WashU Expert: Play it again, Uncle Sam

WashU Expert: Play it again, Uncle Sam

Rick and Ilsa, “Casablanca’s” ill-fated lovers, will always have Paris. Uncle Sam will always have Kabul. And Saigon. And Baghdad. In the long-running tragedy of American foreign entanglements, Uncle Sam has become less a hapless romantic idealist and more a cynical “love ’em and leave ’em” serial abuser, says veteran filmmaker Richard Chapman.
Electrifying Mexico

Electrifying Mexico

Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City

Many visitors to Mexico City’s 1886 Electricity Exposition were amazed by their experience of the event, which included magnetic devices, electronic printers, and a banquet of light. It was both technological spectacle and political messaging, for speeches at the event lauded President Porfirio Díaz and bound such progress to his vision of a modern order. […]
42 Today

42 Today

Jackie Robinson and His Legacy

New collection explores Jackie Robinson’s compelling and complicated legacy  Before the United States Supreme Court ruled against segregation in public schools, and before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, Jackie Robinson walked onto the diamond on April 15, 1947, as first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers, making history as the […]
Remembering William H. Danforth

Remembering William H. Danforth

William H. Danforth (1926-2020) served as Washington University’s 13th chancellor. A man of compassion, Chancellor Danforth touched the lives of countless students, faculty and staff, and he oversaw the university’s rise from a commuter campus to a world-renowned institution.
The Black Widows of The Eternal City

The Black Widows of The Eternal City

The true story of Rome's most infamous poisoners

“The Black Widows of the Eternal City” offers, for the first time, a book-length study of an infamous cause celebre in seventeenth-century Rome, how it resonated then and has continued to resonate: the 1659 investigation and prosecution of Gironima Spana and dozens of Roman widows, who shared a particularly effective poison to murder their husbands. […]
John Dryden

John Dryden

Selected Writings

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the poetry and prose of John Dryden, the most important poet, dramatist, translator, and literary theorist of the later seventeenth century. He wrote across the tumultuous decades of political and cultural revolution — years stretching from the end of […]
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