, with its thematic work and positioning as the antithesis of a concept record, balanced opposing creative sensibilities, garnered the attention of radio programmers across North America, and sold millions of copies around the globe.As the title of the record suggests, each track projects unique filmic properties, allowing the collective work to escape into the realm of the audiovisual. Unparalleled in the band's recorded output, Moving Pictures boasts multisensory qualities, such as a snarling synth portal opening the record ("Tom Sawyer"), pulse-quickening cyclical patterns corkscrewing through the genre fluid "Vital Signs," a spine-tingling sci-fi thrill ride thinly masking social commentary ("Red Barchetta"), technically precise musical jousting amid time signature changes ("YYZ"), chilling glimpses of a hellish, torch-lit mob haunting "Witch Hunt," the wide-screen dual optics of "The Camera Eye," and a ferocious guitar tone taking a bite out of fame ("Limelight"). Put simply, the seven-track offering solidified the band's global appeal and continues to inspire musicians of all walks of life—forty years after its release. This is its story.

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Hold On World revisits Lennon and Ono's love affair and startling collaborations. John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band was arguably the most emotionally honest album ever made. It wasn't merely another record but more like a sonic exorcism, a spiritual, public bloodletting. Lennon's album drove a stake through the heart of the Beatles' myth while confronting everything else in John's life, from Dylan to God to his glorified status as a "Working Class Hero." Determined to rid himself of childhood traumas—abandoned by his father, John, at age nine, watched helplessly as his mother was killed by a car—Lennon wrote the most powerful song cycle of his career, confronting fear, disappointment, and illusion, all the while espousing his love for Yoko Ono. Released simultaneously, Ono's album Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band is emotionally raw and challenging. It inspired bands like the B-52s and Yo La Tengo to employ pure sound, whether shrieking vocals or guitar feedback, to express their deepest feelings.

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Robert Macomber's Honor series of naval fiction follows the life and career of Peter Wake in the U.S. Navy during the tumultuous years from 1863 to 1901. At the Edge of Honor is the first in the series and winner of the Patrick D. Smith Literary Award as Best Historical Novel of Florida. The year is 1863. The Civil War is leaving its bloody trail across the nation as Peter Wake, born and bred in the snowy North, joins the U.S. Navy as a volunteer officer and arrives in steamy Florida for duty with the East Gulf Blockading Squadron. The idealistic Peter Wake has handled boats before, but he's new to the politics and illicit liaisons that war creates among men. Assigned to the Rosalie, a tiny, armed sloop, Captain Wake commands a group of seasoned seamen on a series of voyages to seek and arrest Confederate blockade-runners and sympathizers, from Florida's coastal waters through to near the remote out-islands of the Bahamas. Wake risks his reputation when he falls in love with Linda Donahue, whose father is a Confederate zealot, and steals away to spend precious hours with her at her Key West home. Their love is tested as Wake learns he must make the ugly decisions of war even in a beautiful, tropical paradise—decisions that take him up to the edge of honor.

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When Geronimo and his warriors surrendered to the US Army, General Miles made a number of promises for the surrender terms that were in fact false. Geromino: Prisoner of Lies provides insights into how Chiricahua prisoners of war lived while held in captivity by the United States Army in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as seen through the eyes of their war leader Geronimo. The indignities and lies they suffered, and how they maintained their tribal culture in the face of great pressure to change or vanish entirely, are brought to life and provided new context through this book.

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1797: Britain stands alone against the forces of Revolutionary France. A victorious French Army, led by the youthful Napoleon Bonaparte, is poised to invade Britain. And in his country's darkest hour, Captain Nathan Peake finds himself imprisoned by his own side on the Rock of Gibraltar charged with treason. To prove his innocence Nathan must uncover the great deception that masks the French war aims. Is the great armada being assembled in Toulon bound for the shores of Great Britain or Egypt? His secret mission to discover the truth about Napoleon's invasion plans will hurl him into two of the greatest battles of the 18th century.

