With Peniel Joseph This is Part I of a conversation with Dr. Peniel Joseph. In this conversation, Dr Joseph discusses his new book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. This dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding […]
Commemorating 9/11 in 2017
Let’s end our week of commentary on September 11, 2001 with some images. Visualizing and re-visualizing shape our memories differently than describing and talking. Poetry, photography, and song open up different dimensions to understanding the past. Images keep the past present in different ways as well.
Chan is Missing (1982)
In this affectionate insider’s portrait of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the late 1970s, director Wayne Wang riffs on the well-known adventures of Charlie Chan, the stereotyped Chinese-American 1930s film detective, by following the meandering investigation of two cab drivers.
Fathers & Sons
by J Neuberger My father fought in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War. He didn’t like much of anything about being a soldier but he was proud to have helped to defeat Hitler. This photograph hung in our house and a painting of it hung in my grandmother’s apartment in New York […]
Jacqueline Jones on the Myth of Race in America
Like countless other cultures and countries throughout the world, the United States has its own creation myth—its own unique, dramatic story intended to explain where we came from and who we are today. In the case of the United States, this story holds that the nation was conceived in “racial” differences, and that over the last four centuries these self-evident differences have suffused our national character and shaped our national destiny. Yet America’s creation myth is just that—a myth, one that itself rests entirely on a spurious concept: For “race” itself is a fiction, one that has no basis in biology or any longstanding, consistent usage in human culture.
Seth Garfield on the Brazilian Amazon
During World War II, the governments of Brazil and the United States made an unprecedented level of joint investment in the economy and infrastructure of the Amazon region. The dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1937-45) trumpeted the colonization and development of the Amazon (christened the “March to the West”) as a nationalist imperative to defend a sparsely settled frontier covering some sixty percent of Brazilian territory.
Selling ourselves short? PhDs Inside the Academy and Outside of the Professoriate
In 2009 I wrote: “It is hard not to feel that I have sold myself short by deciding not to be an academic.” It is remarkable how my perspective has changed over four years and how my satisfaction in my work exceeds anything I might have hoped for.
Great Books on Rethinking the College Classroom
A few of the most important and engaging books about teaching college students.
Exploring the Silk Route
It’s the afternoon of a hot summer’s day and I am standing at the bottom of a staircase—with no handrails—that’s not so much set in to the side of a mountain as built on top of it. Way up there, at the top of four hundred fifty five stairs, there’s a shrine whose gleaming silver dome is barely visible in the afternoon sun. That’s our destination.
Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation by Donald Raleigh (2013)
Recalling his formative years as an American baby boomer and the influence the Cold War and the Soviet Union had on his worldview, Donald Raleigh asks what life was like for people his age in the Soviet Union? What were their concerns about the future? How did they spend their time and what did Cold War ideological battles mean for their daily lives?
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