“I won a ticket for a dream house,” my mother tells me on the phone. “It cost a hundred dollars to buy. It’s a gorgeous house. Brand new and big big. If I win, I’ll give it to you. Then you and Allen can move here and live in it.”
Even now, after a century and hundreds of studies, we can draw no coherent picture of the slaveholders of the Old South. Instead, our images are kaleidoscopic, fragmentary, contradictory. These men appear, alternately, as tyrannical and...
No American of any century has excelled in a greater number of diverse areas than a New Englander named George Perkins Marsh, who was born in the town of Woodstock, Vermont in 1801. Marsh is best remembered today for his pioneering book on...
The people who built The Great Wall are now building The Great Dam—the world’s greatest. The reservoir will flood an area 370 miles long. Disappearing under water will be 890 square miles of farmland. Totally or partially, 13 cities, 140...
Lillian Faderman’s scrupulous mining of the original documents and court transcripts of a scandalous 1810 Edinburgh trial in which two mistresses of a fashionable girls’ boarding school sued a wealthy matron for besmirching their names and...
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...
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...
