To her credit, Madam Walker discerned that black women wanted to conform to white Victorian models of beauty. She was aware of the double- sidedness of her products - helping black women appear more European in look, with straight hair - but she always maintained that she was simply selling products that promoted hair growth.
We live in a culture where European beauty standards are dominant.
The European girls, like the Russians, tend to stick together, but there's never any rivalry. Sometimes there's a little bit of tension with the older girls because they might feel a little threatened by the younger models, but it's not between personalities.
As well as our relationship with Afghanistan, I am researching the legacy of other European empires - in Africa. We think of those empires as history, but actually, they still haunt our everyday lives in the strangest of ways.
Vampirism is like celebrity now. Vampires are these eternally young, thin, sexy apparitions of perpetual nightlife and absolutely nothing like their folkloric European boogeyman predecessors. We don't even make our vampires sleep in coffins anymore, or the ground.
We had never before seen a place where European influence had not contributed to smooth and soften the rough features of uncultivated nature. The prospect of Rangoon, as we approached, was quite disheartening.
Historical records show that Abenakis and other Natives encountered European explorers and traders in Canada looking for sources of ivory to compete with the Russian trade in Siberian fossil mammoth ivory - these traders routinely asked about ivory 'horns' and teeth.
As early as 1681-82, a group of Abenakis had accompanied the French explorer La Salle on his historic voyage down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. By 1700, many Abenaki and Iroquois Indians spoke French and had some European education, and some were literate in French and Latin.
I'm fanatical about movies: African, European, Viking, Roman. I got into witchcraft and magic from watching 'Bewitched' and 'The Wizard of Oz,' which shows in some of my outfits. I dress to reflect the whole spectrum of the universe.
Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists. And at the other end of the spectrum, a base in European classical music as well.
