Résultats de "David Boles" dans Toutes les catégories

In 2002 a public health director in Newark asked a dramatist whether he knew the word nosocomial. He did not. Nor did any of the graduate students in the room he taught the following week.Nosocomial means hospital-acquired. It names the illness a patient walks in without and walks out carrying...

What do the living owe the dead?Emma Vogel finds a photograph in her father's nightstand two days before they bury him: a young man in uniform, a young woman with dark eyes, and a name on the back—Ruth, 1946. The photograph her father carried for more than fifty years. The secret that changed...

The Confederacy lost the war and won the memory. Its armies were destroyed, its claim to nationhood erased, and the idea those armies carried into the field outlived them all. In The Synthetic Cause, David Boles traces how a beaten cause captured the story of its own defeat. It wrote the textbooks, raised the monuments, sainted the losers, and walked back into American institutions through the front door. The old machinery worked in bronze and marble and said out loud what it wanted. The machinery running now has learned to hide.

Sixty years ago, Peter Brook opened The Empty Space with a bare stage, a man walking across it, and someone watching, and the theatre took the sentence as scripture. The Occupied Space answers at the anniversary: the floor was never bare. Somebody owns it, somebody polices it, and somebody pays for it. The figure who crosses it can die, and the room knows. Written from inside the working theatre, this book puts the most quoted stage doctrine of its century on trial without borrowing a sentence of it.

An argument for taking a stolen title back. In 1595, in the Italian city of Padua, a medical student climbed a dark staircase and came out standing at a wooden rail, inside a funnel of carved walnut six galleries deep, every eye aimed at one lit table. The Greek word for a theater means the seeing-place, and the men at that rail knew what kind of room they were in. The anatomists knew too. They had built a theater on purpose. For most of Western history, art meant a principled, teachable discipline of making and doing, judged by its work.

In 1545, the richest vein of silver ever found split open a mountain in the Andes.

Ottawa, February 2022. Canadian banks freeze the accounts of protest donors without a court order, and people learn at store counters that their cards have stopped working. Four years later, in January 2026, Canada's Federal Court of Appeal rules the emergency invocation behind those freezes unreasonable and beyond the law. Between those two dates sits the question this book exists to answer: what is money worth if someone else decides when it works?

Verlin Bluffs, Nebraska. For more than a century a Black funeral house has kept the county's dead: washed, carried, and entered by name in a register whose Remarks column holds what no courthouse form would take. In 1919 a drowned stranger comes off the river with a debt fastened to his body, and August Wardlaw writes him into the book as No. 611, man unknown.

Everyone is your friend now. The word that once required an altar can be had for a thumb. For fifty years, David Boles ran his life on one blanket rule: if I know you, you are my friend. Then an actor he calls Curtis said six words in a rehearsal room, and a laugh came out where a sentence should have been, a sentence thirty years in the carrying. This book opens that ledger and refuses to close it politely.

In the spring of 1973, a teacher in a Lincoln, Nebraska classroom handed an eight-year-old boy a blue armband marked S, for slave, and set the brown-eyed children over him for the day. The next morning the roles reversed. No one in that room was Black. The lesson, the teacher said, was empathy.

You have heard that the human attention span has fallen below a goldfish's. It is one of the most quoted statistics of the digital age, repeated in TED talks and tenth-grade classrooms, in newspaper trend pieces and the pitch decks of companies selling a cure for the affliction they just named. The claim has a single defect its champions rarely raise. There was never a study. There was never a goldfish. The number was invented, and a century took it as a verdict on itself. The Eighteen-Minute Lie is the biography of that lie.

On January 30, 2026, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia. The federation that had carried American public broadcasting from the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act through fifty-eight years of programming, political contestation, and federal appropriation reached its legal end. UNDERWRITTEN is the first full institutional history of that federation.

Two words in red ink killed a screenplay and began a book. In 1985 a young dramatist sent a teleplay about William Jennings Bryan to a historian for review. It came back with BAD DRAMA scrawled across the title page, and the play was buried. Forty years later the writer went back to find out whether the verdict had fallen on his work or on the man he had dared to take seriously.

In the fall of 1984, in a darkened lecture hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, two professors offered competing arguments about why beauty matters. The art historian said beauty connects. The film scholar said beauty instructs. Both were right, and both were incomplete. The question that has taken forty years to formulate is the question this book attempts to answer: if beauty connects and instructs, who controls the connection, and who writes the lesson plan? The Human Universal Beautiful proposes a new framework for understanding how beauty operates as a historical force.

To recant is to take back a belief in public, under pressure, in front of the people who demanded the reversal. The word carries an older sense underneath the modern one. It comes from the Latin for singing again, and the act it names is a song performed backward, on command, so that the saying can stand in for the truth. In My Mind I'm Standing Up is a history of that act, traced from the Inquisition and the Reformation through the Moscow show trials, the Hollywood blacklist, and the Maoist struggle session, and into the public apology of our own moment.

An argument against rule by the dead. In January of the year 897, the reigning pope had his predecessor's corpse pulled from its tomb, dressed in full vestments, propped upright, and put on trial in Rome. A deacon answered the prosecution in the dead man's voice, and the sentence was carried out on the body. History treats the Cadaver Synod as a medieval freak show. Barbarous Ancestors treats it as a method, and follows that method into the marble courtroom where it now decides American life.

On April 23, 2016, a warning went up in a comment thread beneath a blog entry about the ugly laws: the ADA is in danger, and the disabled are being propelled backward. Ten years later came the memorandum that proved the warning right. Back to Willowbrook is the record of how America taught itself to see disabled people as citizens, and of how fast that teaching is being unlearned.

The Brittle Self is a history of one of the oldest fears a mind can hold: that the self is fragile, that it can be seen through, broken, switched off, or shown to be unreal. Across six hundred years the fear holds steady while its costume keeps changing, and the book follows that single dread from a medieval palace to a present-day clinic. It begins in 1393, when Charles the Sixth of France forbade his court to touch him, certain his body had turned to glass and would shatter at a careless hand.

In the Republic of Buryatia, in southern Siberia, the funerals come in a steady cadence. Since February 2022, Buryatia has supplied combat soldiers to the war in Ukraine at a per-capita rate among the highest of any region in the Russian Federation. Buryatia is also among the poorest regions of the federation. The young men who die in this war come from the internal periphery, far from Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Russian state has chosen to spend them rather than invest in them. That is the politics of tribute.

In 1862, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. The Act said that any American willing to settle on 160 acres of public land, live there for five years, and improve the parcel, could file a claim and receive title. Between 1862 and 1976, when the Federal Land Policy and Management Act repealed the homesteading provisions in the contiguous states, the United States distributed approximately 270 million acres of continental North America through this mechanism of the registered claim.