May/June 2010
In This Issue May/June 2010
The Making of Jonathan Spence
From Winchester College to The Search for Modern China.
By Frederic E. Wakeman Jr.
Volume 31, Issue 3
Jonathan Spence, 2010 Jefferson LecturerNancy Crampton
-
Features
Talking to Saipan
American lit in a Pacific outpost.
Philosophy on the Radio
A call-in show in North Dakota broadcasts under the motto that philosophy is for everyone.
By Paulette Tobin
Burying Molière
How the French Revolution reappropriated the favored playwright of Louis XIV.
By Steve Moyer -
Departments
Statements
Anne Frank: In Family Photos
Texas views the life of Anne Frank through her father's photos.
By Laura Wolff ScanlanBlack Mozart
A Pennsylvania scholar brings new interest to the composer known as the Black Mozart.
By James WillifordFifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird
Alabama marks fifty years of To Kill a Mockingbird.
By Laura Wolff ScanlanConflict of Interest
South Dakota remembers the Great War in a collection of one family's letters.
By Amy LifsonCurio
Four Acrobats
Four Acrobats, the mid nineteenth-century Indian miniature, was once part of an ordered series of paintings, each of which corresponded to one of the melodic modes—or rāga—of classical Indian music.
By James WillifordThe "Etheric Force Machine"
John Ernst Worrell Keely was, in his own words, “the greatest humbug of the nineteenth century.” The perpetrator of a long-running and remarkably elaborate pseudoscientific scam, Keely convinced numer
By James WillifordThe SL Puffin
This diminutive steamer, christened the SL Puffin, began life in 1906 as a 5-horsepower gasoline-powered launch.
By James WillifordTenor of the Times
In an otherworldly black-and-white photo taken in midtown Manhattan by renowned jazz photographer William Gottlieb on a rainy night in July 1948, jam-packed neon signs shine brightly along both sides
By Steve MoyerSurvival of the Luckless
Captain Bernardo de Vargas Machuca’s 1599 Indian Militia was called by historian Geoffrey Parker the “first manual of guerrilla warfare ever published.” Thomas Jefferson kept a copy on his bo
By Amy LifsonConversation
The China Scholar
Jonathan Spence and NEH Chairman Leach discuss key moments in four hundred years of Chinese history.
In Focus
Georgia’s Jamil Zainaldin
Through Georgia's online encyclopedia, Jamil Zainaldin helps disseminate the state's historical gems.
By Mary J. LoftusEdNote
Editor's Note, May/June 2010
I become uneasy whenever someone mentions the “lessons of history.” Not that history doesn’t offer lessons, it’s just that many of the lessons, I find, are hardly the kind of rules for living that can
By David Skinner
