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RISD's 'Cocktail Culture' offers an intoxicating history of 20th-century fashion

The high life
Across the country, on January 16, 1920, citizens drank up at liquor "wakes" before the 18th Amendment, ratified a year before, went into effect at midnight, banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of "intoxicating liquors."
By GREG COOK | May 12, 2011

Cambridge author Caleb Neelon traces graffiti's hidden history

It was written
'TAKI 183' SPAWNS PEN PALS, announced the headline in the July 21, 1971, New York Times .
By GREG COOK | April 04, 2011

A look at Portland's graffiti history

City walls
Back in the early '90s, Eli Cayer had just finished art school in Boston and headed to Maine, where he continued creating street art.
By JEFF INGLIS | April 05, 2011

Review: 'European Drawings' at the Portland Museum of Art

Historic drawings sketch the way to greater art
"European Drawings" is the Portland Museum of Art's contribution to "Where to Draw the Line: the Maine Drawing Project," a year-long series of historical and contemporary drawing exhibitions at 16 Maine galleries and art institutions.
By NICHOLAS SCHROEDER | March 30, 2011

Rewriting the history of capitalism

Revisions
Brown University president Ruth Simmons has made it hard to ignore the school's ties to slavery — and by extension, the ties of well-known Providence families.
By MARION DAVIS | March 30, 2011

Trading sexual histories

Failure
"How many guys have you been with?"
By KARL STEVENS | March 22, 2011

Review: Trinity Rep’s Crucible is potent

Hidden agendas
The Crucible is a profoundly moving story, especially when inhabited by the talents at Trinity Repertory Company. This is the third time the group has taken on Arthur Miller's masterwork of American theater, the last a quarter-century ago.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | February 17, 2011

I was a teenage Sandinista

Deb Olin Unferth left college in the '80s to become a Communist Freedom Fighter. It didn't quite work out that way.
As a freshman philosophy major at the University of Colorado, Deb Olin Unferth fell in love with a junior named George. A pious Evangelical, George felt it was his duty to help his Communist brethren in Central America fight against their capitalist oppressors. So he did, and Unferth went with him.
By EUGENIA WILLIAMSON | January 31, 2011

Interview: The authors of Future Boston on building the Boston of tomorrow

Future Boston, 15 years later
We only have three years before the aliens land. This was the future envisioned in Future Boston , an anthology by a group of local science-fiction writers published in 1995 .
By S.I. ROSENBAUM | January 21, 2011

Review: The Murder Trial of John Gordon at the Park Theatre

Trial from another era
Who knew? Everybody knows about that frisky, independent start by Roger Williams, and the first bloodshed of the American Revolution with the burning of the Gaspee , but who knows about the dispute between the lowly immigrant Gordon family and the prestigious Spragues, which resulted in the last state execution in Rhode Island, back in 1845?
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | January 18, 2011

How to create a readable future

Future Boston authors Jon Burrowes, Alexander Jablokov, Steven Popkes, David Alexander Smith, and Sarah Smith show us how it's done.
The actual future is a collaboration between nearly seven billion people worldwide. But creating a future can be a fun indoor sport for you and your friends.
By SEVERAL FUTURE BOSTON AUTHORS | January 24, 2011

Review: Christmas Revels 2010

Holy ghosts
This Christmas Revels has the real spirit.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | December 22, 2010

Time for thanks

Giving beer a place at the table
The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock nearly 400 years ago, shortly after running out of beer. Certainly beer was consumed the following year at the first Thanksgiving. So surely beer belongs at your own table this Thanksgiving!
By JOSH SMITH | November 17, 2010

World Toilet Day: The art of the flush

Public Works Dept.
Most people sit on their toilets. Some people paint them — for a good cause.
By ELIZABETH RAU | November 10, 2010

The Book of Clouds

As books turn into data and tweets are archived for posterity, how will readers and academics cope with the detritus of a digital age?
A hundred years from now, how will literary historians deal with 21st-century authors like Tao Lin?
By EUGENIA WILLIAMSON | November 17, 2010