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In the late summer of 1775, General George Washington discovers that his cache of gunpowder has dwindled to a mere nine shots per man. A desperate plan is hatched—to send a ship under the command of Captain Isaac Biddlecomb to Bermuda to capture the British powder known to be there. But the plan is a trap, set by a traitor among the patriots, and one from which even Biddlecomb cannot escape. Washington dispatches his aide-de-camp, Major Edward Fitzgerald, to hunt the traitor down, while Biddlecomb must rely on cunning and seamanship to free his men and the ship, and to capture the gunpowder that is the lifeblood of the fight for liberty. Divided by an ocean but bound by the cause, as well as by their own private fears, Biddlecomb and Fitzgerald must take on a common enemy—the greatest military power on earth. This is a powerful saga of the American Revolution—a stirring maritime adventure in the epic, true-to-life tradition of Patrick O’Brian.

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HARD TO WATCH: HOW TO ENJOY LONG, CHALLENGING, AND OBSCURE MOVIES AND TELEVISION

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Best known for co-founding the early punk duo Suicide, Alan Vega lived a complex and labyrinthine life, driven by a desire to express himself uncompromisingly through art. From his first sketch in art class at Brooklyn College to the 2021 release of the album Mutator five years after his death, Vega continues to shock and inspire.This first-ever biography of Vega tells the story of the man's life and art, beginning with his early attempts to live a normal life and his epiphanic encounter with Iggy Pop in 1969. Although becoming a performer on stage had been at the bottom of Vega's list of lifetime ambitions, Iggy changed his mind: he needed music to truly express his vision. Radical Dreams goes on to describe Vega's many experiments across a variety of media, including the partnership with Marty Rev that became Suicide, which challenged audiences to look deep inside themselves and to not settle for distractions.Written by Vega's widow Liz Lamere in collaboration with a

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BASS NOTES: REFLECTIONS ON MY LIFE IN JAZZ AND JAZZ IN THE LIFE OF OUR CULTURE

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When you sit down at a play, movie, or concert—or even in front of the TV or scrollinl on your—you are taking part in one of the oldest and most mysterious forms of human behavior. Being part of an audience is an age-old experience that we all crave that has evolved from amphitheaters to screens. Right This Way is a pop history of audiences through the ages.Playbill editor Robert Viagas unfolds the unique aspects of what he calls “audiencing” with stories from the age of the Greeks to the world of Zoom. He walks through the different types of audiences and the history of their responses, what science has to say about how our brains respond to what they see and the reactions of the people around them, and why, during COVID-19, people risked a deadly virus to be part of a crowd. Right This Way explores what the audience experience brings us and how it may evolve in the 21st century.

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I SAW THEM STANDING THERE: A 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF MY STORY WITH THE BEATLES BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER THEY CONQUERED AMERICA

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BREAKING THE CODE: OTTO PREMINGER VERSUS HOLLYWOD'S CENSORS: PLUS: CODE BLUE, A PLAY BY ARNIE REISMAN & NAT SEGALOFF

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1935: Cal Jardine is a soldier of fortune. Forced to leave Hamburg, where he has been helping Jews flee the Nazis, he is recruited by a secretive British committee to smuggle guns to Abyssinia, a country threatened by Italian invasion. But first Jardine must procure the weapons from Romania, a country full of treacherous locals as well as German agents seeking his arrest. By sleight of hand, he contrives to steal the weapons he wanted to buy before escaping the country, leaving both the Romanians and Germans floundering. Taken to the Horn of Africa, the arms are then transported over a harsh landscape, along an old slave trader's route full of danger, into the hands of the Ethiopian Army. On his travels, Jardine acquires more baggage than he anticipated, including a beautiful but difficult American woman in search of her archaeologist mother, a determined reporter, and a daredevil French flyer, while missing out on a painful death by sheer good fortune. But the Ethiopians are ill-equipped to face a modern Italian army using tanks, bombers, and poison gas. Trained for war, can Jardine simply walk away? Or will he be drawn into a bloody conflict against massive odds, and manage to save those who now depend on him?

