Last day of Blogust, and my family is visiting me in Kansas City for Labor Day weekend. No time to write, so here's a picture instead, which I found on the Fresh Air Tumblr.
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seamus heaney died today
Irish poet Seamus Heaney passed away today. Heaney won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995, and he is widely considered the most important Irish poet since Yeats. He was a great writer, a naturalist, and had working class sensibilities, which generally covers everything that I find important in an artist. These are some good …
“at 20 a little coquette, at 50 a suffragette”
Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, but the "I Have a Dream" speech is not the only landmark historical moment celebrating human rights in August. Monday marked the 93rd anniversary of the incorporation of the Nineteenth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. I noticed a …
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50 years after king had a dream, racial disparities remain
"Do you know why today is super important for American history?" This was the question I asked each of my students before classes began. Most responded with, "No," though one cheeky girl guessed, "hump day?" "Close," I said. "It's actually the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I have a dream speech." "Oh," said …
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kids who read, and little house in the ozarks
On November 5, 1920, a fifty-three-year-old Wilder wrote in the Missouri Ruralist, “It doesn’t occupy our brains to peel potatoes … Our bodies learn to do the everyday tasks without much head-work, leaving our minds free to pass thru these windows and follow the fascinating ways that lead from them.” Wilder’s window was not in the kitchen of …
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eighty years of the new yorker via advertising
Ads can be maddening. But they can also reveal quite a bit about how corporations appropriate evolving cultural and historical shifts for economic gain. I found a post on The New Yorker's blog featuring several ads from the past eighty years. Here are some of the best. 1938 1965 1984
