History Lesson

RE "AS time goes by: ‘Casablanca' at 70" : Your March 21 editorial might have mentioned what else the film tells us about ourselves as Americans, especially when we criticize our current educational system. Just as most Americans had no idea where Pearl Harbor was on Dec. 7, 1941, Europe and Africa were also a closed book. How best to start the 1942 audience on the correct geographic road? With a globe of the world in the opener moments, a map tour, and a few relevant comments. How many Americans knew that, when "Casablanca" was made, the United States still had diplomatic...

‘Ocean' views Sebastian Smee's review of Richard Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park" paintings ("Richard Diebenkorn, a West Coast painter, at his best," Arts, April 1) was splendid, an especially welcome "Eastern" appreciation of a great painter. Smee's placement of Diebenkorn as the heir of Matisse, regarding both color and composition, is just right. Does this tell us how Diebenkorn, and not the Abstract Expressionists or the New York School generally, carried forward the great tradition last kept in Paris?

HBO's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," which premieres Sunday night at 9, arrives like an invitation post marked days after the party date. Well-intentioned, but kind of lame. It was back in 1970 that Dee Brown's bestseller detailed the Wounded Knee massacre of the Lakota Sioux in 1890 South Dakota, sparking awareness of both the injustices to Native Americans and the misrepresentations of the cowboy-movie view of frontier life. And for decades now, we've seen so many revelatory movies about the cruelties of American expansionism westward that the word "revisionist" has almost...

IN RESPONSE to the March 30 letter written by Maria McDermott ( "Shocked to read what young people are flocking to see" ): Her cause is admirable. It is an irrefutable fact that the novel and movie "The Hunger Games" does indeed contain violence, and it is also a fact that "The Hunger Games" is geared toward adolescents. But what in our world isn't violent? Would you have children never watch the news or read a newspaper, because they tell of violent things? Violence is the essence of history.

Annie Proulx’s novels can be as discrete and orderly as a series of postcards or as leisurely as the ebb and flow of Heart’s Content Harbor in Newfoundland, but they are almost always shapely and finely tuned, with form following function and loyal to landscape — like the work of the most sensitive architects. Tough, sweet, and droll, her short stories are even more controlled. Proulx’s three volumes of Wyoming stories prove her not just a tale spinner and humorist in the great tradition of Mark Twain, but an exemplar of writerly discipline.

"The One: The Life and Music of James Brown" crackles with the same kind of exuberant energy that explodes out of grooves of one of the Godfather of Soul's classic sides. R.J. Smith, a veteran music journalist who conducted scores of interviews with Brown's family, friends, lovers, and band members, lands smack dab in the intersection of grit and elegance that made Brown so intoxicating as a performer, writing a detailed and engrossing portrait of an immensely complicated man. The book chronicles Brown's life from his difficult and...

Les Miles gets plenty of practice in the art of trying to keep his players grounded when LSU is a heavy favorite. Doing so this week has been somewhat easier, thanks to a little deja-vu surrounding Saturday's meeting between the top-ranked Tigers (4-0, 1-0 SEC) and Kentucky (2-2, 0-1). The last time these teams met in 2007, an unbeaten LSU squad had just risen to No. 1 with a memorable triumph over Florida. Although LSU would go on to win a national title that season, the Tigers stumbled in Kentucky, losing 43-37 in triple overtime.

Jim Lauderdale’s first foray into bluegrass and his first collaborations with lyricist Robert Hunter (best known for his work with the Grateful Dead) both came on 1999’s “I Feel Like Singing Today,’’ an album he made with bluegrass patriarch Ralph Stanley. Bluegrass has been a steady dwelling place for the artist ever since: half of the records Lauderdale has made have belonged to the genre, including this latest, his third joint effort with Hunter. The basic division of labor is Lauderdale providing the music for Hunter’s words.

IN RESPONSE to the March 30 letter written by Maria McDermott ( "Shocked to read what young people are flocking to see" ): Her cause is admirable. It is an irrefutable fact that the novel and movie "The Hunger Games" does indeed contain violence, and it is also a fact that "The Hunger Games" is geared toward adolescents. But what in our world isn't violent? Would you have children never watch the news or read a newspaper, because they tell of violent things? Violence is the essence of history.

‘Ocean' views Sebastian Smee's review of Richard Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park" paintings ("Richard Diebenkorn, a West Coast painter, at his best," Arts, April 1) was splendid, an especially welcome "Eastern" appreciation of a great painter. Smee's placement of Diebenkorn as the heir of Matisse, regarding both color and composition, is just right. Does this tell us how Diebenkorn, and not the Abstract Expressionists or the New York School generally, carried forward the great tradition last kept in Paris?

