History, Natural History & the Arts
In 1951, Harry Belafonte decided he was finished with singing. For the past few years, he had been taking acting classes at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School with the influential German director Erwin Piscator, alongside Marlon Brando and Sidney Poitier.
All the while he was performing with the American Negro Theater. [Read more…] about Harry Belafonte’s Early Career in Greenwich Village
Composer Hanns (Johannes) Eisler was born in July 1898 in Leipzig, Saxony, where his Austrian father Rudolf worked as an academic. The family moved to Vienna in 1901 and settled in Leopoldstadt, a district known for its large Jewish population. Being an outspoken atheist (although of Jewish descent), Rudolf was denied a post at Vienna University and worked for the publisher Werner Klinkhardt as editor for a series of books on philosophy and sociology. [Read more…] about Red Scare Mania: The Karl Marx of Music
Joseph Urban may be a somewhat forgotten figure in America’s annals of culture, but during his lifetime he enjoyed an almost legendary reputation.
An all-round creative talent, Urban was a prolific Gilded Age illustrator, set designer, and architect of private dwellings, theaters, and a university building in the city of New York. His Gingerbread Castle was built for a fairy tale themed amusement park in Hamburg, New Jersey. [Read more…] about The Architecture of Joseph Urban: Mar-a-Lago & The New School
Judith Friedlander’s new book A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and Its University in Exile (Columbia University Press, 2019) takes a look at the history of the New School for Social Research in New York City.
Founded in 1919 in the name of academic freedom, the New School for Social Research quickly became a pioneer in adult education — what its first president, Alvin Johnson, called “the continuing education of the educated.” [Read more…] about New School 100th Anniversary Marked With New History
The Center for Public Scholarship at The New School in New York City is hosting a free public event celebrating the University in Exile, on Thursday, January 30, 2014.
The University in Exile was created by The New School’s first president, Alvin Johnson, as a haven for scholars whose careers and lives were threatened in Germany in 1933, when the Nazi Party came to power and acted to expel all Jews and political opponents from German universities. [Read more…] about The New School To Celebrate The University in Exile
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