On October 26th, 1963, Bob Dylan performed “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” for the first time in New York’s Carnegie Hall. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” were also in the set. And he closed with “When the Ship Comes In,” a song he had performed with Joan Baez only a few months earlier at the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. would later deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. Something was happening and Dylan was right in the midst of it.
-
-
Hammurabi the Humane
While the ancient world was a world that may very well have been more violent than ours, the law codes of even the most ancient peoples (flawed though those laws were and as ours are) echo through the ages with a basic, humane instinct for justice, mercy and peace.
-
A Paper Thin Distance (Conversation)
On February 16th of this year, Daryl Davis, an African American blues musician who engages with members of the Ku Klux Klan, sat down with Christian Picciolini, the former leader of a white-supremacist skinhead group, for a conversation at the New York Encounter. Their gripping discussion offers profound insight and ultimately hope for this moment in our nation.
-
The Education of Henry Adams (Book Recommendation)
The education he had received bore little relation to the education he needed. Speaking as an American of 1900, he had as yet no education at all. He knew not even where or how to begin.
-
Karl Marx’s Letter to Abraham Lincoln
Wait ... what??? One of the challenges of teaching world history is that events unfold in both time and space. Focus on what was happening all around the world at a given time, and you lose the ability to tell a clear story. But focus on a story as it unfolded in a particular place (say America, France, China or Russia), and you risk putting history into silos.
