Ed Simon on Stephen Foster

I was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1949, so I grew up playing cowboys and Indians with my cousins in the rubble fields of my native city.

The dodo was not always fat. Nobody alive is able to say for sure what a dodo was really like: the last one had died by the end of the 17th Century...

Among historians, 1968 is increasingly viewed as a publishing phenomenon – some have even talked about a ‘paperback revolution’...

Deletant skillfully depicts the complicated geopolitical relations in east-central Europe during World War II, and the ways in which Nazi Germany tried to exploit the tensions between Romania, Hungary, and the USSR...

In the prologue to Empire in the Air: Airline Travel and the African Diaspora, Chandra D. Bhimull begins with two narratives about death.

‘God, but life is loneliness,’ declared the writer Sylvia Plath in her private journals. Despite all the grins and smiles we exchange, she says ...

In 1937, the black nationalist activist Celia Jane Allen packed her bags and headed from Chicago to Mississippi. Working for the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME), she traveled against the tide of the Great Migration with the specific aim of promoting black emigration to West Africa...

It is a time of great unrest in Europe. A large portion of the population is connected by a loose confederation, which threatens to fall apart at any moment. This unstable situation is made worse by false news flooding the continent...

When the ground was first broken in 1900 to build a subway under the crowded streets of New York, some 25,000 of the city’s residents gathered to watch the ceremonies and cheer

Also known as the “dancing plague”, it was the most fatal and best documented of the more than ten such contagions...

Back in the fall of 2014, I visited the House of Terror museum in Budapest. On the way out, I flipped through the pages of the guest book, curious to read the reactions of other visitors after they had perused the exhibits.

Poor Diogenes Laertius. He gets no respect. A “perfect ass”—“asinus germanus”—one nineteenth-century scholar called him. “Dim-witted,” said Nietzsche.

There is a tale, perhaps apocryphal, in which Fra Damiano da Bergamo looks on as emperor Charles V — motto: Plus Ultra, “further beyond” — sands away at an area of intarsiated wood from a recently completed choir...

Equality is a central concern of Hughes’s work, but in his hands, the concept possesses a desperate, embodied—and thoroughly pragmatic—quality to it. There are serious inequities facing black Americans, he reports...

On 18th March 1921 the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Paris Commune was marked in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Newspapers were emblazoned with headlines decrying the brutal suppression of the heroic Communards...

In Mariano Azuela’s bestselling novel about the Mexican Revolution, Los de Abajo (The Underdogs) (1915), the revolutionaries who set out to eradicate the corruption and decadence of the Porfirian government themselves...

It was because my father’s health had deteriorated to the point that he could no longer live alone that I came to possess his copy of Chinese Household Furniture, the Dover paperback edition with the pale yellow cover.

Sharrona Pearl’s book Face/On looks at the cultural representations of face transplants. It is a fascinating account of media discourses particularly concerning the issue in the United States.

Throughout most of the 1990s my evenings were split between working at a nonprofit call center where I bummed money off strangers for good causes, and getting drunk and dancing at any of San Francisco’s queer punk clubs.