Skip to main content

Oil!

By

The historical note of the day on Spindletop Hill made me think of Paul Thomas Anderson's recent movie, There Will Be Blood and the book it was loosely based on Upton Sinclair's Oil!  This essay in the NYTimes discusses both.  The movie was riveting to watch but all the other characters seemed incidental to the harrowing character Daniel Day Lewis played.  The discovery of oil in Texas certainly changed this state's fortunes.

Comments

  1. Rick DiguetteJanuary 10, 2011 at 7:37 PM

    That was quite a film. I found it a bit too long and drawn out, but DDL was excellent. So was the actor who played the young preacher.

    ReplyDelete
  2. James FergusonJanuary 10, 2011 at 8:01 PM

    Daniel Day Lewis seemed to blot everyone else out with his performance. It was truly top notch, but to have virtually no redeeming qualities leaves you with a big pit in your stomach.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

The People Debate the Constitution

By
As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified.  After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution.  Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through.  But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 .  The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others.  Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified.  A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.
166 comments
Read more