Buzz

Buzz
Author: Jeffrey Spivak
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813126436

The Great Depression was defined by poverty and despair, but visionary American filmmaker Busby Berkeley (1895-1976) managed to divert the public's attention away from the economic crash with some of the most iconic movies of all time. Known for his kaleidoscopic dance numbers featuring multitudes of performers in extravagant costumes, his musicals provided a brief respite for an audience whose reality was hard and bitter. Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley is a revealing study of the director, drawing from interviews with his colleagues, newspaper and legal records, and Berkeley's own unpublished memoirs to uncover the life of a Hollywood legend renowned for his talent and creativity. Jeffrey Spivak examines how Berkeley's career evolved from creating musical numbers for other directors in films such as 42nd Street (1933) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) to directing his own pictures, such as Strike up the Band (1940) and The Gang's All Here (1943). Though Berkeley claimed he was no choreographer, his movies revitalized the public's waning interest in musical pictures. While other popular filmmakers advertised their works specifically as nonmusical, Berkeley embraced his niche, eventually becoming the premier dance director of his time. However, the happy face Berkeley presented publicly did not necessarily reflect his life. Offstage and away from the set, the director met with scandal, and his fondness for liquor and women was well known. In September 1935, he was involved in a car accident that left three people dead and four others severely injured. Accused of driving under the influence, he was put on trial for second-degree murder. The accident significantly changed the nature of his stardom.

The Buzzel About Kentuck

The Buzzel About Kentuck
Author: Craig Thompson Friend
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2014-07-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813149517

Touted as an American Eden, Kentucky provides one of the most dramatic social histories of early America. In this collection, ten contributors trace the evolution of Kentucky from First West to Early Republic. The authors tell the stories of the state's remarkable settlers and inhabitants: Indians, African Americans, working-class men and women, wealthy planters and struggling farmers. Eager settlers built defensive forts across the countryside, while women and slaves used revivalism to create new opportunities for themselves in a white, patriarchal society. The world that this diverse group of people made was both a society uniquely Kentuckian and a microcosm of the unfolding American pageant. In the mid-1700s, the trans-Appalachian region gained a reputation for its openness, innocence, and rusticity- fertile ground for an agrarian republic founded on the virtue of the yeoman ideal. By the nineteenth century, writers of history would characterize the state as a breeding ground for an American culture of distinctly Anglo-Saxon origin. Modern historians, however, now emphasize exploring the entire human experience, rather than simply the political history, of the region. An unusual blend of social, economic, political, cultural, and religious history, this volume goes a long way toward answering the question posed by a Virginia clergyman in 1775: "What a buzzel is this amongst people about Kentuck?"

Women's Acts

Women's Acts
Author: Teresa Scott Soufas
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2014-07-11
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0813149290

The plays are in Spanish. Los papeles están en el español.

Domination And Defiance

Domination And Defiance
Author: Diane Elizabeth Dreher
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2014-10-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813159172

Shakespeare was clearly fascinated by the relationship between fathers and daughters, for this primal bond of domination and defiance structures twenty-one of his comedies, tragedies, and romances. In a conflict that is at once social and interpersonal, Shakespeare's fathers demand hierarchical obedience while their daughters affirm the new, more personal values upheld by Renaissance humanists and Puritans. In her penetrating analysis of this compelling relationship, Diane Dreher examines the underlying psychological tensions as well as the changing concepts of marriage and the family during Shakespeare's time. She points to the pain and conflict caused by sex role polarization. Shakespeare's possessive fathers tyrannize over their daughters, unwilling to relinquish their "masculine" power and control and leaving these young women with only two alternatives: paternal domination or defiance and loss of love. The logic of Shakespeare's plays repudiates traditional stereotypes, showing how women like Ophelia and Desdemona are destroyed by conforming to the passive Renaissance ideal. The book concludes with a consideration of Shakespeare's androgynous characters—dynamic women in doublet and hose, and fathers who become sensitive, caring, and empathetic. Shakespeare's balanced characters thus reconcile the polarities within themselves and bring greater harmony to their world. Domination and Defiance is the first book on this most provocative relationship in Shakespeare. Shedding new light on the complex father-daughter bond, character, and motivation, it makes a major contribution to literary studies.

