When Jackie Robinson crossed the color line at Ebbets Field in 1947, many Americans weren’t ready to see a black man play ball in the same league as white men. Seven years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against legal

Ernst Thälmann ran against Hitler in Germany’s 1932 presidential election. Neither man won, but after Hitler seized power, the communist Thälmann was arrested and eventually murdered at Buchenwald. Ironically, as Russell 

 Although not widely recognized today, Alec Wilder’s songs were sung by Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra and performed by Keith Jarrett and Kenny Burrell. His compositions for the concert hall combined jazz with classical

 Eastern Europe meets Jamaica in this surprisingly credible collaboration between the Romanian Gypsies of Mahala Rai Banda and such reggae remix producers as Mad Professor and Jstar. The convergence sounds more organic

 When a dictator holds a referendum, he expects an affirmative outcome. But when one of Latin America

 Opera is a rebuke to the dogma of realism; after all, no one sings the dialogue of his life, and key moments aren’t emphasized with the roll of kettledrums or a resounding swell of orchestration. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker

 Looking back at the 20th century, it seems as if some philosophers deliberately marginalized philosophy by refusing to address important issues in language meaningful to the general public. Perhaps that disengagement

 John Steinbeck is familiar to film buffs for the raft of Hollywood movies based on his novels, including such classics as The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden; and many of us encountered Steinbeck in a high school or college

Nothing is forever in rock anymore, least of all breakups. Whether local heroes or global superstars, defunct bands regroup nowadays with alarming regularity. Many of them downright suck; many more reemerge as mere outlines