Dick Tracy

Dick Tracy is a long-running comic strip featuring a popular and familiar character in American pop culture. Dick Tracy is a hard-hitting, fast shooting, and supremely intelligent police detective who has matched his wits with variety of colorful villains, many based on real-life gangsters. This comic strip was created by cartoonist Chester Gould, the Dick Tracy strip made deput apperance on October 4, 1931-1977. Chester introduced the violent comic strips which reflected the violence of 1930s in Chicago.  He kept up with and studied the best fighting/detective techniques, forensic science, advanced gadgetry.

The history of Dick Tracy is that he proposed to a girl named Tess Trueheart. After returning home , they walked in on the middle of a robbery. Interrupted they shoot Tess' father Emil and kidnaps Tess. Dick wants justice done, so he swiftly in the police force, and nine days later was appointed to the plainsclothes detective division. After rescuing Tess, he continues with his new career.

The strip's villain  are arguably the strongest appeal to the story. Gould most favor villain is Flattop Jones, a freelance hitman with a large head as flat as an aircraft carriar's flight deck. Flattop was hired to murder Tracy, and he came within hair's breadth of accomplishing that before deciding to first blackmail his employers for more money. This proved to be a fatal mistake since it gave Tracy time to signal for help, and he eventually defeated his assassin in a spectacular fight scene even as the police were storming the hideout. When Flattop was eventually killed, fans went into morning.

In later years, Dick Tracy made film debut in 1937, a Republic Pictures movie serial starring

Ralph Byrd.

Lauren Bray

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Tracy

http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/d/diktracy.htm

Babe Ruth, "The Bambino"

George Herman Ruth, Jr. formally known as "Babe" Ruth was an American Major League baseball player from 1914-1935.  He started as a starting pitcher for the Boston Red Sox and then was sold to the New York Yankees in 1919, in which he converted to a full-time right fielder. He then became one the league's most prolific hitters. Babe Ruth won seven pennants and four world series titles during his tenure with the New York Yankees. 

Ruth since become regarded as one of the greatest sports heros in American Culture. He has been named the greatest baseball player in the history in various surveys and rankings, and his home run hitting prowess and charismatic personality made him a larger than life figure in the roaring twenties. Ruth was the first person to hit 60 home runs in one season(1927), setting the season record which stood until broken by Roger Maris in 1961. Ruth's lifetime total of 714 home runs at his retirement in 1935. Ruth also hit for average: his .342 lifetime batting is tenth highest in baseball history, and in one season he hit .393, a Yankee record. His .690 career slugging percentage and 1.164 career on-base plus slugging remain major league records.

In 1998, The Sporting News ranked Ruth number one on the list of  "Baseball's 100 Greatest Players." In 1999, baseball fans named Ruth to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team. In 1969, he was named baseball's Greatest Player Ever in a ballot commemorating the 100th anniversary of professional baseball and in 1993, he was reported to be tied with Muhammad Ali as the most recognized althletes, out 1000, in America.

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babe_Ruth

Lauren Bray

Führermuseum

Adolf Hitler wanted to create a museum in the Austrian city of Linz where a display of art plundered or purchased by the Nazi party during WWII. The museum would be designed by Albert Speer and would include a "monumental" theatre, an opera house and of course the Adolf Hitler Hotel. This would all be surrounded by huge boulevards and a parade ground. There would also be a library that would have around 250,000 books (all of which were approved by Hitler, because if not they would just burn them).

Hitler hid the paintings during the war in his personal office buildings and deposits in upper Austria, when the threat of bombings were getting closer to where the pieces were kept they were moved into the salt mines of Altaussee to protect them.

After the war, the American Art Looting Investigation Unit or ALIU made reports about the Nazi plundering and consolidated all the reports into 4 detailed ones which were then used to return the art to its rightful owners. Stalin used this as an opportunity to stock his Soviet museums and create a museum that would be considered one of the best along with those of Britain.

SB

Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Führermuseum

My tower is BIGGER than your tower

Tatlin’s Tower or The Monument to the Third International

Designed by Vladimir Tatlin who was an architect during the Russian Constructivist movement. He envisioned a tower bigger than the Eiffel Tower in Paris and it would have many moving parts. The purpose was to "combine a machine aesthetic with dynamic components celebrating technology." It would resemble a twin helix but he partitioned the tower into three separate levels. The first at the base of the tower would rotate very slowly and do a full rotation once a year, the second would rotate once a month and the top would complete its rotation every day. The tower was to be created out of industrial materials; iron, glass, steel, all of these things helped with the modern thinking at the time he gave careful thought to the materials, the shape, and the functionality.

SB

sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatlin's_Tower

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_constructivism

The Red Scare

The end of the fighting in Europe did not bring peace and security to the United States. Shortly after the end of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Red Scare began in the United States.
The nation was wrapped up in the fear of communists, socialists, anarchists, and other rebels. Innocent people were jailed for expressing their views, freedoms were ignored, and many Americans feared that a communist revolution was in sight. This revolution suggested that the working class would overthrow the middle class.
Both the federal and state governments reacted to that fear by attacking potential communist threats. And they used acts passed during the war to prosecute suspected communists. Then, in the early 1920s, the fear left just as quickly as it had begun, and the Red Scare was over.

