The Curious Case of Harper Lee vs. the County School Board
by Jamal Stone Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has become a rite of passage for middle- and high-school students for its sensitive approach to mature topics such as racism, rape, and murder. But in 1966 some parents found its subject matter “immoral.” At least that was the reason given when Virginia’s Hanover School Board, then embroiled in the...
Julia Scheeres Documents the Untold Story of Jonestown
This week we recommend the Longreads exclusive excerpt of journalist Julia Scheeres’s New York Times bestselling investigative work, A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown. In this piece, Scheeres follows the story of Tommy Bogue, a troubled teenager who followed his parents from San Francisco to the ill-fated Jonestown compound founded by Jim Jones deep in the Guyana...
The Woman Behind “The Grapes of Wrath”
by Carla Dominguez Sanora Babb was a writer, poet, and journalist who spent most of her adult life living in the shadow of John Steinbeck. By a strange twist of fate, the meticulous notes she took during her time visiting migrant workers in the Dust Bowl underpinned two novels: her own, Whose Names Are Unknown, and...
Silent Histories
by Carla Dominguez Portraits have always been the most popular type of photography. Besides being an excellent preservation of our history, portraits give us permission to stare at people, quietly learning their stories. Hugh Mangum was a self-taught itinerant photographer from Durham, North Carolina who understood the truth that portraits convey. At the beginning of...
The Real Lolita
Here at Broad Street we love reading about the true-life stories that have inspired some of our favorite fiction. That’s why we recommend a recent piece over at Hazlitt investigating the 1948 abduction of Sally Horner, a New Jersey fifth-grader whose kidnapping at the hands of Frank La Salle, along with the trip Horner made...
