To truly understand the wicked legacy of racism in the United States, look to well-researched history. Current media may buzz about critical race theory – and it can be provocative – but history has staying power. And really well-done history explains so much in ways that can engage and enrage, that can make you weep…
In Praise of the Field Trip
On a chilly, grey Chicago afternoon not that long ago, I drove to the Pullman National Monument. The rain was intermittent and traffic thin. I was a tourist in my own city, pulling into an empty parking lot and wondering if others found nineteenth century labor history equally fascinating. Short answer: very few people were…
Clarity on Climate Change
Since reading Lab Girl, I, like many others, have kept an eye out for more writing by Hope Jahren. Her latest book, The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here, is outstanding. It’s engaging, informative, and relatable while dealing with a topic that can quickly be overwhelming.…
Relationships Make the Student
Powerful research and scholarship need not be exotic to have an impact. Sometimes a close look at the familiar can be surprisingly powerful. Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, an accessible and informative book by Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert, does just that. The authors examine something that we who work…
Cultural Anthropologists as Public Intellectuals
Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex and Gender in the Twentieth Century is a marvelous book, creative and engaging. A collective biography of a number extraordinarily influential scholars who came together to define an academic field and to reshape thinking, inside the academy and out,…
Hope Certainly Can Write
Hope Jahren is a geobiologist, a writer, a teacher, and an extraordinarily interesting person. In 2016 she wrote Lab Girl, a personal and professional memoir that rightfully garnered all manner of awards. It’s a beautiful, carefully crafted work that I would like to encourage you to read – and for you to recommend to anyone…
One Determined Engineer & the Creation of the Taconite Industry
The drive from Chicago to Ely, Minnesota, goes northwest through Wisconsin, crossing into Minnesota at Duluth. Route 53 winds up steep terrain through the city, heading into Duluth Heights and Hermantown. It’s pretty much due north past the Duluth Airport as signs of human activity thin out. Rice Lake Road winds north and east through…