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Few songs have captured the contradictions and ambiguities of the 1960s as memorably as “California Dreamin’,” the iconic folk music single that catapulted The Mamas & The Papas into rock and roll history. In All the Leaves Are Brown, SiriusXM producer Scott Shea details how John Phillips, Denny Doherty, Michelle Phillips, and “Mama Cass” Elliot became standard-bearers for California counterculture, following their transformation from folk music wannabes to rock sensations and chronicling the tumultuous events that followed their unexpected success. Shea gives a definitive account of the group’s short time together, from their hitmaking approach with legendary producer Lou Adler to John’s unique songwriting to their tours and friendships with other musicians riding the folk-rock wave. He explores the emotional vicissitudes that came with being in the Mamas & the Papas, from Cass’s unrequited love for Denny, his affair with Michelle, and the ebb and flow of dysfunction in John and Michelle’s marriage. Shea explains how it all came to a crashing end with John’s brainchild, the Monterey Pop Festival, which should have launched them even further into the rock music stratosphere, but only served to be their undoing. Through interviews with former bandmates, session musicians, family members, and many others, All the Leaves Are Brown is a layered and revelatory tale of overnight stardom and its many pitfalls.

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The Child Ballads are a series of over 300 traditional ballads from England and Scotland that, along with their American variants, were anthologized by folklorist Francis James Child in the nineteenth century. An Evolving Tradition is the story of the Child Ballads—the world’s best-known and most highly regarded repository of traditional English folk songs, and the wellspring for approximately 10,000 recordings over the last century, from obscure musicological archives to classic releases from Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and Led Zeppelin.Drawing on interviews with numerous scholars and musicians, author Dave Thompson explains what a ballad is, outlines their dominant themes, and recounts how these ballads survived to become a mainstay of field recordings made by Cecil Sharp, Alan Lomax, and others as they traveled the English and American countryside in search of old songs. Thompson traverses the entire spectrum of rock, pop, folk, roots, experimental music, industrial, and goth to reveal the remarkable legacy and incalculable influence of the Child Ballads on all manner of modern music.

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Carefully Taught looks at American history as depicted in thirty Broadway musicals. Presented chronologically according to the musical timeframe, award-winning theater critic and author Cary Ginell dissects the stories, characters, and songs to not only examine how Broadway viewed historical events, epochs, and personalities, but also to capture how dramatic license separated fact from fantasy. The chosen musicals fall into a variety of categories: biographies of famous Americans, (Andrew Jackson and Fiorello LaGuardia), stories with national conflicts (Hamilton, South Pacific), events that captured the attention of the American public (Floyd Collins, Newsies), and sociological studies or satires of specific eras (The Music Man, Hair). Many books have been written about Broadway, but Carefully Taught uniquely approaches American history from two vantage points: the point of view of the playwright and composer accompanied with the context of how these events were seen when they were produced versus how they are seen today. Ginell’s research of contemporary theater reviews and in-depth studies of productions’ back stories play off his knowledge gained from his quarter century as a theater critic in Southern California.The combination is a complete overview of American history on the stage from the coveted balcony seat.

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She Persisted: One Hundred Monologues from Plays by Women Over Forty is a collection of monologues from plays by members of Honor Roll!, an advocacy group of women over forty. About Honor Roll!:"Honor Roll! is an advocacy and action group of women+ playwrights over forty—and our allies—whose goal is our inclusion in theater. The term "women+" refers to a spectrum of gender identification that includes women, non-binary identifiers, and trans. We are the generation excluded at the outset of our careers because of sexism, now overlooked because of ageism. We celebrate diversity in theater, and work to call attention to the negative impact of age discrimination alongside gender, race, ethnicity, faith, socioeconomic status, disability, and sexual orientation in the American Theatre and beyond.""These women are in their forties and fifties and sixties, and they have been writing a long time, and they are at the height of their craft. These are tight, complex, nuanced pieces of writing, which no one has seen because for too long they weren't looking. These are important writers, and important plays." —Theresa Rebeck, from the introduction

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Paul Gemignani is one of the titans of the modern musical theater industry. Serving as musical director for more than forty Broadway productions since 1971, his collaborations with Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, John Kander, Fred Ebb, Hal Prince, Michael Bennett, and Alan Menken have led to countless accolades for his collaborators, but due to the near invisible position of the musical director in the Broadway industry, Gemignani's story is often overlooked. GEMIGNANI seeks to not only bring the reader into the orchestra pit to learn Gemignani's story, but also to educate the reader about the crucial role a music director plays in bringing some of the most iconic musicals in Broadway history to life.Born into a second-generation Italian American family during the aftershocks of the Great Depression, Gemignani worked his way up from playing percussion in USO bands to conducting before Leonard Bernstein, all before becoming a pivotal player in the team that brought some of the most successful musicals of the late twentieth century to the stage. Sweeney Todd, Evita, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods would be quite different without his key contributions, and many of the sonic markers we now associate with the postmodern musical theater can be traced to Gemignani's careful curiosity to expand the bounds of what was possible.

