Articles from %2 January, 2009

Review: 'Passing Strange' by Martha A. Sandweiss answers questions about geologist Clarence King

By David L. Beck, Special to the Times
April 12, 2009; St. Petersburg Times

 

You've probably never heard of him, but Clarence King was famous once. As a geologist, he helped map the American West, and he organized the United States Geological Survey as its first president. As a writer, he had a bestseller, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.

He dined at the White House and had a genius for friendship; among his intimates were writer and diplomat John Hay, historian Henry Adams and novelist Henry James. Hay, who in his youth was Lincoln's secretary and who in the fullness of his years was McKinley's secretary of state, thought King the best man of his time and was puzzled by the fact that King's talents did not make him rich.

"I fear he will die...

Passing Strange's love story is a black and white issue

By STEVE WEINBERG
Houston Chronicle
April 10, 2009; Philadelphia Daily News

 

A few years ago, historian Martha A. Sandweiss read in passing that Clarence King — a Caucasian male famous in the 19th century as a surveyor of the vast frontier and a best-selling author about the land west of the Mississippi River — lived a double life as a self-proclaimed African-American male.

During an era when many light-skinned blacks hoped to pass as white, King, who lived from 1842 to 1901, moved the other direction, passing as black for some of each year without the knowledge of his white friends.

The cause of the reverse passing? Love.

In 1888, King had met and married an African-American woman named Ada Copeland, 18 years his junior. Copeland, who had made her way to...

Voice of the Century
Celebrating Marian Anderson

By Alex Ross
April 9, 2009; New Yorker

On Easter Sunday, 1939, the contralto Marian Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to let her appear at Constitution Hall, Washington’s largest concert venue, because of the color of her skin. In response, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the D.A.R., and President Roosevelt gave permission for a concert on the Mall. Seventy-five thousand people gathered to watch Anderson perform. Harold Ickes, the...

"The bipolar child is a purely American phenomenon": An interview with Philip Dawdy

By Christopher Lane, Ph.D.
April7, 2009

Philip Dawdy, a prize-winning investigative journalist, has for several years written a powerful, well-researched, and well-regarded weblog, Furious Seasons, which focuses on American psychiatry, mental health, and the way we think about treatment options. Given his intensive work on the issues, I wanted to ask him several burning questions about ADHD, bipolar disorder, and other controversies in...

Ta Nea Magazine Online
Thursday, March 9, 2009; Ta Na Online

To watch the video, click here.

ITa Nea (Greek: Τα Νέα, Translation: The News) is a daily newspaper published in Athens, owned by Lambrakis Press Group that also publishes the newspaper To Vima.

University of Washington historian Raymond Jonas' WHEN THE WORLD TURNED: HOW AN AFRICAN ARMY DEFEATED THEIR EUROPEAN COLONIZERS AT THE BATTLE OF ADWA, ETHIOPIA, 1896, the monumental story of European hubris and African determination that is filled with clashing armies, strategic blunders and the pomp of the royal court of Ethiopia's King Menelik and Queen Taitou who outwitted the Italian pretenders at nearly every turn and provided the beginning of the end of Africa's colonial era, to Kathleen McDermott at Harvard University Press, for publication in 2011, by Dan O'Connell

Guggenheim Fellow and founder of the Wild Dolphin Project Denise Herzing's DOLPHIN DIARY: Twenty-Five Years Living with Wild Dolphins; In Their World, On Their Terms, revealing the hidden life of a pod of dolphin off the Grand Bahama Bank to which Herzing has devoted her research life including her efforts to foster and document human-dolphin communication, to Daniela Rapp of St. Martin's by Dan O'Connell.

China historian Tonio Andrade’s account of the little known story of the Chinese pirate Zheng Chenggong who led a fleet of ships against the Dutch East India Company’s trading colony on the island of Taiwan. In The Lost Colony: How a Chinese Pirate Defeated Europe’s Greatest Colonial Empire, Andrade reveals a China far different than the inward-looking, xenophobic creation of the Western imagination. The true China, embodies great curiosity, exploration and an appetite for international trade. To Clara Platter at Princeton University Press by Dan O'Connell.

Brown University psychologist and author of THE SCENT OF DESIRE Rachel Herz's THAT'S DISGUSTING: Why We Love Perverse Pleasures to Angela von der Lippe at Norton by Wendy Strothman at The Strothman Agency, LLC (World).

Food writer Ramin Ganeshram's THE CURRY CHRONICLES, the story of a young Trinidadian girl whose family owns a roti shop in Richmond Hill, Queens and her ambition (against her parents' wishes) to make a culinary career for herself in Manhattan by taking part in a "Food TV" contest in the hopes of joining a new "Top Kid Chef" cooking show, to Andrea Pinkney at Scholastic, for publication in 2010, by Dan O'Connell at The Strothman Agency (World).