With Good Reason

During and despite the Great Depression, the entertainment industry produced what some consider the greatest era of popular music.  Elliot Majerczyk (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities) looks at the songs that became the soundtrack of the ‘lost generation’ and helped pull America through hard times. Also: Nigel Sellars (Christopher Newport University) explains that Roosevelt’s New Deal [...]

Each day most of us wave to a friend or gesture in a meeting with colleagues. Dance professor Karen Studd (George Mason University) sees patterns and language in all of these acts. She calls her system for observing, describing, notating, and understanding movement “Laban Movement Analysis.” Also: Choreographer and professor Benita Brown (Virginia State University) [...]

Genetic testing of our risks for disease is the latest trend in medicine. The technique offers hope for some, but also raises medical, ethical, psychological, and practical concerns for many, including whether genetic information is worth acquiring. Doris Teichler Zallen (Virginia Tech) is the author of a new book, To Test or Not Test, a [...]

The “Geography of Slavery” website catalogs more than 4,000 advertisements offering rewards for runaway slaves—placed in newspapers from 1736 through 1803. Tom Costa (University of Virginia’s College at Wise) gathered these ads as a Fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. He says that, taken as a whole, these humanize the stories of men [...]

In Greek mythology, the goddess Mentor was a trusted counselor of Odysseus.  Today, mentoring still fuels career success in all fields. But Suzanne De Janasz (University of Mary Washington) says in this techno-dependent age we can use online tools to establish relationships with mentors as we build our careers.  Also: In the not too distant [...]