Christopher Hibbert writes in a note at the start of his 1986 book Cities and Civilizations that, in contrast to more scholarly and comprehensive works, he aims simply “to give impressions of the appearance and social life of twenty-one of the...
When Lee Bey writes about Pride Cleaners, he expresses a palpably warm affection for the other worldly structure which has stood on the northwest corner of 79th Street and St. Lawrence Avenue since 1959. Bey notes in Southern Exposure: The...
A hallmark of the black nationalism movement in the 1960s was the idea of African-Americans patronizing African-American businesses. This approach with its pull-ourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps subtext has been a prominent tenet for many...
Reader: This review is going to deal with Mark Twain’s 1885 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and, because of that, it will include a particular term that, today, is highly offensive. If that makes you too uncomfortable, please don’t read...
Many Annunciations By Patrick T. Reardon The first was a girl who dodged. The second girl wanted to think about it. The third fainted. The fourth was distracted. The fifth called her mother. The sixth remembered an...
When 27-year-old Juliette Kinzie settled with her husband John, the local Indian agent, in the tiny hamlet of Chicago in 1833, it was the home of only about 300 people, several of them Kinzie relatives. Nearly three decades later, when she left...
I’ve lived my whole life, I guess, with dangerous women. I just thought they were interesting. I’ve discussed with Sarah, my daughter, the pros and cons of Christopher Hibbert’s biography The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the...
Throughout the 20th century, postcards were an easy, cheap way to keep in touch. Often, they were sent home by tourists, but postcards were also sent to memorialize or comment on or proclaim events closer to home. You could make a postcard of...
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