| By J. Robert Parks | Edgar Allan Poe has been a favorite of English and language arts teachers for decades. Many who want to introduce the concept of rhyme schemes have relied on his poem “The Raven,” many who want to introduce the concepts of tone and suspense have presented “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and … Read more
| By J. Robert Parks | Harriet Tubman was a larger-than-life figure even in her lifetime. A few years after the U.S. Civil War, Frederick Douglass wrote her a letter, stating, “I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.” Tubman’s work to … Read more
| By J. Robert Parks | The growing influence of women and people of color has often been noted by their ascension to positions of power: the first governor, the first U.S. senator, and the first Supreme Court justice. The first Black Supreme Court justice was Thurgood Marshall in 1967, while the first female justice, … Read more
| By J. Robert Parks | In the 1950s and early 1960s, most of the advances in civil rights for Black people occurred because of the tireless efforts of activists and the decisions of the Supreme Court. Actual legislative changes were few and far between. That was particularly true at the federal level, where many … Read more
| By J. Robert Parks | Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In our world today, which expects instant results for anything we do, that message can seem out of touch, but the civil rights movement was an example of that … Read more
| By J. Robert Parks | Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which was decided seventy years ago this week on May 17, 1954, might be one of the most famous Supreme Court decisions of the twentieth century, but it’s also one of the more misunderstood. Although it’s widely hailed today as the … Read more
| By J. Robert Parks | It’s difficult for most people, much less young people, to imagine a time before cars, but the rise of the automobile is only about 100 years old. In fact, it was 100 years ago this week, on April 15, 1924, that the first Rand McNally Road Atlas was published … Read more
| By J. Robert Parks | There are certain public figures who are seen as embodying their generation, and if they die before they reach old age, especially in tragic ways, their deaths can be seen as the end of an era. So it was with President John F. Kennedy in 1963, with John Lennon … Read more
| By J. Robert Parks | A Raisin in the Sun was one of the most significant American plays of the twentieth century. Written by Lorraine Hansberry, it portrays a multigenerational, working-class Black family living in a cramped home in Chicago, Illinois, but dreaming of something more. It received its Broadway premiere 65 years ago … Read more
| By J. Robert Parks | Television commercials that have resonated with the U.S. public have historically relied on jingles, catchphrases, or quirky humor. Yet one of the most famous ads in television history had none of those. Instead, it featured a dystopic vision based on George Orwell’s book 1984 and didn’t even show the … Read more