The legend of Texas Western: journalism and the epic sports spectacle that wasn’t

This essay interrogates journalistic accounts of Texas Western College’s 1966 college basketball championship, a game in which an all-Black team defeated an all-White team. The analysis traces the evolving portrayals of the game over 45 years. In 1966 American journalists did not emphasize the racial aspects of the game and it was largely forgotten. Twenty-five years later, however, journalists reconstructed the game as a racialized legend, and this account evolved into an epic American narrative. The author argues that the epic portrayals, although aesthetically appealing, reflect problems with accuracy, appropriation, and commercial exploitation. The latter factor led to the legend’s motion picture adaptation as part of a troublesome “White Savior” cinema genre.     

商业电影的形式特征

本文对好莱坞商业电影的形式特征进行客观细致的分析,总结并反思其成败得失,对当前我国商业电影的良性发展有启示和借鉴意义。     

The Mysterious Crescent-Shaped Amphitheatre Weapon: A New Interpretation

Three Roman mosaics show a tool (a staff ending in a crescent) that has always been a mystery for researchers. Some of them make no comment at all about it when discussing those mosaics, limiting themselves to describing its shape. Others try to deduce what its function was, and propose it might be a symbol (of a corporation of venatores or of a god). A few suggest it could be a weapon for fighting the animals (bulls) that appear nearby. Here I propose that the tool might indeed be a weapon for fighting animals, especially bulls, during the venationes, its precise function being to cut the hamstring tendon of one of the hind legs of the animal. I base this hypothesis on the fact that that same tool was still used in sixteenth-century Spain for that task. Of course, this hypothesis implies accepting that the tool had continued in use in the Iberian peninsula for that same function from the times of the Romans until the sixteenth century, which seems likely, since bull fights and the breeding of bulls have been activities uninterrupted in the Iberian peninsula since the times of the Romans (as attested by evidence).