Humanities

History through Literature: Gulag Labor Camps in the Soviet Union

The names Auschwitz and Birkenau are often in the forefront of our minds when we talk about concentration and labor camps, but the Germans were not the only ones who used labor camps to round-up large sections of their population. It is estimated that, from 1930-1960, over 14 million people

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Book Tour: Poets Ghassan Zaqtan and Fady Joudah across America

Leading Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan and fellow award-winning poet and translator Fady Joudah are scheduled to visit 15 U.S. venues during October in support of Joudah’s critically acclaimed translation of Zaqtan’s work Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems. Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and

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Lest We Forget: The 1980s As They Would Have Seemed

Sarah Underwood—   Growing up in the 1990s, I had conflicting, and generally superficial, views of the 1980s. Either I was proud to be “from” the previous decade – I was born in 1989 – like cooler, older teenagers (my babysitters), or I was glad that I had essentially escaped

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Utopia/Dystopia: Construction and Destruction in Photography and Collage

Follow @yaleARTbooks You never see just one image when you study a work of art. With a portrait, you see the physical form of a human being; you can also guess at that person’s inner life by examining her expression or posture. You are also seeing a representation of the

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A Prolonged Silence: John Cage and Still After

Follow @yaleARTbooks September 5, 2012 marks the 100th birthday of American composer John Cage, most often known for the silently performed 4’33’’. Though Cage’s silence as a composition has been deeply considered on Yale University Press’s list with Kyle Gann’s Icons of America book, No Such Thing as Silence, the

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Handbags: The Making of a Museum

Handbags: The Making of a Museum will cause much excitement among those who treasure these coveted objects, but as the author and curator Judith Clark explores, the history of the handbag – its design, how it has been made, used and worn – also reveals something essential about women’s lives lived

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Surveying Jewish Culture and Civilization with the Posen Library

Take our Posen Library Survey and get 15% off Yale University Press books! This fall, Yale University Press and the Posen Foundation will launch The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a ten-volume series that collects more than 3,000 years of Jewish cultural artifacts, texts, and paintings, selected by

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The Lucian Freud “Skins” Quiz

Follow @yaleARTbooks “I like skin. It’s so unpredictable.” –Lucian Freud, 7 May 2009 As the grandson of the world’s most famous psychoanalyst, Lucian Freud (1922 – 2011) unsurprisingly used the psychology of both his subjects and his audience to create his provocative portrait paintings. For Freud, painting was always psychological—a

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Lest We Forget: “Baby”‘s Visit to the Museum

Sarah Underwood— “Baby” I’ll admit it, I really had no idea what I was getting myself into this month. Performance art can be incredibly nuanced, and Michael Smith’s Baby Ikki at the Museum is no exception. In college, I performed with a modern dance company as, among other things, a

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Robert Sterling Clark in China

In 1908 Robert Sterling Clark, accompanied by a team of hand-picked professionals and support staff, explored the far reaches of Northern China and oversaw the creation of one of the first maps of a largely uncharted area of the world. Before this expedition, Clark served in the army in the

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