I grew up in the Deep South of the 1950s and 1960s. Social change wasn’t only in the air; it was in the streets and, more importantly, in the city buses, the dime store lunch counter, and the public schools. The Civil War had ended a century before, but it seemed like it was still being fought in the civil rights battles that competed for newspaper space with the growing war in Vietnam.
The school board of Jefferson Parish in suburban New Orleans, anticipating the racial integration of schools, had segregated the high school student populations by gender – boys went to one school, girls to another. The first year of integration saw riots, fights, and protests, the more violent ones at the boys’ high school but including the girls’ school to a lesser degree. Federal marshals became an in-school presence.
Luke Adam Hawker is a designer who made the leap to full-time art in 2015. His background is architecture and design, and in his art, he works to connect places and people. His limited-edition prints can be found at several locations in London, including the Royal Opera House, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Old Royal Naval College, and Battersea Power Station.
Hawker has also published three books. Together (2021) is a graphic novel that turned into a surprise bestseller. The Last Tree: A Seed of Hope (2023) is a fable about a world without trees. This year, he published To Those Who Speak, a much more personal story that’s less a story and more of a non-fictional account with quiet, profound illustrations.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
“The war endures in you,” writes poet Ayala Zarfjian, “It lingers in your capillaries, / in your arteries, / in your veins. / The war is a river that bridges the past to the present.” The war she’s speaking about is World War II and the part of the war that made it unlike any other – the Holocaust. If you’re Jewish, the Holocaust is not something that’s ever over.
That’s the theme that threads through every poem in Zarfjian’s collection A Corner in the World. She wrote the poems specifically for her father, who survived the Holocaust while most of the family perished. Zarfjian has written them so that the stories they tell, and the people they’re about, will not be forgotten, that the Holocaust itself will not be written off as someone’s crazy conspiracy theory but the real destruction of people, millions of people, that tragically, horribly happened.
When the American Revolution started, a group not insignificant in numbers and influence was not impressed. They were known as the Loyalists, and as Kimberly Nath at The Conversation writes, they paid a steep price for their allegiance to Britain. At the same publication, Amanda Moniz writes about an unintended effect of the American Revolution. The conflict which led to American political independence also transformed philanthropy, not only in America but in Britain as well.
It’s one of the most famous of American short stories. A young couple give up their most treasured possessions for each other. John Savoie at Literary Matters writes that the biblical allusions in “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry is far more present than the story’s title.
In 1862, Nathaniel Hawthorne found himself almost unable to write. He was distracted by the growing conflict we now call the Civil War. So, he went to Washington, D.C., to observe what was happening from one of the two epicenters of the conflict. Richard Smith at Emerging Civil War has the story.
