The first movie I ever saw was the Walt Disney cartoon, The Three Little Pigs. My grandmother took me to it. It was back in the days when you went “downtown.” There was a second feature, with live actors, called Bring ‘Em Back Alive, a...
A few words are in order about this essay’s title. It is pilfered from that great American man of letters, Edmund Wilson, who used it for his collection of American writing, The Shock of Recognition.
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...
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.”
