Running a bookstore is hard enough, but the business of feminist bookstores is deeply entwined with both politics and money.
History
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
It’s Wednesday, So This Must Be the Vice President’s House
Historian Merry Ellen Scofield, writing in Common-Place, dives deep into the intricacies of 19th century social etiquette: calling cards, the hierarchies and politics of who visits who and when, and the details of the cards themselves.
Posted inEditor's Pick
House of Cards: The Politics of Calling Card Etiquette in Nineteenth-Century Washington
In the early republic, social media had its own crucial importance — although what the media employed was not the tweet, but little bits of pasteboard.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Eastern Europe: Beyond the Cold War, and Beyond the Stereotypes
The homogenizing force of globalization means that a shopping center in Budapest doesn’t look all that different from one central Turin, or York, or Cleveland. Is “Eastern Europe” as an idea disappearing? Try Jacob Mikanowski’s essay in the LA Review of Books for some suggestions (and some objections).
Posted inEditor's Pick
Goodbye, Eastern Europe!
Is “Eastern Europe” disappearing? Was it ever real, or just a figment of Cold War imaginations?
Posted inBooks, Business & Tech, Nonfiction, Quotes
The Early Principles That Guided the Makers of LEGO
In his book Brick by Brick, David Robertson outlines the early successes and failures of the Denmark-based LEGO Group.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
“Madness and the Hurling of Furniture,” or How You Know It Was a Good Night in Ancient Greece
Andrew Curry’s thorough history of our relationship to and use of alcohol is informative, enlightening, and just plain entertaining.
Posted inEditor's Pick
M.I.A.
In 1968, an American soldier named John Hartley Robertson disappeared in the jungles of Laos after his helicopter was shot down. His body was never found—until 2008, when a Christian missionary discovered a man in Vietnam who claimed to be Robertson.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Digging Through The Past to Understand the Present
Revisit a fascinating story from Smithsonian Magazine on what the discovery of a 3,500-year-old soldier’s tomb in southwestern Greece tells us about the Mycenaeans, the Minoans, and the roots of Western civilization.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Forgotten History of Japanese-American Designers’ World War II Internment
Revisiting the link between detention and design history, 75 years after FDR’s executive order.