The very first Mother’s Day was celebrated in 1908 in Grafton, West Virginia when Anna Jarvis’s held a memorial for her late mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, who had died in 1905. Her campaign to make Mother’s Day a recognized holiday in the United States found success years later when Woodrow Wilson signed a
The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization will be a ten-volume collection of 3,000 years of Jewish literature, artwork, and artifacts. We sat down with Felix Posen, who conceived the project, to ask about his hopes for the anthology, his perspective on secularism, and his thoughts on technology and preservation.
John M. Burkey— Good patient care requires careful listening. Sometimes this listening is not so difficult, however, as knowing what to do about what is heard. This story began several years ago when I was confronted by a patient with a complaint that at first did not appear to be related
Welcome to our weekly roundup of news from university presses! Once again, there is a lot to share this week from our fellow academic publishing houses and much to learn on What SUP at the social university presses. This week, we found conversations on online bullying, digital militarism, and sexting as well
Michael Coogan— In 2001, Roy Moore, the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, installed a massive monument featuring the Ten Commandments in the courthouse rotunda. When ordered by a federal judge to have it taken away because it violated the establishment clause of the U. S. Constitution, Moore refused, and
Steven Gimbel— We stand on the edge of the centenary of Albert Einstein’s greatest achievement, his general theory of relativity. It was a work that not only changed science, it changed how we think of science and the relationship between society and science. In 1905, eleven years earlier, Einstein had
More than three-and-a-half million men served in the British Army during the Second World War, the vast majority of them civilians who had never expected to become soldiers and had little idea what military life, with all its strange rituals, discomforts and dangers, might entail. Alan Allport, author of Browned Off and
Welcome to our weekly roundup of news from university presses! Once again, there is a lot to share this week from our fellow academic publishing houses and much to learn on What SUP at the social university presses. This week, we found conversations on Greek tragedies, genocide and climate change as
John Gribbin— When I started out in astronomy, the Big Bang theory was just becoming accepted as a good description of the Universe in which we live. But there was one big problem with it. Nobody knew how old the Universe was. The age of the Universe is related to
In Why Poetry Matters, the gifted poet, novelist and biographer Jay Parini gives us a deeply felt meditation on poetry. He explores its language and meaning, and its power to open minds and transform lives. Parini ponders Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus, and moves on through Sidney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Eliot,