With Good Reason

America has elected 44 different presidents, but more than 12,000 people have served in Congress.  Matthew Wasniewski (James Madison University alum) was recently appointed as the fourth official historian of the U.S. House of Representatives.  He says that while much has changed in the House since its first session (members no longer carry weapons on [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In October 2002, filling up a gas tank or loading groceries into the car brought fear to many residents of metropolitan Washington, D.C. region.  Over the course of three weeks, two snipers killed 10 people and injured three others in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia.  Jack Censer (George Mason University) in his new book “On the [...]

The federal government unveiled a 12 billion dollar initiative last summer to add 5 million new community college graduates by 2020.   Frank Friedman (Piedmont Virginia Community College) says community college enrollment has exploded during the recession, but colleges are struggling to keep up with the demand for faculty and facilities. Also featured: Realizing that most [...]

Women journalists who covered the Vietnam War are often not given their proper due when the history of the conflict is told.  Joyce Hoffman (Old Dominion University) is the author of On Their Own:  Women Journalists in Vietnam. She shares stories of women who won esteemed prizes for their reporting and several who broke new [...]

Many historians say the United States government of the nineteenth century did little to improve the lives of its citizens. But Brian Balogh (University of Virginia) argues the federal government was quite active even before the era of big government, and laid the groundwork for America to become a superpower in the twentieth century.   Also: Chris [...]

Think you could pick out a serial killer in a crowd? Mike Aamodt (Radford University) says you couldn’t if your life depended on it.  Aamodt has compiled a database profiling information on more than 1,700 serial killers around the world.  The data were collected, in part, to determine whether the commonly used profile of a [...]

Women journalists who covered the Vietnam War are often not given their proper due when the history of the conflict is told.   Joyce Hoffmann (Old Dominion University) is the author of On Their Own:  Women Journalists in Vietnam. She shares stories of women who won esteemed prizes for their reporting and several who broke [...]

The last ten years has seen tremendous growth of Latino populations throughout the country.   Silvia Tandeciarz and Jennifer Bickham Mendez (The College of William and Mary) discuss the challenges Latinos face as they integrate into new communities, and the ways in which they are influencing our culture. Also: Richard J. Kilroy (Virginia Military Institute) says [...]