Kali Lightfoot's kindergarten teacher told her parents that Kali had "a well-developed sense of beauty and can skip with both feet". This proved prophetic for a life that has included a number of careers and passions – Lightfoot has earned a master's...

From 1940 to 1945, forty thousand patients died in French psychiatric hospitals. The Vichy Regime's "soft extermination" let patients die of cold, starvation, or lack of care. But in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one p...

Throughout his career, Robert B. Pippin has examined the relationship between philosophy and the arts. With his writings on film, literature, and visual modernism, he has shown that there are aesthetic objects that cannot be properly understood unles...

Philip Agee's story is the stuff of a John le Carre novel – perilous and thrilling adventures around the globe. He joined the CIA as a young idealist, becoming an operations officer in hopes of seeing the world and safeguarding his country. He was th...

Inspired by Robert McCloskey's beloved children's book of the same name, the iconic bronze Make Way for Ducklings sculpture in Boston's Public Garden has come to serve as something of a record of the recent decades of life in the city itself. In a se...

Michael Graziano's intriguing book fuses two landmark titles in American history: Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness (1956), about the religious worldview of the early Massachusetts colonists, and David Martin's Wilderness of Mirrors (1980), a...

A century before the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, a passionate discourse emerged in the Ottoman Empire, rebutting politicized Western representations of the East. Until the 1930s, Ottoman and early Turkish Republican intellectuals, well...

The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered...

In the study of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, four key concepts have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism. Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anach...

The world we engage with is a vibrant collage brought to consciousness by language and our creative imagination. It is in the symbolic forms of language that the human world of value is revealed, and it is there that religious scholar Michael Fishban...