Review: A. Cemal Ekin's 'Touching the History' at PC

See the light
In June 2009, A. Cemal Ekin, a marketing professor at Providence College, found himself in Istanbul, Turkey, atop scaffolding rising some 16 stories high inside the historic dome of Hagia Sophia.
By GREG COOK | October 12, 2010

Chris crossed (out): Columbus Day needs an update

Diverse-City
You've had a good, long run, Christopher Columbus, but I think it's time to revoke your holiday.
By SHAY STEWART-BOULEY | October 13, 2010

America's favorite pastime

Hoopleville
Preserve our historical landmarks? NO! TIME TO BLOW THEM UP!
By DAVID KISH | September 29, 2010

The death of the American city, revisited

Renewables
Urban renewal is seldom discussed as anything but the great scourge of the American city — a disastrous post-World War II push to steamroll working-class neighborhoods and replace them with towering concrete buildings and cavernous plazas that sterilized once-vibrant places.
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG | September 16, 2010

The aristocrats

Behind the Hedgerow follows the moneyed in Newport
As year-round busloads of tourists attest, people will always be fascinated by the stately mansions along Newport's Bellevue Avenue, more than a century after robber baron money and such financed their construction. Even more compelling, upon close examination, are the lives of the American aristocrats living in them, the town's social elite.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | August 04, 2010

The Seeker

Salvatore Mancini’s quest for elemental connections
Salvatore Mancini has photographed factories along the Blackstone River Valley to record a local history of the Industrial Revolution.
By GREG COOK | June 24, 2010

Review: Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies

Linking movies and Cubist painting
Picasso seems to have done so, though preferring Chaplin slapstick and cowboy silents to artsy fare, and biographers place him at several screenings of Lumière shorts.
By GERALD PEARY | June 24, 2010

Book bag for the dog days

Load up your Goodman, Gordimer, Franzen, Moody, and more
Planning to be lazy and let it all go this summer? Sorry, there are too many good books to read. From Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector to Richard Rhodes's The Twilight of the Bombs and Jean Valentine's Break the Glass , you'll find tomes galore to keep you occupied through Labor Day.
By BARBARA HOFFERT | June 16, 2010

Beyond belief

Three literary fantasies for summer — including a true one
One of the purposes of escapist reading is to feed our daydreams.
By CHARLES TAYLOR | June 16, 2010

A Rhode Island filmmaker’s tribute to the Good War

Heroes
Amid the moral ambiguity of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the handwringing over weapons of mass destruction, drone attacks, and the rights of detainees — there is something startling about the raw patriotism of the documentary Navy Heroes of Normandy .
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG | June 02, 2010

Cowardly new world

Diverse-City
I know that the ancient Mayan calendar indicated the world may end in 2012, but I doubt it. Instead, let me illustrate how bad it might get, starting in that year.
By SHAY STEWART-BOULEY | May 26, 2010

Photos: 'The Kennedys' at Peabody Essex Museum

Photos of JFK, Jackie Onassis and family at the PEM through July 18
"The Kennedys” exhibit at Peabody Essex Museum, through July 18
By RICHARD AVEDON | May 19, 2010

Hearing voices

Dave Tompkins chases the Vocoder in his book How To Wreck a Nice Beach
Don’t be fooled by its textbook appearance — How To Wreck a Nice Beach (Melville House/Stop Smiling) is hardly a dry anthropological study of “The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop,” as the subtitle suggests.
By CHRIS FARAONE | May 14, 2010

Slideshow: Photos from the War Lovers

Photos of Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Randolph Hearst, and more from Evan Thomas' book.
Photos from Evan Thomas' book The War Lovers.
By EVAN THOMAS | May 14, 2010

Meet Evan Thomas

The parallel careers of Newsweek's premier wordsmith
Narrative is the throughline in the professional life of Evan Thomas.
By PETER KADZIS | May 13, 2010

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