John Cage was a giant of American experimental music--composer, writer, and artist. He is most widely known for his 1952 composition 4'33,whose three movements continue to challenge the definition of music by being performed without playing a single note. In questioning fundamental tenets of Western music, Cage was often at the center of ......
Reprinted from its 1918 edition, The Tale of a Plain Man by Alexis Stone details the memories of Pennsylvania's turn-of-the-century state governor. During the Civil War, the adolescent Stone ran off to enlist in the volunteer army beginning a military career, which he then followed into private education, law practice, and public ......
An Irish working-class hero of Pittsburgh, Billy Conn captured hearts through his ebullient personality, stellar boxing record, and good looks. A light heavyweight boxing champion best remembered for his sensational near-defeat of heavyweight champion Joe Louis in 1941, Conn is still regarded as one of the greatest fighters of all time. Andrew ......
As one of the best-known honky-tonkers to appear in the wake of Hank Williams's death, Faron Young was a popular presence on Nashville's music scene for more than four decades. The Singing Sheriff produced a string of Top Ten hits, placed more than eighty songs on the country music charts, and founded the long-running country music periodical ......
In February 1874, Jack Gowlland RN, newly promoted to the rank of Commander, and his sister Celia left England to travel across the Continent to Brindisi. From there they sailed via the newly opened Suez Canal to Australia. Celia never returned to England. Jack drowned surveying Sydney Harbour within months of his return to his post as head of the ......
Spanning over 1,000 separate performances, The Music of Bill Monroe presents a complete chronological list of all of Bill Monroe's commercially released sound and visual recordings. Each chapter begins with a narrative describing Monroe's life and career at that point, bringing in producers, sidemen, and others as they become part of the story. ......
Celebrated as the most famous woman in America at the time of her death in 1898, Frances E. Willard was a leading nineteenth-century American temperance and women's rights reformer and a powerful orator. President of Evanston College for Ladies (before it merged with Northwestern University) and then professor of rhetoric and aesthetics and the ......
Carl Sandburg first encountered Kenneth Dodson through a letter written at sea during World War II. Though Dodson wrote the letter to his wife, Letha, Sandburg read it in tears and told her, I've got to meet this man. Composed primarily of their correspondence that continued until Sandburg's death in 1967, The Poet and the Sailor is a chronicle ......
In 1901, a year after her brother Friedrich's death, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche published The Will to Power, a hasty compilation of writings he had never intended for print. In Nietzsche's Sister and the Will to Power, Carol Diethe contends that Förster-Nietzsche's own will to power and her desire to place herselfnot her brotherat the center of ......
