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Behind the Book: Maryland Blood
Maryland Blood is a stirring, true-life adventure story spanning four centuries of American history. Seen through the unique lens of one Maryland family’s eyes, the adventures unfold through Hambleton letters preserved in archives across the United States...
The Outlook Is Bleak
America is losing the fight against HIV/AIDS. Last year, CDC leaders summarized the evidence in the New England Journal of Medicine. The most compelling data show that for the last 20 years the annual number of new HIV infections in the United States has...
The Value of Pain?
One of the interesting things I learned while researching my book, was the way our conception of pain has changed over time. Prior to 1900, pain was viewed as an immediate and short-lived response to an injury or illness – the body’s emergency warning system...
The book as an interactive device: Media doesn’t always need to be digital
The traditional media used in education has at least one major Achilles heel. No matter how well produced and instructional the content may be, the learning experience is primarily passive and the extent to which learners can control the flow of that content...
Hoax: Franklin's Forgery
The following is an excerpt from chapter nine of Gregory Dowd's latest book, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Late in the Revolutionary War, in Passy, France, [Benjamin] Franklin lifted his pen in a most extraordinary...
Irish Romanticism and Climate Change
Like many of my friends and neighbors in Spokane, Washington this summer, I have been preoccupied with a second consecutive year of major wildfires. We have endured prolonged stretches where the Air Quality Index has been deemed “unhealthy” or even “hazardous...
Modernism and Opera
The following is an excerpt from Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith’s new edited volume, Modernism and Opera. In opera, one always dies of the thing one loves. To love less than the impossible, less than that for which one cannot live, is not to love at...
The Distractions and Implications of Biomedical Promise
Gene therapy has been on the horizon as the next great medical breakthrough in curing disease for half a century now. Every time a new genetic mapping or engineering approach is developed, the promise of gene therapy seems to finally be within reach. This was...
Scalps: Charged Revolutionary Rumor
The following is an excerpt from chapter eight of Gregory Dowd's latest book, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Check back with us every Thursday in the month of November for more Groundless excerpts highlighting word-of...
Alien Invasion! National Culture in Peril! Fifth Column Plot Uncovered!
These are dark days for cosmopolitanism. On both sides of the Atlantic, in the US and Europe, xenophobia, nativism, and aggressive jingoism are in the ascendency. In the US, the President Elect built his platform on a promise to build a wall along the US...