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Christmas carols today carry cozy connotations of ancient traditions as old as King Wenceslas, but Christmas caroling as we know it dates back to the 19th Century and not much further. In fact, caroling itself didn't always involve Christmas, and the ancient tradition of traveling from house to house to wish neighbors good cheer didn't always involve singing. There's a distinction to be made between carols - songs stemming from medieval musical traditions - and today's Christmas caroling, says Daniel Abraham, musicology expert and choral director at American University in Washington, D.C. "The concept of carol...
...Despite its dubious beginnings, fad dieting gained mass appeal in the 19th century. In 1829, Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham touted the Graham diet - centered on caffeine-free drinks and vegetarian cuisine and supplemented by the eponymous graham cracker - as a cure for not just obesity but masturbation (and the subsequent blindness it was thought to cause). The diet became so popular that the students of Oberlin College were forced onto it for a brief period in the 1830s before they successfully rebelled through mass dissent in 1841. Thirty-five years later, an English casketmaker named William Banting became famous...
...past year, with film crews blocking off Dunster Street and celebrity sightings in CVS. But Harvard's relationship with tinsel town doesn't end where the set begins. To coincide with the release of “Bright Star,” the new romantic film about the great 19th century English poet John Keats and his love interest Fanny Brawne, Harvard’s Houghton Library has launched a new exhibit. The display, titled “John Keats and Fanny Brawne,” showcases some of the few relics of a romance that fans have long been...
...story's literary antecedents are ancient and plentiful. You'll find them in the Old Testament (Cain and Abel), in medieval romance (Heloise and Abelard) and in 19th century poetry (Tennyson's "Enoch Arden"), not to mention dozens of movies about men whose wives think they're dead and marry someone else. All these motifs appear in the script that Anders Thomas Jensen wrote for Susanne Bier's 2004 Danish film Brodre, of which Brothers is a nearly scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, Americanization. Except for a few stunt exercises, like Gus Van Sant's Psycho and Michael...
...Literature, and Raker are attempting to bring this traditional play to life in a modern context. “What feels ‘modern’ about our interpretation of ‘Shulamis’ is simply that we’re not striving to reproduce a 19th century operetta as it was performed in the 1880s,” Caplan writes in an email. “We opted to bring ‘Shulamis’ into a 21st century theatrical framework.” Among other changes, Tsingitang, formerly a comic foil, has become Tsigitang...