In 1960, novelist John Steinbeck circled the country in a pickup truck with a standard-bred poodle named Charley in a sort of cultural vision quest. What he found was not always a pretty sight. His observations, published as Travels With Charley: In Search of America, included the prediction that his fellow Californians would lose the...
Author: Chris Segura (Chris Segura)
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June 1, 2002June 22, 2022Vital Signs
Racial Conflicts
Three days before the world “changed forever,” U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson tried to put a pretty face on a lackluster summit that had just ended in Durban, South Africa. The nine-day conference, designed to address “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,” was doomed when the United States and Israel withdrew over objections...
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November 1, 2001April 21, 2022Correspondence
The Peculiar Institution
A selective historical motion picture about a 19th-century rebellion aboard a cruel Spanish slave ship rakes in megabucks as a result of media hype, including the notation that white production assistants were forbidden to put the stage-chains on the black actors aboard the replica vessel. No one mentioned that the original chains were first put...