Ivan Lett– When Emperor Charles V was elected Holy Roman Emperor in June 1519, his influential position became incredibly important for the strength of his family. Only three years before, he had inherited the vast lands of the Spanish Empire, which already spanned the far ends of the globe, and
Paul Strand, a friend of Alfred Stieglitz and his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, visited O’Keeffe while she was away in New Mexico. Stieglitz had written O’Keeffe on June 27, 1931 from Lake George, NY, “…Strand will add to his trophies of photography. What a chance he has. He ought to do
About a hundred years ago in Los Angeles, some of its boarding houses hung signs that read, “No Jews, actors, or dogs allowed.” Movies entertained the lower classes only, and major film companies produced in Philadelphia. When Charlie Chaplin built the first big studio in Hollywood in the early twentieth
Deborah Valenze explains in Milk: A Local and Global History, how the “elixir of immortality” changed from a staple of the gods to a staple of nutrition textbooks.
The printing press was a revolution for the written word. Its creation can be compared to the invention of the internet today. Besides the obvious good that came from being able to mass produce books, it also brought about a new art form that is often forgotten: the bookplate, a
Summer vacationers all over America right now are camping for a weekend, spending the afternoon at the pool, or if they are adventurous, going snorkeling. Most people probably are not embarking on a dangerous transatlantic voyage and leaving their children for a six-month tour of a foreign country, but that’s
Sterling Memorial Library looks like a Gothic cathedral. It has the vaulted ceiling, the stained-glass windows, and the secret garden. Yet this library, Richard Selzer says, “is chock full of loonies, of whom I am one.” A former surgeon and professor of surgery at Yale School of Medicine, Selzer has
The critics have weighed in: at the Boston Globe, at the Chronicle Review, even with a slideshow on Slate.com, and the consensus is that Peter Toohey’s Boredom: A Lively History is anything but boring! (You can imagine how it came to have such a subtitle from the “Book Bench” interview
This spring and summer marks the premiere of the film and companion book, Journey of the Universe, by Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, an evolutionary philosopher and a historian of religions, respectively. Their science-based narrative tells the epic story of the universe, leading up to the challenges of