My Old Kentucky Home

My Old Kentucky Home
Author: Emily Bingham
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2024-09-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1985901692

"The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home." So begins an American standard, first published as a minstrel song, that became dear to the hearts of millions and ultimately was enshrined as the Kentucky Derby's sonic centerpiece—a popular selling point for Kentucky tourism. Emily Bingham's masterful decoding of Stephen Foster's 1853 ballad reveals that the song was always about slavery and how white Americans wanted to remember it. Acknowledging her own entanglement in this legacy, Bingham takes readers on the journey of a melody, from its inception by a white northerner, to its enormous success on the blackface circuit, in recordings by Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, and on the pages of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, to its countless screen appearances, including Shirley Temple movies, The Simpsons, and Mad Men. For almost two centuries, "My Old Kentucky Home" has never been just a song—it continues to be a resonant, changing emblem of America's original sin, whose blood-drenched shadow haunts us still. My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song investigates the tune's hidden history, lodged in the nation's cultural DNA, and ends with a startling solution for what to do with this artifact of race and slavery.

John Gay and the London Theatre

John Gay and the London Theatre
Author: Calhoun Winton
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2014-10-17
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0813159369

The Beggar's Opera, often referred to today as the first musical comedy, was the most popular dramatic piece of the eighteenth century—and is the work that John Gay (1685-1732) is best remembered for having written. That association of popular music and satiric lyrics has proved to be continuingly attractive, and variations on the Opera have flourished in this century: by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, by Duke Ellington, and most recently by Vaclav Havel. The original opera itself is played all over the world in amateur and professional productions. But John Gay's place in all this has not been well defined. His Opera is often regarded as some sort of chance event. In John Gay and the London Theatre, the first book-length study of John Gay as dramatic author, Calhoun Winton recognized the Opera as part of an entirely self-conscious career in the theatre, a career that Gay pursued from his earliest days as a writer in London and continued to follow to his death. Winton emphasizes Gay's knowledge of and affection for music, acquired, he argues, by way of his association with Handel. Although concentrating on Gay and his theatrical career, Winton also limns a vivid portrait of London itself and of the London stage of Gay's time, a period of considerable turbulence both within and outside the theatre. Gay's plays reflect in varying ways and degrees that social, political, and cultural turmoil. Winton's study sheds new light not only on Gay and the theatre, but also on the politics and culture of his era.

By Southern Playwrights

By Southern Playwrights
Author: Michael Bigelow Dixon
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1996-02-01
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780813108773

By Southern Playwrights is a rare assemblage of works from the 1980s and 1990s by writers continuing the tradition of Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, and Beth Henley, among others. This book makes available for the first time in print Marsha Norman's romantic comedy Loving Daniel Boone, novelist Harry Crews's only play, Blood Issue, and humorist Ray Blount Jr.'s ventures into one-act comedy, Five Ives Gets Named and That Dog Isn't Fifteen. Also included are novelist Elizabeth Dewberry's first play, Head On, Kentucky novelist and essayist Wendell Berry's The Cool of the Day, and Digging In, a remarkable array of Kentucky farm voices adapted for the stage by Julie Crutcher and Vaughn McBride. Southern playwriting is a distinctive voice in the American theater, a point eloquently made in the foreword by Jon Jory. The literary works of the South, he writes, are dominated by "great language, family, strong women, religion, the land, and the past," all of which makes them wonderful for acting -- and for reading. This entertaining book honors southern playwrights in a collection of works that have premiered at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

My First Book About Kentucky!

My First Book About Kentucky!
Author: Carole Marsh
Publisher: Gallopade International
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0635085887

This reproducible book is an introduction to your great state. Kids will learn about their state history, geography, presidents, people, places, nature, animals, and much more by completing these enriching activities.

The Birds of Opulence

The Birds of Opulence
Author: Crystal Wilkinson
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2016-03-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0813166934

A lyrical exploration of love and loss, this book centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern Black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness. The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight against both the moral judgment of the community and her own rebellious daughter, Mona. The residents of Opulence struggle with vexing relationships to the land, to one another, and to their own sexuality. As the members of the youngest generation watch their mothers and grandmothers pass away, they live with the fear of going mad themselves and must fight to survive. The author offers up Opulence and its people in lush, poetic detail. It is a world of magic, conjuring, signs, and spells, but also of harsh realities that only love - and love that's handed down - can conquer.