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Favorite examples of cross-dressing or cross-gender performances include Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, Vesta Tilley as Burlington Bertie, Maxine Peake as Hamlet, and Drag Queen RuPaul outrageously fronting the RuPaul Drag Race. Cross-Dressing in Performance tells the story of the different ways performers cross-dress. Janet Tennant looks at many of the memorable performers over the years who have adopted the characters and dress of others, and why they have done so: to tell stories, to amuse, to create memorable alter-egos, to rebel or call attention to social and political issues or merely for reasons of expediency.Tennant examines cross-dressing at different periods of theatrical history in the Western canon, predominantly in Britain and North America. Not following a conventional historical timeline, Tennant instead examines the different types of cross-dressing/cross-gender performance: Boys in Shakespeare, Heroes in Opera, Pantomime Dames, and Drag Queens being just a few. And no study of cross-dressing can, of course, forget its origins in Ancient Greece.It's a Drag: Cross-Dressing in Performance discusses the present and attempts to predict the future of cross-dressing in performance. How will the drive towards equality affect the use of cross-dressing and cross-gender role casting? Will gender-blind roles become as prevalent as color-blind casting? Will audiences continue to be amused and impressed, or will gender differences in entertainment cease to be important?

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In 1869, more than twenty years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony made their declaration of the rights of woman at Seneca Falls, New York, the men of the Wyoming Territorial Legislature granted women over the age of 21 the right to vote in general elections. And on September 6, 1870, a grandmother named Eliza Swain stepped up to a ballet box in Laramie, Wyoming, and became the first woman in the United States to exercise that right, ushering in the era of Western states’ early foray into suffrage equality. Wyoming Territory’s motives for extending the vote to women might have had more to do with publicity and attracting female settlers than with any desire to establish a more egalitarian society. However, individual men’s interests in the idea of women’s rights had their roots in diverse ideologies, and the women who agitated for those rights were equally diverse in their attitudes. No Place for a Woman explores the history of the fight for women’s rights in the West, examining the conditions that prevailed during the vast migration of pioneers looking for free land and opportunity on the frontier, the politics of the emerging Western territories at the end of the Civil War, and the changing social and economic conditions of the country recovering from war and on the brink of the Gilded Age. The stories of the women who helped settle the west and who ushered in voting rights decades ahead of the 19th Amendment and the stories of the country they were forging in the west will be of great interest to readers as the 100th anniversary of national woman suffrage approaches and is relevant in our current political climate. Revealed through the individual stories of women like Esther Hobart Morris, Martha Cannon, and Jeannette Rankin, this book fills a hole in the story of the West, revealing the real story of how the hard work and individual lobbying of a few heroines, plus a little bit of publicity-seeking and opportunism by promoters of the Wyoming Territory, ushered in a new era for the expansion of women’s rights.

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In 1900, the young and beautiful Leonel Ross Campbell became the first female reporter to work for the Denver Post. As the journalist known as Polly Pry, she ruffled feathers when she worked to free a convicted cannibal and when she battled the powerful Telluride miners’ union. She was nearly murdered more than once. And a younger female colleague once said, “Polly Pry did not just report the news, she made it!” If only that young reporter had known how true her words were. Polly Pry got her start not just writing the news but inventing it. In spite of herself, however, Campbell would become a respected journalist and activist later in her career. She would establish herself as a champion for rights of the under served in the early twentieth century, taking up the causes of women, children, laborers, victims and soldiers of war, and prisoners. And she wrote some of the most sensational stories that westerners had ever read, all while keeping the truth behind her success a secret from her colleagues and closest friends and family.

