By Howard Bryant | For black men, sports was not as promising an employment opportunity as it appeared. Their bodies were valuable, but beyond playing, chances to coach, evaluate personnel, or run or own teams were as remote as they were in the non-sports world. And as for the Heritage, Jackie Robinson had created the template of the black political athlete, but it was still a game, and employees were still just ballplayers, with plenty of visibility but not nearly enough security (the million-dollar, guaranteed contract was a decade and a half away), so the tolerance for speaking out about social issues was low. Even during the obvious inequality of the Jim Crow era, the white mainstream was still confounded by the black demand for equality. Read more →

By Kay Whitlock | I am often drawn to historical battlefields and sites by a sense that the memories, the ghosts, the landscape will somehow reveal more than I have yet learned through book-and-documentary-related study. And by the inchoate sense that I may even be changed by it, that in mysterious ways, my justice vision will be moved toward greater wholeness. In solitary reflection in places where something terrible happened, I listen to the land, to winds, to the rustle of leaves. I cull histories, photographs, poetry, and survivor accounts to try to conjure in my imagination the people and the place and the moment. And sometimes something close to that happens, a quiet ripple in time and perception that somehow shifts how I see and experience everything. When I lived in southern Colorado, long before a national historic site was created, I periodically drove out east to Sand Creek, where a long-ago cavalry massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples—mostly women, children, and elderly people—took place. There, I sat alone for hours and in silence on land unmarked by buildings or pathways. For whatever reason, Shiloh still disquiets me in a way many other historic battlegrounds do not. Read more →

By Kay Whitlock | In the autumn of 2017, my partner and I joined a long car caravan winding slowly across White Sands Missile Range. Organized semiannually by the Alamogordo, New Mexico Chamber of Commerce, the trek set out from an empty lot adjacent to the local high school’s athletic fields. Journey’s end, Trinity Site, is where the first atomic bomb—scientists and officials working on the device called it “the gadget”—exploded at 5:29 a.m. on 16 June 1945. It is open to the public only two days each year, the first Saturdays in April and October. Read more →

By Dina Gilio-Whitaker | The incident with the Covington Catholic school boys has been an astonishing exhibition of not only an intensely polarized country, but a dizzying conglomeration of issues. There were countless mixed messages contained in the assortment of video clips of Nathan Phillips and Nick Sandmann who appeared to be in a standoff. As an American Indian journalist and academic trained to analyze information from all possible angles and come to some kind of understanding of the evidence, I agree that much of the reactionary rhetoric and hateful response to the Covington students was misguided and outright wrong. The students did not deserve death threats. Read more →

By Deborah L. Plummer | My husband, Mike, is an engineer—a full-blooded engineer. Not only is it his career choice, but he also lives and thinks like an engineer. Often when we go out with my friends, the occasion is loosely planned and somewhat spontaneous. A phone call made that day inquiring about the evening’s plans usually gets things started. Mike’s friends (fellow engineers), on the other hand, plan events literally months in advance—even if we are just meeting for dinner. Time, place, and confirmed reservations are emailed in a precise manner. Read more →

By Lisa Page | As a kid, I heard that Carol Channing was black (the word back then was negro). She was one of many celebrities rumored to pass, in Hollywood—a list that included Angie Dickenson, Dinah Shore, and others. These women had large brown eyes, full lips, and bleached blond hair. Looking white—being light-skinned—allowed many Americans to cross the color line into the mainstream, back in a time when that meant serious opportunity. But rumors are rumors. Read more →

By Lori L. Tharps: I’m not mad. Not mad at all that executive producer, Peter Saji, covered the same ground regarding colorism and family dynamics in a twenty-two-minute Black-ish episode that I covered in my 200-page heavily researched 2016 book, Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families. Read more →

By Helene Atwan. In 2003, having miraculously convinced Mary Oliver and her tough-minded agent and partner, Molly Malone Cook, to return to Beacon as a publishing home, Mary, Molly and I hit something of a brick wall. Our shared vision was to publish a second volume of New and Selected Poems (Beacon had published the first volume in 1997, and it had won the National Book Award).  Read more →

A Q&A with Stephen Puleo: I’m proud to say that Dark Tide is still the only adult non-fiction book about the Great Boston Molasses Flood. The book has been out for fifteen years and is still the definitive account of the flood—and I hope always will be. Read more →

I’ve always wanted to work in book publishing once I realized it was a possible career. I interned at a few different publishers in college and loved it. I knew it was a super competitive field, and someone at my college’s career office even told me it was too competitive for me and that I shouldn’t really bother trying to break in, but I knew what I wanted to do, so I worked really really hard to make it happen. My first job was at Cornell University Press in the acquisitions department, which was great, but I really enjoyed the marketing aspects of my job the most and wanted to move back to Boston, so that’s how I ended up here! My official title is associate marketing manager and I do lots of different things: academic marketing, conferences, advertising, creating promotional materials like postcards or bookmarks, drafting marketing plans, and managing our internship program. Read more →

They are today’s indisputable shrine to our cuddly overlord, the cat. Meow! You embed them in your text messages, your tweets, your Facebook posts, your Instagram stories. A shorthand for our daily feels, they’re also unifying symbols and rallying cries for a common cause. We’re talking about internet memes. They’re everywhere, on- and offline. And they’re shaping and reflecting our pop culture and politics in real time. Read more →

By Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks | After years of basking in the glow of a flattering limelight, by the fall of 2011 the very rich were experiencing something new and altogether jarring: the glare of a harsh spotlight trained directly on them. The temptation to bark orders like: “Dim that light, or else!” was natural enough, but perhaps unwise. After all, those shining the spotlight were not their employees and were swarming in large numbers through the streets of lower Manhattan, behaving like the sort of unruly mob one finds in faraway places where the ways of the free world are insufficiently appreciated. Read more →