Articles by Author

The Obama family posing outside
02 February 2017

I have been in a funk since the day after last year’s presidential election. About a month before the voting, I began to feel as though Donald Trump would...

Book cover
22 January 2017

I constantly remind the students in my African American history classes that if you are poor and white in America, especially if you are rural or southern,...

Book cover
16 January 2017

Most Americans never learned that there was slavery in the northern United States. Half of all slave voyages docked in tiny Rhode Island, and...

Book cover - Nixon's face
23 July 2016

Whenever I think of Richard Nixon, a wave of pity washes over me. Has there ever been a mainstream politician in America who was so hated, so reviled, so...

Book cover
28 May 2016

I have been hoisted on my own petard. For decades now, I have assiduously ignored ninety-nine percent of all the rap music–an oxymoron if ever...

Cover photo of Respect book
24 March 2016

I was well into my thirties before I learned that Otis Redding wrote and recorded Respect in 1965. As far as I–and probably many others–knew, Respect...

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