Andrew Burstein’s lively and perceptive book not only provides an engaging portrait of a long-forgotten age, delightfully populated with characters worthy of a novel, but it offers an extended reflection on the role of memory and history in...
Whenever I see sheets drying on the line or smell gumbo simmering on the stove, a flood of memories comes to me. In 1953 when I traveled in the rural South with a group of students, we received the generosity of strangers—African Americans...
In 1967, Viking Press published The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. Moore’s only explanation for the dozens of published poems eliminated from her “complete” work consisted of the brief epigraph: “Omissions are not accidents.”
The arguments about whether affirmative action has run its course, has accomplished its purposes, or now constitutes an enshrined system of discrimination against white people contain so little historical perspective that they are...
The vacant lot where we North Third Street kids played softball on those sunny Connecticut summer days was full of trees, and it was small. When we wanted to play hardball, we went down the street, to West Main, crossed, walked a hundred...