With Good Reason

On college campuses, female students continue to outnumber male students. Films like Knocked Up and television shows like Last Man Standing suggest that being a man in America is ever more difficult. Real American men, so the narrative goes, are disappearing. David Magill (Longwood University) explores the myths and realities of the male crisis. Also [...]

One of the most important legal documents in history, the Magna Carta influenced the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Nearly 800 years later, it’s now going online. Bruce O’Brien (University of Mary Washington) is leading an effort to translate and digitize 150 early English laws, including the Magna Carta. Also featured: The [...]

Aniko Bodroghkozy  (University of Virginia) is the author of the new book “Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement” which explores how the newly created evening news shows shaped attitudes about race relations during the Civil Rights Movement. She investigates the network news treatment of events including the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign, integration [...]

With the end of the War in Iraq, tens of thousands of soldiers have returned home, and many of them are going to college. But the transition to academia can be hard. Alexis Hart and Roger Thompson (Virginia Military Institute) are traveling the country, coaching professors on how to welcome and support veterans. Also featured: [...]

The Camino de Santiago, a medieval pilgrimage trail in northern Spain, continues to attract tens of thousands of travelers each year. Among those are George Greenia (William & Mary, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities), who for years has walked the 500-mile route with his students. George studies the relationship between medieval and modern pilgrimages. He [...]

In the early 1990s, a young American man worked as a ghostwriter for a member of the royal family of Bahrain. Now, 20 years later, Ranjit Singh (University of Mary Washington) is sharing his story about the man who would become the Bahraini minister of information and a key figure in the brutal response to [...]

The poetry of children in Birmingham, Alabama, inspired a recent classical music piece titled “Dream, Child. Hope.” It was composed by Adolphus Hailstork (Old Dominion University), in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Hailstork has written music for a number of prestigious ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony. But his influences sometimes [...]

  An epidemic of over-consumption is sweeping the United States and the rest of the industrialized world. With Good Reason sat down with PBS documentary producer John De Graaf, among whose best-known shows is Affluenza, for an in-depth discussion of happiness and the economy and how the life/work balance got out of whack for American [...]

In 2010, baseball’s San Francisco Giants became the first professional sports team to use dynamic ticket pricing for games. It was the same year they won the World Series. Stephen Shapiro (Old Dominion University) studied the Giants’ ticket pricing practices and says more teams are following suit. Also featured: Female athletes are three times more [...]

In the period between the American Civil War and the Russian Revolution of 1905, American and Russian travel writers wrote home about their encounters abroad.  At first the observations were mostly positive.  But as time went on the writings became increasingly hostile.  Margarita Marinova (Christopher Newport University), in her new book, says these negative characterizations [...]