RE "AS time goes by: ‘Casablanca' at 70" : Your March 21 editorial might have mentioned what else the film tells us about ourselves as Americans, especially when we criticize our current educational system. Just as most Americans had no idea where Pearl Harbor was on Dec. 7, 1941, Europe and Africa were also a closed book. How best to start the 1942 audience on the correct geographic road? With a globe of the world in the opener moments, a map tour, and a few relevant comments. How many Americans knew that, when "Casablanca" was made, the United States still had diplomatic...

"The One: The Life and Music of James Brown" crackles with the same kind of exuberant energy that explodes out of grooves of one of the Godfather of Soul's classic sides. R.J. Smith, a veteran music journalist who conducted scores of interviews with Brown's family, friends, lovers, and band members, lands smack dab in the intersection of grit and elegance that made Brown so intoxicating as a performer, writing a detailed and engrossing portrait of an immensely complicated man. The book chronicles Brown's life from his difficult and unconventional youth (one aunt...

South Boston students receive a lesson in Evacuation Day history (Patrick D. Rosso/Boston.com/2012) In Video: Alex Rittershaus playing the part of a British solider for students at the Condon School Friday. By Patrick D. Rosso, Town Correspondent Students in South Boston got a dose of history Friday as the South Boston Historical Society and an army of Colonial-era actors toured schools in the neighborhood.

Mail delivery has been on overload at the Foxborough Regional Charter School this month, but not for the customary holiday reasons. With items pouring in from around the world, the students are interested mostly in the postage stamps. Not just stamps stuck on the outside of envelopes destined for the school office, but ones that are trimmed and organized in boxes and bags, sometimes thousands at a time, as word spreads about the school's goal. The Holocaust Stamp Project is now in its third year at the school, where students are...

To historians, it's "ephemera. " To Nelson L. Dionne, it's a window into Salem's past. Filed in drawers and boxes in Dionne's home office are thousands of postcards and stereoscopic views, matchbook covers, and advertising fliers from the 19th and 20th centuries. Disposable in their day, they provide a look at the past that would otherwise be lost. "Salem, I think, was a very special place; was and still is," Dionne said. "We have so much history in Salem, in-depth, people have no comprehension of what went on here, and it's worth bringing back.

RE "MORE or less than human: The strange power of the word ‘person' " (The Word, Books, Nov. 20): May I challenge Mark Peters's assertion that "personhood" is somehow demeaned when applied to other-than-humans? The lawsuit filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals along with three marine mammal experts and two former SeaWorld trainers maintains that the five wild-caught orcas forced to perform at SeaWorld parks are being held as slaves in violation of the 13th Amendment.

Until Wednesday, Marta Gomez had been one of Boston's best-kept secrets. Most jazz fans knew about the Colombian singer and Berklee College of Music graduate, but outside of that circle, folks probably read about her and saw her fliers more than they saw her actual performances. Gomez moved to New York last year to pursue her career full time, but when she was here, fans packed tiny venues such as Matt Murphy's in Brookline Village to catch an artist who appeared to be a rising star.

PBS is selling its new reality series, "Cooking Under Fire," as "reality TV that feeds your brain. " That's like Fox promoting "American Idol" as a graduate course in democracy and capitalism, or ABC advertising "The Bachelor" as a seminar in the psychology of love. It's just a hunk of fat-blobbed baloney that only feeds your cynicism. Oh, maybe we should let PBS get away with this blatant bit of denial. Maybe the public network, lost in an identity crisis some 20 years into the cable era, still unsure of how to compete with the likes of the Food Network and the Learning...

*½ 1911 Directed by: Jackie Chan and Zhang Li Written by: Wang Xingdong and Chen Baoguang Starring: Chan, Winston Chao, Bingbing Li At: Fenway Running time: 120 minutes In Mandarin, with English subtitles Rated: R (battlefield gore, including a sonically graphic amputation) This year marks the centenary of the revolution that overthrew China's last imperial dynasty. To observe the occasion, Jackie Chan has co-directed (with cinematographer Zhang Li)

X At: Paradise Rock Club, Sunday Filmmaker W.T. Morgan explored the formation and ascent of the band X in his documentary "X: The Unheard Music," suggesting that the Los Angeles quartet had more substance to it than the typical punk-rock band born in the late '70s. After a screening of the 1986 film Sunday at the Paradise, X itself backed up the claim with a scorching performance that included all of its debut album, "Los Angeles," and more than a dozen other tunes from a catalog that is American punk-rock scripture.