Best known as the woman who “ran MGM,” Ida R. Koverman (1876–1954) served as talent scout, mentor, executive secretary, and confidant to American movie mogul Louis B. Mayer for twenty-five years. ...

Congressman Emanuel Celler (1888–1981) was a New York City congressman who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1923 to 1973. Celler’s almost fifty-year career was highlighted ...

In 1966, a year after the Voting Rights Act began liberating millions of southern blacks, New Yorkers challenged a political system that weakened their voting power. Andrew W. Cooper (1927–2002), a ...

The Stooges Brass Band always had big dreams. From playing in the streets of New Orleans in the mid-1990s to playing stages the world over, they have held fast to their goal of raising brass band music ...

For thirty-four years Sister Anne Brooks, a Catholic nun and doctor of osteopathy, served one of the nation’s most impoverished towns and regions, Tutwiler, in Tallahatchie County in the Mississippi ...

Dan Duryea (1907–1968) made a vivid impression on moviegoers with his first major screen appearance as the conniving Leo Hubbard in 1941's classic melodrama The Little Foxes. His subsequent film and ...

In 1968, during Albert Lepard’s fifth escape from a life sentence at Parchman Penitentiary, he kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, then eighteen years old, from his family’s farm in Grenada, Mississippi. Three ...

José Ferrer (1912–1992) became the first Puerto Rican actor to win the Best Actor Academy Award for the 1950 film version of Cyrano de Bergerac. His iconic portrayal of the lovelorn poet/swordsman ...

What happens when you marry into a family that includes a Nobel Prize winner who is arguably the finest American writer of the twentieth century? Lawrence Wells, author of In Faulkner’s Shadow: A Memoir ...

In the summers of the early 1970s, Morris Ardoin and his siblings helped run their family's roadside motel in a hot, buggy, bayou town in Cajun Louisiana. The stifling, sticky heat inspired them to find ...