08/30/2012
As we celebrate the 188th Labor Day, commemorating the struggles of the American labor movement, through picnics, parades, or the simple enjoyment of our leisure, we should also consider the gravity of the recent coordinated attacks on union rights.
08/27/2012
The Middle Ages isn’t generally thought of as a period friendly to women at all, much less to powerful ones. Still, we’re all familiar with a handful of medieval and early modern women who had extraordinary influence: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of Castile, Elizabeth I of England. The subject of my book, Berenguela of Castile, is one of their lesser-known peers. But the focus on women like Berenguela as “exceptions to the rule” has the strange effect of reinforcing old myths about medieval women.
08/16/2012
Before I began my internship, I hadn’t considered the extremely obvious fact that a lot of paper gets passed around in a press (blame my place in the digital generation). However, even as my fingers have become increasingly shredded, I’ve come to appreciate traditionally printed work more and more.
08/08/2012
Cervantes clearly viewed dance as an important aspect of seventeenth-century Spanish culture, and Fuchs and Ilika have preserved this in the translation.
08/01/2012
Early African American Print Culture Edited by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein 432 pages | 6 x 9 | 43 illus. Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4425-0 | $55.00… READ MORE
06/18/2012
Barring a miraculous rebirth of neighborhood real estate markets, city officials should think twice before creating more vacant lots.
05/29/2012
North Carolina's recent constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and the White House's response to that measure continue to reverberate through personal and public conversations across the nation. In this post,… READ MORE
04/12/2012
In this guest blog post, historian Molly Michelmore considers why the Internal Revenue Code came to be so baffling. Her answers may surprise you.
02/20/2012
In time, Douglass became so interested in the connection between the visual arts, imagination, humanity, and progress toward liberty and justice that he wrote and delivered a set of lectures on the subject between 1861 and 1865. He began both the earlier and the later versions of his “Lecture on Pictures” with an extended consideration of the daguerreotype. After being daguerreotyped multiple times in the 1840s and 1850s, the former slave had become a man in his daguerreian portrait. His lectures suggest that if his audiences were to look at his or any other African American’s image and reflect on its likeness to their own, the daguerreotype would show them the reality of blacks’ humanity and awaken them to their own.
01/25/2012
On Sunday, the anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision, U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann made her first public appearance since pulling out of the presidential race on January 4. At a protest against abortion at the Minnesota State Capitol, the conservative congresswoman was in her element as she rallied the faithful.
Bachmann’s last-place finish in the Iowa caucuses and subsequent withdrawal from the presidential running had undoubtedly disappointed that audience.
Outside of those circles, many observers viewed Bachmann’s candidacy as a manifestation of our collective political dysfunction. Yet any relief at her poor showing needs to be tempered by caution.
