40s and 50s designs and memorabilia

Is the sunburst Gibson Les Paul Standard really the greatest electric guitar ever made? This books aims to answer that question, even if so many players and collectors have already...

The period of post-World War II American printmaking is unique in the history of printmaking, as the volume and variety of prints proliferated and printmakers experimented with mod...

The working premise of this chapter is that, in the 1950s, film noir and anticommunism form a double helix and that even the most notorious of these “red menace” films—The Whip Han...

Samuel Fuller’s Crimson Kimono (1959) is, like Odds against Tomorrow (1959), a paradigmatic late ‘50s American noir. Part policier, part melodrama, part “art” film, part “B” or exp...

This chapter looks at the '50s heist picture—a subgenre of '50s gangster noir—examining John Huston's Asphalt Jungle (1950). In Huston's film, the criminal gang resembles nothing s...