Piet Mondrain

Mondrian was born in the Netherlands and was introduced to art from a very early age. His father was a qualified drawing teacher; Piet often painted and drew along the river. He began his career as an elementary school teacher, but while teaching he also painted. Most of his work from this period was naturalistic or impressionistic, consisting largely of landscapes, pastoral images, windmills, fields, and rivers.




Various artistic movements had a lot of influence over Mondrain, including pointillism and fauvism. He eventually began using a palette consisting almost entirely of red, yellow and blue.

The earliest paintings that show a feeling of the abstraction to come are a series representing scenes of trees and houses with reflections in still water. However, these paintings are still rooted in nature, compared to his further abstractions.

We still find Mondrain-influenced work in some of the most uncommon places....

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, born in Spain, seemed to be a child prodigy.
Museo de Picasso in Barcelona is devoted primarily to his early works- I've visited this museum before. His early works seem to be very disturbing and gruesome.

Around 1904, Picasso's palette brightened his subjects became things like circus people and clowns.




He was influenced a lot by Matisse.













Cubism is essentially the fragmenting of three-dimensional forms into flat areas of pattern and color, overlapping and intertwining so that shapes and parts of the human anatomy are seen from the front and back at the same time. -www.artchive.com

Sliding into the Great Depression

The Stock Market Crash of 1929 was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States. This crash was not a one-day affair. And it was a long-lasting economic depression for the United States as well as the rest of the world. The stock market collapse continued for nearly a month.

The decade that led up to the crash, was a time of wealth and surplus, and many believed that the market could maintain high price levels.

date	change	% change	close
October 28, 1929	-38.33	-12.82	260.64
October 29, 1929	-30.57	-11.73	230.07

-Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com.

• "Anyone who bought stocks in mid-1929 and held onto them saw most of his or her adult life pass by before getting back to even" -Richard Salsman.

The 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression are together know to be the biggest financial crisis of the 20th century!

Coco Chanel

Chanel No. 5 was created in 1921 for a woman named Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, by Ernest Beaux. He used blends of jasmine and rose with a base of sandalwood. Chanel believed women should wear perfume wherever they hoped to be kissed. Today Chanel No.5 sells a bottle every 30 seconds.

No. 5 was chosen to be launched out of a series of 10 Chanel perfumes made by Beaux.
Chanel was known to have said that "Joy was for women who wanted to put their petty morals on display [by wearing the world's costliest perfume]", about this perfume created just for her!

Hair during the Cloche Era

Hairstyles of the 1920's and the era of the Cloche Hat

By 1923 the bob, a pageboy style with some length was seen everywhere amid enlightened women. About 1924 the razor cut shingle style was introduced and the most clear cut silhouette of the year is the dome shaped rounded crown with a much reduced brim.

From the mid twenties styled, shaped to the head cuts, which combined various forms of waving from the Marcel wave to finger waving, became a norm. All of these new cuts enabled smaller closer fitting headwear like the cloche to be worn as the shaped hair conformed to the skull’s contour.

Eton Crop - The most extreme form of hairstyle was the Eton Crop circa 1927 to 1928 and the hair could have Brylcreem brilliantine to increase the skull like appearance of the hair style. Shiny black hair was the best form of this fashion. Josephine Baker wore this style of slick, greased hair to great effect.

By 1927 hair was softening from straight to wavy and by 1928 neckline nape hair began to be grown and thus softening the look of some women. Likewise the way the brim was worn gave a new meaning to the cloche style. The forehead and hairline was exposed as either they were cut higher, or the front brim was lifted back on one side following the asymmetric lines of skirts which dipped and waved dithering from month to month as the hemline wavered with indecisiveness.

By the late twenties women suddenly wanted to break free of the cloche and show their hair to the world. The point that they could have shorn hair had been made, now the new point to make was that they were free to choose to be ultra feminine whilst having more rights formerly once an attribution of the male gender only.

SB

The Iconic Cloche Hat's of the 1920's

The Iconic Cloche Hats of the 1920's

The cloche hat was not confined to the 1920s as is often first thought.

It was fashionable from 1908 to 1933 was one of the most extreme forms of millinery ever, with an appearance that resembled a helmet. It was the iconic hat of the twenties decade and will ever be associated with the flappers of the era. It was responsible for the period stance we associate with the era. To wear one correctly the hat had to be all but pulled over the eyes, making the wearer have to lift up the head, whilst peering snootily down the nose.

Cloche hats had a basic bell contour with bulbous crowns which if correctly designed could add inches to the height of the wearer helping to foster the haughty look, so redolent of the cloche in our mind’s eye.

Art Deco influence can be seen in the zigzag seaming and construction lines of many cloche hats. Art Deco appliqué was a popular embellishment. Cloches existed in many forms including one with a beret like top.

This harsh style was made more acceptable by the use of make up. Make up became the epitome of sophisticated chic and self-assurance. When a woman publicly applied make up from a glamorous compact when in a restaurant or dance hall, she was exhibiting the new symbol of womanly grace and refinement.

Never before had women abandoned the softness that came with possession of feminine tresses and its effect on physical appearance. Now the effect was for a different effect, one that said look at me I am a new woman unhampered by old ideas and I embrace the new. Make up instead was used to define the face in the modern style making it a specific and recognizable new look of the new women.

Blush was not considered quite proper so was used very sparingly. Those that overdid the rouge, were frowned upon for their poor skill at application, but luscious ox-blood red enhanced lips were a must for the woman of the moment.

SB - better late than never i suppose