For Ben Jaffe, the future is all about updating the past………………………………………….Jaffe was born into musical royalty. His parents, Allan and Sandra, founded New Orleans’s world-famous Preservation Hall in 1961, after they fell in love with the Crescent City while returning from their honeymoon in Mexico. They uprootedRead More
The backgrounds of tennis partners Althea Gibson and Angela Buxton were radically different. The daughter of share-croppers, Gibson was born in South Carolina and raised in New York City’s Harlem. British and Jewish, Buxton was the daughter of entertainment impresario Harry Buxton, who made his fortune by breaking the bank at a casino.Read More
In 1931, when Germany was awarded the 1936 Olympics, Adolf Hitler hadn’t yet come to power. Two years later, after he became chancellor, he embraced the Olympic Games as an opportunity to show off his Aryan nation to the world.He faced one serious obstacle: himself. If word got out about Hitler’s discriminatory laws and policies, the rest ofRead More
On June 22, 1938, when heavyweight champ Joe Louis entered the ring at Yankee Stadium to defend his title against Germany’s Max Schmeling, the approximately 70,000 fans in attendance — and the 70 million people tuned to their radios — knew that this was no ordinary bout. Occurring mere months after Germany annexed Austria, the fight was seenRead More
Leni Riefenstahl always insisted that the two most famous films she directed, “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia,” were nothing more than straight-forward documentaries. Others have argued that they were nothing more than Nazi propaganda. What’s indisputable is that the controversy over Riefenstahl, who died this week at the age ofRead More