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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Updating yesterday’s announcement that David Oshinsky won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in history for Polio: An American Story, here is today’s NYTimes piece on the “Letters, Drama and Music” winners: HISTORY: ‘Polio: An American Story,’ by David M. Oshinsky Mr. Oshinsky, 61, is George Littlefield professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. […]
The Pulitzer Prizes for 2006 were just announced and Oxford has won its second straight Letters and Drama Prize for History! Congratulations to this year’s winner, David Oshinsky, author of Polio: An American Story!
by Brian Priestley It was a strange experience, watching a recent television documentary on Charlie Parker and the music I immersed myself in for nearly two years. Originally, I hoped my book would be finished in time for the 50th anniversary last year of its subject’s premature death. Instead, the U.S. release of my Chasin’ […]
As calls for “lobbying reform” resound through the halls of Congress this spring, we do well to remember this piece of wisdom from Ecclesiastes: there is nothing new under the sun. Influence peddling, lobbying scandals, and the reporters and newspapers that expose them, have been a part of American political life since the beginning. We […]
Mencken: The American Iconoclast by Marion Rodgers is a Finalist for The 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography! The lists of finalists was announced on Friday and the awards will be presented at a ceremony on April 28. We think there is a strong chance that Mencken will be the Crash of this […]
by Richard Striner How will historians eventually rate our incumbent president as a wartime commander? A comparison of George W. Bush and the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, is instructive. Putting aside the issue of civil liberties in wartime —— an issue that people of good will could debate almost endlessly —— Lincoln was a […]
Presidents are the curse of American history. Or to be more precise, our interpretation of American history is bedeviled by the excessive focus on the role of the president, his character and personality. Not long ago, PBS’s “American Experience” repeated its major series on Ronald Reagan, which used a biography of Reagan as a means […]
Butler, Octavia (b. 22 June 1947 – d. 24 February 2006), science-fiction author. Butler was one of the most thoughtful and imaginative authors of her time. One of the few black writers in the science-fiction field, she took full advantage of the speculative freedom that the genre allows writers to explore her interest in sociology, […]
Goldberg, Whoopi (13 Nov. 1955 –), actress and comedian, was born Caryn Elaine Johnson in New York City, the second of two children of Emma Harris, a sometime teacher and nurse, and Robert Johnson, who left the family when Caryn was a toddler. Caryn attended St. Columbia School, a parochial school located several blocks from […]
After our brief Q&A session with Lizzie Collingham last week, I wanted to provide another taste of the delicious and fascinating recipes woven into her new book, Curry. Having already given out Collingham’s favorite recipe from the book, green coriander chutney, I’m strangely delighted to post the much more esoteric dish that she mentioned last […]
“WASHINGTON’S CROSSING!” the stranger said with a bright smile of recognition. Then a dark frown passed across his face. “Was it like the painting?” he said. “Did it really happen that way?” The image that he had in mind is one of the folk-memories that most Americans share. It represents an event that happened on […]
Carson, Ben (18 Sept. 1951 –), pediatric neurosurgeon, was born Benjamin Solomon Carson in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Robert Carson, a minister of a small Seventh-Day Adventist church, and Sonya Carson. His mother had attended school only up to the third grade and married at the age of thirteen; she was fifteen years younger […]
Slaves retained their humanity thanks to the support of families and religion, which helped them resist oppression. Nonetheless, slavery was a dehumanizing institution. Assaults on the bodies and minds of the enslaved exposed them to trauma that was both physical and psychological.
What advice would you give to all of those ‘foodies’ out there searching for an authentic Indian meal? Don’t worry about the authenticity of the food. There is no such thing as an authentic Indian dish. The stories behind Indian dishes are far more fascinating and almost always reveal that the dish is an amalgamation […]
Jemison, Mae (17 Oct. 1956 –), astronaut and physician, was born Mae Carol Jemison in Decatur, Alabama, the daughter of Charlie Jemison, a carpenter and roofer, and Dorothy Jemison, a teacher whose maiden name is unknown. After living the first three and a half years of her life in Alabama near the Marshall Space Flight […]
by Philip Jenkins For observers of Washington politics who remember the 1970s, the sense of déjà vu becomes stronger daily. Liberals freely compare the Iraq conflict with the latter stages of the Vietnam War, while scandals involving corruption and illegal leaks threaten the highest ranks of the Republican Party. Domestic controversies focus on intelligence abuses […]