African American Demonstrators outside White House, with signs “We demand the right to vote, everywhere” and Signs Protesting Police Brutality against Civil Rights Demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, Washington, D.C., USA, Warren K. Leffler, US News & World Report Magazine Collection, March 12, 1965. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) This weekend […]
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What if there were a way to create accurate replicas of ancient and historical instruments that could be played and heard? In late 2024, senior MIT postdoc Benjamin Sabatini wrote MIT Professor Eran Egozy to ask just that, and about a collaborative research project between the Center for Materials Research in Archeology and Ethnology (CMRAE) and […]
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L, Valerie Thomas (Photo by NASA/Interim Archives/Getty Images); R, Dr. Patricia Bath (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images) This Women’s History Month, we want to celebrate all the Black women who have helped to shape lives for the better with their innovative minds and tenacity in their respective fields. From the invention of the ironing board […]
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Portrait of Winnie Mandela, wife of Nelson Mandela, South African leader of the A.N.C. (African National Congress) who has been in jail for 23 years for opposing the government. (Photo by Bernard Bisson/Sygma via Getty Images) Happy Women’s History Month! As we carry over our celebration of Black excellence from last month, we are making […]
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Every March, we celebrate women who shaped history, but we rarely talk about the ones whose history was stolen. As we mark the anniversary of the first Salem Witch Trial on March 1, 1692, we are forced to confront the legacy of the enslaved woman coerced into becoming the face of a hysteria she did […]
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Today, MIT plays a key role in maintaining U.S. competitiveness, technological leadership, and national defense — and much of the Institute’s work to support the nation’s standing in these areas can be traced back to 1953. Two months after he took office that year, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower received a startling report from the military: […]
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James Baldwin was a prodigy. That is not the first thing most people associate with a writer who once declared that he “had no childhood” and whose work often elides the details of his early life in New York, in the 1920s and 1930s. Still, by the time Baldwin was 14, he was a successful […]
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Long before the open warfare of recent months, the US and Iran have been locked into decades of low-level conflict. Since the revolution of 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has considered the US the “Great Satan” (Israel is dubbed the “Little Satan”). The leaders of the new Shia Muslim theocracy thought of America as […]
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