Early space age culture in America highlighted women’s reproductive capacity as a primary, crucial contribution that women could and inevitably would make to the space effort. It’s bedtime in middle-class, white America, October 1962. Little Billy and Little Susie pick out books for story time. Billy wants Mommy to read his favorite, Timothy’s Space Book. He[…]
Beyond the headlines and iconic reputation she built across party lines, she had to fight just as hard within the House for the causes she supported. Introduction Fifty years ago this month, Shirley Chisholm, the charismatic and outspoken Brooklyn educator and politician, made history when she became the first African-American woman to serve in Congress. Small in stature,[…]
Amistad captives were kept in a jail on the New Haven Green. For twelve-and-a-half cents, residents of the city could come look at them. But you are here for the story… So it is a lost story but we will be imagining it, anyway. —Rita Dove, “Prologue of the Rambling Sort” Many things are true at once. —Elizabeth[…]
The tragedy of treating people as property has left only scattered scraps to hint at their cultures and communities. For the past eight years I’ve been living with 72 people. These 28 men, 25 women, 12 girls, and seven boys are long dead—they were Africans sold into captivity and shipped to America in the mid-1700s.[…]
Current explanations for why humans dance tend to follow one of two approaches. Dancing is a human universal, but why? It is present in human cultures old and new; central to those with the longest continuous histories; evident in the earliest visual art on rock walls from France to South Africa to the Americas, and[…]
Defamiliarizing fame by exploring its roots in the ancient world. Introduction “Fame is a bee,” Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her last poems. “It has a song— / It has a sting—.” “Ah, too,” she added, “it has a wing.” The poem captures Dickinson resigning herself to how ephemeral fame can be, how effortlessly[…]