A Cold War Baby: Happy Birthday, Alvin!
The submersible Alvin is sixty years old this year. Numerous overhauls and upgrades have kept the craft going down (and coming back up!).
The Annotated Oppenheimer
Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.
Chinese Science Fiction Before The Three Body Problem
Viewing the genre as a means to spread modern knowledge, Chinese novelists have been writing science-fiction stories since at least 1902.
Using False Claims to Justify War
Hardly the recent innovation it’s frequently mistakened to be, deception as a path to war has been used by American presidents since the 1800s.
José Garcia Villa, an American Poet Ahead of His Time
While Villa’s otherness created an opening for his work in the US, American critics ultimately held both his modernism and his nationality against him.
Freeing Birdman of Alcatraz
Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Production Code Administration could stop the production of a movie about murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud.
A Mughal Mosque in Kenya
Built for Punjabi migrants brought to Africa by the British and modeled on Mughal architecture, the Jamia Masjid in Nairobi serves Kenya’s Muslim minority.
A Flood of Tourism in Johnstown
Days after a failed dam led to the drowning deaths of more than 2,200 people, the Pennsylvania industrial town was flooded again—with tourists.
The Flour War
In eighteenth-century France, the scarcity and price of flour was the base ingredient for what would become one of history’s bloodiest revolutions.