Some of the most memorable educators are the ones willing to throw out the syllabus in pursuit of a higher lesson. When a fourth-grade teacher in Roseburg, Oregon, did just that during the height of the Cold War, he sent the US state department and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI into a tizzy. In a search […]

Seventy-one years ago, Dr. Richard Lawler led a team of surgeons and nurses in performing the world’s first solid organ transplant by grafting a kidney from a just-deceased patient into the abdomen of a 44-year-old Chicago woman. She lived nearly five more years. In the decades that followed that groundbreaking operation at Little Company of […]

Wahoo ‘Round Midnight This Time the Dream’s on Me Dizzy Atmosphere Night In Tunisia Move The Street Beat Out Of Nowhere Little Willie Leaps / 52nd Street Theme Ornithology I’ll Remember April / 52nd Street ThemeFats Navarro, trumpet; Charlie Parker, alto sax; Bud Powell, piano; Curly Russell, bass; Art Blakey, drums. Embraceable You Cool Blues […]

Much was heard lately about the emergence of a new Cold War between the United States and China. There is something both reassuring and disturbing about this confrontation: reassuring because we find in it something familiar and what we have overcome in the past in the case of the Soviet Union. And worrying of course […]

“It is possible that we exist in a predominantly narcissistic society – in which people want you to love them; and then they don’t want you anymore.” I occupy these worlds: jazz and academia. The jazz world is filled with pandering, patronage (real and false), banter and fastidious applause; meanwhile, the hallowed, homogenous halls of […]

On 5 May 2021 the UK government dispatched two Royal Navy patrol boats, HMS Severn and HMS Tamar, to the waters off the coast of Jersey in the English Channel. The ships were not there to commemorate the end of the Second World War in Europe but to scare off French fishermen who were threatening […]

The guest author of this post is Eve Hayes de Kalaf. She is a Stipendiary Fellow at the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and the author of the Anthem title ‘Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic’. Over the past three decades, a silent […]

Anna S. Rogers and Mathieu Deflem What happens to women when they do something only men have traditionally been expected and accepted to do? What motivates these women to move beyond conventional mores and enter communities and subcultures that are not only dominated by men but shaped by their values as well? How are these […]

The guest author of this post is Blake Stricklin. He is a lecturer at the University of Houston – Victoria and the author of ‘American Paraliterature and Other Theories to Hijack Communication’. In April 1968 students at Columbia University overtook the campus. Members from Columbia’s Student Afro-Society (SAS), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and […]