With Good Reason

John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln on Good Friday, April 14, 1865 in Ford’s Theater in Washington.  But Booth had been part of a long standing conspiracy to kidnap Lincoln.  Terry Alford (Northern Virginia Community College), an expert on Booth, investigates who were these conspirators, their motives at the end of the war and whether [...]

Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy, the first Jewish American to reach that rank in the United States Navy, is an unsung hero of American history.  According to Melvin Urofsky (Virginia Commonwealth University), not only was Levy instrumental in the Navy, he also rescued Monticello, the Thomas Jefferson estate, from ruin.  Also featured: David Metzger (Old Dominion [...]

Inter-country adoptions gone awry have a way of capturing headlines.  A missionary group lands in jail after trying to remove children from Haiti.  An American woman puts her seven year-old adopted son on a one-way flight back to Moscow.  Karen Rotabi (Virginia Commonwealth University) has studied this issue in Guatemala and beyond for decades and [...]

Don Quixote, conqueror of windmills and readers’ hearts, was recently voted the best book of all time in a survey of 100 of the world’s best authors.  It’s the tale of a Spanish knight who reads one too many chivalric romances and takes up a rusty breastplate and sword in search of adventures.  Antonio Carreño-Rodríguez [...]

You know what it’s like to have a song stuck in your head. But what if your brain was constantly making music of its own without your knowledge? “Brainwave Chick” Paras Kaul (George Mason University) has found a way to tap into the natural melodies of her mind, convert them to digital sound, and make [...]

Author and media critic Jack Shaheen has watched over 1,000 films from the last century to see how Middle Eastern characters fare.  Not so well.  More often than not, the silver screen resorts to demeaning Arab stereotypes.  Hanadi Al-Samman (University of Virginia) studies contemporary Arabic literature and culture and joins the conversation.  Also featured:  Iraq [...]

The last decade has seen an increase in the rate of college women who engage in high risk drinking, especially among sorority women when they drink at fraternity parties.  Jill Russett (College of William and Mary) is studying the trend.  Also featured: Much has been written about the way our culture raises girls.  But what [...]

In her new book “Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked About Book of All Time”, Kristin Swenson (Virginia Commonwealth University) explains what the Bible is, where it comes from, and shows how people use the Bible to argue today’s most controversial issues.   She also speaks about the Bible’s universality and relevance in our [...]

For years, lawyers have advised parties in high stakes cases to avoid apologizing, because doing so could be construed as an admission of guilt.  However, Rick Warne (George Mason University) shows that apologizing may not only sometimes be the right thing to do, it can also save people from paying higher damages.  Also: The recent [...]

Antonio Garcia (Virginia Commonwealth University) says that the personal and professional lives of musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane cannot be divorced from the struggle for racial equality—they contributed in significant ways to interracial understanding and social progress.  Also featured: The composers of the Civil Rights anthem “Lift Every Voice and [...]