Genre: Special Feature

23 February 1996

Outside in the night, a full moon is shining, and in the moon glow, a mockingbird is singing the cadences of all the birdsong it has ever heard. It imitates the raucous jayjay of the blue …

I have something to confess right here up front. Tonight I feel utterly at home. You might think we’re in a magnificent wedding cake ballroom full of chandeliers and debutante pretensions. But I spring from a long line of Baptist …

Between 1990 and 1999, eight national OutWrite conferences convened, first in San Francisco, then in Boston, gathering gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer literary luminaries for a weekend celebrating literary culture. Initially, OUT/LOOK, the glossy national gay and lesbian …

In 1900 the world’s fair was held in Paris. Like world’s fairs before it, the 1900 Paris Exposition celebrated technological innovation within the context of a world built of nations, projecting an air of unbridled optimism through a conviction of …

W. E. B. Du Bois was a leader in establishing the field of American sociology. He deployed empiricism, often triangulating various methods to advance our sociological understanding in ways that were unheard of in the United States at that time …

In the attitude of the American mind toward Negro suffrage can be traced with unusual accuracy the prevalent conceptions of government. In the fifties we were near enough the echoes of the French Revolution to believe pretty thoroughly in universal …

Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left. Here and there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed leisurely at the depots; …