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By 1900, the tale of the 300 Texians who died in the 1836 battle of the Alamo had already become legend. But to corporate interests in the growing City of San Antonio, the land where that blood was shed was merely a desirable plot of land across the street from new restaurants and hotels, with only a few remaining crumbling buildings to tell the tale. When two women, Adina Emilia De Zavala, the granddaughter of the first vice-president of the Texas Republic, and Clara Driscoll, the daughter of one of Texas’s most prominent ranch families and first bankers, learned of the plans, they hatched a plan to preserve the site—and in so doing, they reinvigorated both the legend and lore of the Alamo and cemented the site’s status as hallowed ground. But the story of the battle the two women started with each other reverberates to this day. These two strong-willed, pioneering women were very different, but the story of how they banded together and how the Alamo became what it is today despite those differences, is compelling reading for those interested in Texas history and Texas’s larger-than-life personality.

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For some, Rod Stewart embodies all of the conceit and narcissism that susceptible egos are prone to once they make it big in the music industry. Even if that were true, however, that wouldn’t change the fact that he is responsible for some of the greatest recordings ever made. A great number of those songs were recorded for the Mercury label between 1969 and 1975, spread across Stewart’s solo output as well as his side gig as front man for the band Faces. Even when the records were likable more often than they were classic, Stewart was still one of the greatest live attractions in the world, whether on his own or with the band.Rod Stewart: The Classic Years gives an precedented in-depth look at this crucial phase of Stewart’s career. Author Sean Egan brings together interviews with musicians Mick Waller, Pete Sears, and Ray Jackson, engineer Mike Bobak, manager Billy Gaff, Stewart’s then-girlfriend and muse Dee Harrington, his publicist Jonathan Rowlands, and many other key individuals in orbit around Stewart, including a brand-new interview with the man himself for a first-hand account of the Mercury years. Egan offers a striking portrait of big egos, plenty of decadence, and solid-gold rock ‘n’ roll amidst the long post-‘60s hangover.

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THE RAMONES AND THE MAKING OF ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL

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A comprehensive companion to the six-part Emmy-winning PBS documentary series, Broadway: The American Musical is the gold standard of musical theater history books, tracing the roots of the art form at the turn of the twentieth century through the smashing successes of the new millennium. The in-depth text is lavishly illustrated with a treasure trove of photographs, scenic renderings, production stills, and rehearsal shots, many previously unpublished. With a foreword by Julie Andrews, this edition is revised and updated, with brand-new material on all the Broadway musicals through the 2018–2019 season, including The Book of Mormon, Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, and more. Called by Playbill "an epic tome—handsomely produced and intensely researched," this five hundred-page volume is a must-have for theater fans, casual enthusiasts, and students of all ages.

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Through photos, interviews, how-tos, and recipes, this book offers a guide to creating your own Cowboy Christmas and a celebration of the style, traditions, food, and family celebrations unique to the lifestyles of American cowboys. Featuring ranch families, rodeo cowboys, and communities with western-style Christmas celebrations, this book will highlight the things that make a Cowboy Christmas special. Each chapter will feature traditions, recipes, decorations, and stories from the interviewees.

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As the captain of a useful frigate, Thomas Kydd is claimed by the Leeward Islands station, exchanging the harsh situation in South America for the warmth and delights of the Caribbean. It's a sea change for Kydd, who revisits the places and people that figured in his time as a young seaman. Some are nostalgic and pleasing, while others bring challenges of a personal nature. In Europe, Napoleon is triumphant on land, but so far away in the Caribbean, Kydd and the others feel secure and make the most of running down prizes and sending off fat convoys of sugar to England. But, in a stroke of genius, Bonaparte finds a way to take revenge for Trafalgar and shocks Kydd out of complacency when an element from his past returns and Kydd is accused of murder. In a stroke of irony, it is that same past that may just provide Kydd the means to clear his name.

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New York State's Adirondack region is as ancient as is it immense over six million acres of wild forests, lakes, rivers, and mountains. Mapping the Adirondacks celebrates the overwhelming nature of this landscape by following two early visitors who became totally obsessed by the region. This is the first book to focus solely on Verplanck Colvin and Mills Blake's original survey of the Adirondack Region, a monumental project that would help define and protect the land for generations to come. It was an 18-year-old explorer and travel writer named Verplanck Colvin who, in 1865, began personally mapping a half million acres of true Adirondack wilderness. Then, in 1872, right after the State legislature gave a slight nod to the project, Colvin dubbed himself Superintendent of the Adirondack Survey and hired an equally intrepid surveyor to helphis ever-dependable and longtime friend Mills Blake. Together they extended the scope and granularity of their survey, hired hundreds of Adironda

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