The sexual exploitation of children by adults has a long, fraught history. Yet how cultures have reacted to it is shaped by a range of forces, beliefs, and norms, like any other social phenomenon. Changes in how Anglo-American culture has understood...

He was, according to Pauline Kael, "the greatest American screenwriter". Jean-Luc Godard called him "a genius" who "invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today". Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts – including "Scarfac...

Alan Hurwitz ascended the ranks of academia to become the president of not one, but two, universities – National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology and Gallaudet University. In "Let's Go In: My Journey to a Universi...

"Mother of Orphans" is the compelling true story of Alice, an Irish-American woman who defied rigid social structures to form a family with a black man in Ohio in 1899. Alice and her husband had three children together, but after his death in 1912, A...

Originally published in 1999, Sounds Like Home adds an important dimension to the canon of deaf literature by presenting the perspective of an African American deaf woman who attended a segregated deaf school. Mary Herring Wright documents her life f...

Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new account, John Hardman redresses the balance and sheds...

Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was a man of huge paradoxes and contradictions and is one of the most misunderstood Zionist political leaders – a first-rate novelist, a celebrated Russian journalist, and founder of the branch of Zionism now headed by...

Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was an anomaly. A virtuoso pianist and electrifying showman, he toured extensively throughout the European continent, bringing sold-out audiences to states of ecstasy while courting scandal with his frequent...

Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), daughter of romantic poet Lord Byron and his highly educated wife, Anne Isabella, is sometimes called the world's first computer programmer and has become an icon for women in technology. But how did a young wom...

A film-centric portrait of the extraordinarily gifted movie director whose decades – long influence on American popular culture is unprecedented. "Everything about me is in my films", Steven Spielberg has said. Taking this as a key to understanding t...