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“Help Me, Rhonda”: The Beach Boys and the Labouring of Popular Music
By Grant Wong (@wongpopscholar) The Beach Boys’ 1965 album Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) looks and sounds like your typical early Beach Boys record. Its tracks, hits like “California Girls” and “Help Me Rhonda,” celebrate the simple joys of being a teenager in postwar America. Its album sleeve beams with summer fun, depicting the Beach…
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22. Disney’s America Park Map
By Maddy Culpepper (@exlibrismaddy) In 1993, The Walt Disney Company announced a new theme park that never would be. Disney’s America was a $650 million, 3,000-acre project in Virginia that would have centered on a singular theme: American history. [1] Its announcement was quickly met with furious debate, leading to congressional hearings, environmental reviews and an…
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16. Le Cochon Noir (‘The Black Pig’) Songbook
By Sam Young (@samyoung102) Le Cochon Noir is a booklet of anticlerical songs produced in Marseilles in 1902 by the songwriter Eugène Besson. [i] Though humorous in tone, Besson’s songs are sharp in their condemnation of the Catholic clergy. Priests are ridiculed throughout as gluttons (the title song refers to a cleric’s black robes), liars…
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12. A Corned Beef Sandwich in Space
By Lauren Evans (@lauren_evans99) In March 1965, the landmark Voting Rights Act worked its way through Congress in the United States, the Beach Boys topped charts with “Help Me, Rhonda”, and a corned beef sandwich found its way into low earth orbit aboard the Gemini 3 spacecraft which launched from Cape Canaveral on March 23.
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Michael Boym’s Illustrated Magna Cathay and Gushi Huapu, the Chinese Source of the Images
By Eszter Csillag Held at the Vatican Library, Magna Cathay (Borg. Cin. 531) is a never-printed map of China illustrated by the Polish Jesuit Michael Boym (1612–1659) when he returned to Europe from China. This map was part of a larger cartographical enterprise of the Jesuit order in the seventeenth century, when mapmaking was seen as one of the…
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