The US Festival was a milestone in the history of rock music. It lasted for only two years – 1982 and 1983 – but the shows laid the groundwork for today’s enormous, week-long festivals: Lollapalooza, Glastonbury, Bonnaroo, Outside Lands, Coachella among them. The US Festival was three days – not of peace and music, but […]
The purpose of propaganda is to invoke an emotional response from the target audience: one which is not based on critical thinking. Terror bombing is so morally offensive to its victims that it has always been used as a propaganda tool by the government. The greatest success of the ‘myth of the Blitz’ was the […]
The critical timeframe between the bombing of Hiroshima and the surrender of Japan has been largely ignored by historians. Sadao Asada’s essay, The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision to Surrender – A Reconsideration is a well-reasoned, critical exploration of the true factors which led to Japan’s surrender to the allies in August, […]
The Comstock Law, passed in the United States in 1873, was part of an ongoing – to this day! – campaign to legislate public morality in the United States. The Comstock Law was initially meant to stop the trade in “obscene literature” and “immoral articles,” particularly through the mail. It was named after Anthony Comstock, […]
King Henry VIII was the first Monarch to take legal action to control the press in pre-Enlightenment England. His methods were simple enough: he required all printers to pay licensing fees in order to be allowed to print anything. This concept became known as ‘prior restraint’: preventing the distribution of controversial materials before they are even […]
(Caution: italics ahead!): From the school playground to the presidential election, the art of a truly fine insult is a universally accepted cultural tradition with a long, inglorious history. The most effective insults use irony, metaphor and personification tropes – along with humor – as a way to attack their opponents’ character, and to frame […]
Recent studies confirm that a growing number of college students are losing empathy for their fellow human beings. In a world that clearly needs more compassion, this is a shocking trend. Studies conducted between 1979 and 2009 found that college students have less empathy toward their peers than previous generations. The findings come from the study, Changes […]
My first encounter with social media was probably listening to the car radio as a child while my parents drove around Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. These are some of my earliest memories. A few of the songs I can recall hearing during this time include A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles, Stop In the […]
The second event which influenced my sense of identity was more technology-driven, and it came much later in my life. The transition from vinyl albums to compact discs was a difficult one for me, and it was at this time when I first realized that for better or worse, change was inevitable; there was no […]
The final innovation which profoundly affected my personal sense of identity was the advent of the Internet. By the time my wife and I broke down and bought our first PC in the early 90s, the World Wide Web was already a full-blown global phenomenon. The Internet opened up entirely new vistas of research and […]
Jason Darensburg's Blog-o-rama 