An Historian Goes to the Movies

The LGBT community is mourning the loss of two queer icons in two days: Dolly Parton, the honorary drag queen and fierce voice for tolerance, and Tim Curry, whose arch performance as Frank N Furter in Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, dir.

Last time I offered you my initial thoughts on The Odyssey (dir.

Ok, so I kinda have to post about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

In 1938, an English widow paid an amateur archaeologist to dig into some small hills on her property, not realizing that they were going to discover the most spectacular and important find in English history.

During my long hiatus from the blog, I watched the first two seasons of Netflix’ Shonda Rhimes series Bridgerton.

After my series of posts on The Gilded Age, I was pondering if I have the time to keep posting, and while I was looking over the blog, I discovered a draft post I wrote a couple years ago but inexplicably never managed to put up on the blog.

As I wrap up my last post on HBO’s The Gilded Age, I had a couple random details from the show that aren’t enough for a whole post, so I’m just going to toss them out here.

The late 19th century in America is not often depicted in film or television (in contrast to the Late Victorian Age in Britain, which is a pretty popular setting), and even more rare is any depiction of the position of Black people in the post-Reconstruct…

Nathan Lane’s Ward McAllister plays a secondary but still important role in The Gilded Age, so I thought that this rather interesting guy deserved his own post.

One of the plot lines of Season 2 of the The Gilded Age is ‘Maud Beaton’ (Nicole Brydon Bloom) scamming Oscar (Blake Ritson) of the van Rhijn money, bringing him and Agnes (Christine Baranski) to the brink of ruin.