Births, deaths and marriages, No1 singles, drug busts and arrests, famous gigs and awards... all these and much more appear in this fascinating 50 year almanac.Using a page for every day of the calendar year, the author records a variety of rock and pop events that took place on a given day of the month across the years.This Day in Music is fully illustrated with hundreds of pictures, cuttings and album covers, making this the must-have book for any pop music fan.
Perry Como put aside his career as a barber to become one of the top American crooners of the 20th century and also one of the first multimedia stars. His record sales exceeded 100 million. In 1948, Como was the first popular singer to cross over to television and The Perry Como Show became the benchmark for a broadcast music and variety show. Como's career illuminates developments in the music and television business in the middle of the last century. This biography features 73 photographs, a complete discography, a listing of all television appearances, and a year by year chronology of Perry Como's life from 1912 to 2001.
The minstrel show occupies a complex and controversial space in the history of American popular culture. Today considered a shameful relic of America's racist past, it nonetheless offered many black performers of the 19th and early 20th centuries their only opportunity to succeed in a white-dominated entertainment world, where white performers in blackface had by the 1830s established minstrelsy as an enduringly popular national art form. This book traces the often overlooked history of the "modern" minstrel show through the advent of 20th century mass media--when stars like Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Mickey Rooney continued a long tradition of affecting black music, dance and theatrical styles for mainly white audiences--to its abrupt end in the 1950s. A companion two-CD reissue of recordings discussed in the book is available from Archeophone Records at www.archeophone.com.
In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.
Gripping, deeply researched, and authoritative, the history of one of the closest intelligence and security relationships in the world The Special Relationship between the United States and Britain is touted by politicians when it suits their purpose and, as frequently, dismissed as myth, not least by the media. Yet the truth is that the two countries are bound together more closely than either is to any other ally. In The Real Special Relationship, Michael Smith reveals how it all began, eighty years ago, when a top-secret visit by four American codebreakers to Bletchley Park in February 1941—ten months before the US entered World War II—marked the start of a close collaboration between the intellitence services of the two nations. When that war ended and the Cold War began, both sides recognized that the way they worked together to decode German and Japanese ciphers could be used to counter the Soviet threat. They laid the foundation for the behind-the-scenes intelligence sharing that has continued—despite rivalries among the services and occasional political conflict and public disputes between the two nations—through the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to the threats of the present moment. Smith, who served in British military intelligence, brings together a fascinating range of characters, from Winston Churchill and Ian Fleming to John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Edward Snowden. Supported by in-depth interviews and a broad range of personal contacts in the intelligence community, he takes the reader into the workings of MI6, the CIA, the NSA, and all those who strive to keep us safe. Sir John Scarlett, former chief of MI6, has written the introduction, and Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and the NSA, has provided the foreword.
This biography examines the life and career of scholar-journalist Elizabeth Wiskemann (1899-1971) from her youth and student years at Cambridge to her death by suicide. Disappointed in her hopes for an academic career, she reinvented herself as a journalist in Berlin, covering the overthrow of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism for The New Statesman, Nation, and numerous other newspapers and periodicals. Expelled from Germany, she settled in Prague and funded by Chatham House wrote the most important account of the Czech-German conflict and the Sudeten crisis, still a classic, followed by a detailed analysis of Nazi political and economic destabilization of the countries of eastern Europe. Her journalistic skills served her well in the war years when she worked as a secret agent in Switzerland, gathering intelligence, running agents into Axis-controlled Europe, and working closely with Allen Dulles, the O.S.S. chief in Bern. Postwar, Wiskemann returned to freelance journalism, focusing especially on Italy and Germany, while also writing several books, including the first scholarly study of the Hitler-Mussolini relationship and the first major account of the expulsion of 12 million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. Although a prolific writer and highly regarded as a commentator on international affairs, she remained on the fringes of academia until 1958 when she was appointed Professor of International Relations at Edinburgh (the first woman to receive a Chair there in any discipline); she later became one of the first faculty recruited by the new Sussex University. In her later years she published several works of contemporary history, including Europe of the Dictators, 1919-45, widely used in schools and universities. Blinded in one eye by a botched surgery and increasingly anxious as her other eye deteriorated, she became terrified of going completely blind and ended her life. Aside from its intrinsic interest, Wiskemann's biography is illustrative of a whole cohort of women - graduates in the 1920s and 30s - who found ways to pursue their interests in international affairs and contemporary history. In this sense the book foregrounds the gendered experience of these pioneers whose professional lives often intersected through journalism, Chatham House, and service in the propaganda and intelligence agencies of the wartime state.
