At the turn of the last century, newspapers were the social media apps of their time. They could bring communities together, shape public opinion, and instigate important social and political reforms. But in the late 19th and early 20th century, these tools were overwhelmingly in the hands of upper-class white...

Title: 19th century novels endure: Why reading books makes us better thinkers By Barb Howe For The Chronicle, any issue   A recent study from the University of Florida found that reading as a pastime has declined by more than 40% in the US over the last 20 years. In a sample of over...

The word propaganda has “an ominous clang in many minds”  as one early twentieth century political scientist described it back in the 1920s. It wasn’t always that way. Up until fairly recently the Latin word was only used in the biological sense, as in to propagate a species. The first...

Independence Day and the idea of freedom Article for the Chronicle by Barb Howe July/August 2023 issue   America is unique among all nations because at the center of its identity as a country is not a race or a religion or an ethnicity but an idea: the idea of freedom.But freedom is a...

When Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948 there were no women’s restrooms near the chamber. Ms Smith had to wait in line to use the solitary ladies’ room that was added to the main Capitol building in 1927 to accommodate the three...

Virginia Woolf is almost as famous for the way she died––suicide-by-drowning––as she is for her writings. So when literary scholar Louise DeSalvo published a biography of Woolf in 1989 it caused quite a stir because for the first time it portrayed the Victorian novelist not as a mad artistic genius...