Kyle David, a recent Silas Palmer fellow at Hoover Library & Archives and a doctoral candidate in Modern Chinese and World History at the University of California at Irvine, shares his experience of using Maoist textbooks to study the socialization of  schoolchildren during China’s turbulent twentieth century.

Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s most recent article in The New Yorker, entitled “Joe Gould’s Teeth,” explores the long and mysterious history of Gould’s life and his relationships to the literati of his day, including E.E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, and, most importantly, the journalist Joseph Mitchell, who first publicized Gould’s purported “Oral History of Our Time” manuscript in the pages of the New Yorker in 1942.

On July 17^th, National Public Radio host Robert Siegel interviewed eighty-nine-year-old violinist Stuart Canin. Canin holds the distinction of being a World War II veteran, a former concert master of the San Francisco Symphony, and the subject of the forthcoming documentary The Rifleman’s Violin, which tells the dramatic story of Canin’s musical performance, given at the age of 19, for Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill during the July 1945 Potsdam Conference. A collaboration between Hoover Library & Archives and Citizen Film, The Rifleman’s Violin tells the remarkable story of how the young GI bearing a “$2, cigar-box violin” came to play Pugnani and Tchaikovsky in front of the most powerful men in the world. 

On July 31, Magnolia Pictures and directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville (Twenty Feet from Stardom) will release Best of Enemies, a film based on the famous 1968 political debate between leftist writer and polemicist Gore Vidal and conservative TV host William F. Buckley Jr. The archive of William F. Buckley’s thirty-three-year-long television series Firing Line is among the most used collections at Hoover Library & Archives; it includes broadcasts, transcripts, and administrative files, some of which illuminate the notorious animosity between Buckley and Vidal.