Benjamin Cawthra's Blog

I recently curated an exhibition of William Gottlieb’s photographs from the Library of Congress collection for the Great Park Gallery in Irvine, California. 52nd Street: Jazz and the Photography of William Gottlieb looks at Gottlieb’s work for Down Beat magazine in the late 1940s when the Street was alive with a variety of jazz styles. […]

Something that makes Drew Brees of the New Orleans Saints one of the greatest quarterbacks in National Football League history is his downfield vision. Not only does he seem to have an almost telepathic ability to know exactly who is open when, but he has what some analysts like to call “pocket awareness.” The “pocket” […]

Amy Cooper is a bad actor. Her recent starring role in Central Park’s Ramble revealed her thespian limitations to an almost embarrassing degree. Her vocal management is a real problem. She falls into the trap of going “high” at the start, giving her nowhere else to go, always a source of discomfort for the audience. […]

Max Von Sydow died last week at age 90. Movie audiences knew the tall Swede as a European character actor of malevolent mienthe elegant hitman in Three Days of the Condor, the compromised mastermind of Minority Report. Or as the uptight artist/intellectual in Hannah and Her Sisters. The priest in The Exorcist. But of course, []

Warm Up What is an editor? To some people, who editors are and what they do will remain mysterious in a way other professions—teacher, nurse, architect—are not. Once in a while an editor becomes a brand name. Max Perkins, William Maxwell, Nan Goldin—all esteemed editors, but they are known by readers, people who read more […]

Stanley Nelson’s documentary Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool debuted at Sundance last winter and is now making its way across the country. It was premier weekend here in Los Angeles, and it was fun to see Nelson’s take on the Davis story as well as reconnect with people in the Miles orbit. I am […]

Jack Johnson was one of the most significant Americans of his time, brazenly erasing racial and sexual codes, triumphing in the ring when white boxing fans craved nothing more than a “Great White Hope,” and inspiring frantic legislative action (banning fight films, the White Slave Act) to make him less, well, free. That’s what it […]

In 2018, CSU Fullerton history and American Studies graduate students got to know the North Long Beach neighborhood, developing a public history project for my graduate seminar in conjunction with the Lawrence de Graaf Center for Oral and Public History. Working with the urban educational non-profit organization We Are the Next, students researched the city’s […]

When pioneering historian Carter G. Woodson began Negro History Week commemorations in 1926, the field of black history barely registered among professional historians. In the twenties, historians were more apt to blame African Americans for the tragedy of the Civil War and the failures of Reconstruction than to investigate them as significant historical actors whose […]

Miles Davis is on the cover of Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz, and is the subject of a chapter on his album covers and image. I was recently one of many who sat down with director Stanley Nelson to talk about Davis, that figure of intrigue whose impact continues to be […]