America binged on expansion, relying on land grabs as an engine of growth and a way to externalize racial hatred. Historian Greg Grandin asks, without a frontier, what can America be?
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Posted inArts & Culture, Blog Post, Commentary, Culture
The Enduring Legacy of the Willie Lynch Hoax
Why Kanye referenced a nonexistent slave owner.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Commentary, Reading List
On, In, or Near the Sea: A Book List
Summer’s almost over. Alison Fields curated a list of beach-based books to make you feel like you’re still breathing in that sweet sea air.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Bowie Knives, Concealed Rifles, and Caning Charles Sumner
As the Civil War loomed, weapons — like the recently invented bowie knife and rifles that were shipped to Kansas hidden in crates labeled as bibles — became complex political symbols.
Posted inArts & Culture, Commentary, Culture, Current Events, Story
Theatre of Wokeness
Are we having a surface-level reckoning?
Posted inStory
Queens of Infamy: Josephine Bonaparte, from Malmaison to More-Than-Monarch
In fraught games of power politics, sometimes the best revenge is not being exiled to die alone on an island in the South Atlantic.
Posted inArts & Culture, Culture, Highlight, profile, Profiles & Interviews, Quotes
Carvell Wallace on ‘Moonlight’ Writer Tarell Alvin McCarney’s Next Acts
Tarell Alvin McCarney’s Broadway debbut,, “Choir Boy,” is a tender coming of age story about a queer Black boy at a prestigious boarding school.
Posted inNonfiction
The Story of Salvador’s Banda Didá
In a country with violent history and violent politics, Brazil’s first all-female, Afro-Brazilian percussion group drums and dances and changes lives.
Posted inBooks, Commentary
This Month In Books: ‘This Is Really Not What I Want To Be Reading’
This month’s books newsletter is jam-packed with scammers, censors, and … other books.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
When Zora and Langston Took a Road Trip
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston gave Langston Hughes a lift to Tuskegee in her Nash coupe, nicknamed “Sassy Susie.” It was one of most fortuitous hangouts in literary history.
