Imagine this: a young African girl, barefoot but wearing a dress and head wrap, clenches her fists and looks you in the eye. Behind her a semi-circle of men, some in suits and some in kente cloth, turn their backs to her. The girl is Abina,

The second-longest reigning British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II has always remained an elusive figure, a monumental accomplishment given the media attention focused upon her family. In her new book, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch (Ra...

Whoever states the old adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words” grossly underestimates. So Erin D. Chapman shows in Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (Oxford University Press, 2012).

When I teach my course on gender, sexuality, and human rights, my students invariably want to talk about China’s one-child policy. They imagine living in a state where the government tells you how many children you can have – and they’re horrified.

In December of 2011, Oprah Winfrey appeared on The Dr. Oz Show to talk about her new big plans and her inspirations for the future. Oprah replied, “For me at this particular time in my life I recognize that everything is about moving closer to that whi...

Much ink has been spilled in telling the story of the making of Gone With the Wind– be it the book, the movie, or the subsequent musicals and merchandise. So it’s not only refreshing but downright commendable that in their biography,

The birth of the American republic produced immense and existential challenges to Native people in proximity to the fledgling nation. Perhaps none faced a greater predicament than the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (popularly known as the...

We’re all familiar with the film cliche of the little band of soldiers who in ordinary life never would have had met, but who learn to appreciate each other in the battles of World War II. All white, of course: African Americans would have to wait till...

For years, biographers have been fascinated by the Mitfords, a quiet aristocratic British family with six beautiful daughters, nearly all of them famous for their controversial and stylish lives. There’s Nancy,

What would a Presidential campaign be without a good dose of reproductive politics? To be sure, many of us are surprised to see contraception, and not just abortion, called into question – but maybe that’s because the intensity of abortion politics has...

Is your gender essential to who you are? If you were a man instead of a woman, or vice versa, would you be a different person? In her new bookThe Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford University Press, 2011), Charlotte Witt found that most people answered that...

Elizabeth West has written an insightful study about the presence of African spirituality in the autobiographies, poetry, speeches and novels of African American women, ranging from Phylis Wheatley to Harriet Wilson to Zora Neale Hurston.

As a whole, the genre of biography trends towards linear narratives–wherein the events of a subject’s life are tracked in the order that they occurred. This makes sense, as it’s how we live our lives, but there are advantages that come with non-linear ...

Nearly twenty years after the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, biographers are not only continuing to tell her story but finding provocative new ways to do so. In particular, a big bravo to William Kuhn for considering the former First Lady in a co...

One lesson that the ever-present trickster figure in African American folklore teaches is how to use signifying to protect one’s intimate self. A challenge of writing Dorothy West’s life is getting beyond the masks she presents before the ever-prying g...

Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s. And yet, so often Piaf’s high-spirits are used against her and her lif...

I can’t remember when I first saw one of those horrible photographs of a lynching, with crowds of white people, kids included, laughing and pointing at the mangled black body hanging from a tree. I do know that such images were part of my childhood men...

Few people can claim to have created a literary genre… Phillis Wheatley did. By the time she was twenty, her name- taken from the slave ship that carried her to America and the family that bought her upon arrival- would be known throughout the world.

“When your grandmother gets raped, put it on the front page.” That was the Medill family editorial policy and Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson embraced it enthusiastically. The granddaughter of the Chicago Tribune‘s founder,

Forty-five years after her death, the reproductive rights activist Margaret Sanger remains a polarizing figure. Conservatives attack her social liberalism while liberals shy away from her perceived advocacy of eugenics and her supposed socialist tenden...

Today, you can open your newspaper and find stories about mass rape in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, death sentences for adulterous women in Iran, or Central American women smuggled into the US for the purposes of sexual slavery.

I saw “The Decline of Western Civilization,” Penelope Spheeris’s film documenting the late seventies punk scene in Los Angeles, when it was first released in 1981/82. Performances by the “popular” bands like Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, X,

Aside from being aesthetically equated to Elizabeth Taylor, Cleopatra has not fared well in history. In her riveting biography Cleopatra: A Life (Back Bay Books, 2011), which is now out in paperback, Stacy Schiff establishes that this was primarily bec...

When she emerged triumphant in a legal battle with the Texas beef industry, Oprah Winfrey took to the steps of the Amarillo court house and declared: “Free speech rocks!” She was likely a little less enthusiastic about the First Amendment following the...

In what must be one of the most well-organized and clearly-written books in the history of academic writing, Yi-Li Wu‘s book, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2010),