The names Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery may not be well known, but the image of them from September 1957 surely is: a black high school girl, dressed in white, walking stoically in front of Little Rock Central High School, and a white girl standing directly behind her, face
When photographer Ishimoto Yasuhiro asked modernist architect Tange Kenzō to write an essay for his book of Katsura photographs, he inadvertently pitted architectural and photographic approaches against each other. Kenzō’s enthusiastic reaction was akin to Dad “helping” with his child’s science fair by reshaping the vision of the project; instead of merely contributing an essay, he cropped, resized, and reorganized the pictures into what became the “landmark” work.
As the events of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution continue with the no-longer-televised trial of deposed president Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, journalist Tarek Osman, author of the acclaimed and prescient Egypt on the Brink (January 2011), weighs in on the current state of the revolution’s course. An updated edition of his
If you Google the phrase “movies with the word ‘love’ in the title,” you could spend an amazingly long time reading list after list of endless films. Hollywood knows that the word “love” is like pouring gasoline on your marketing campaign’s fire—it could go very badly, but it is going
Do you believe everything you read history books? If you answered “No,” you are thinking like a historian. A historian’s purpose, as John Lukacs explains in The Future of History, is to find out what “untruths” have been recorded and discover the truth. Currently, that job is becoming harder for
Michelle Stein— In The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960, Richard Longstreth documents the development of the department store as it moves from “a great, all-inclusive emporium that helped define the character and the purpose of the city” to its transformation into shopping centers and malls. Here in New York City,
It’s hard to express the magnitude of the disaster that faced Japan after the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant melt-down earlier this year. Every aspect of Japanese life has been affected, from entire villages having vanished to the yen’s record low. One might also expect the cultural life of
In September, Yale University Press is publishing Melissa Harris-Perry’s new book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, titled after the author’s popular column for The Nation. As guest host this week on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, she steps in for Maddow’s role and brings her informed opinions to the news. We’ve compiled some of the highlights of Harris-Perry’s insightful commentary on the show this week and over the past year.
The information compiled in the R.R. Hawkins Award-winning Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, edited by David Eltis and David Richardson documents, in nearly 200 color maps, the paths of Europeans, Africans, merchants, slaves, and human life, showing how and when so many people went from port to port, hub to hub, as the many regions developed and evolved over the history of the slave trade.