Strolling through any European art gallery that houses works from the Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, one cannot help but notice something oddly humorous. The baby Jesus, and indeed many other infants in religious paintings, often look less like cherubic babies and more like stern, middle aged men who have seen rather a lot of life already. Their receding hairlines, solemn expressions, and oddly defined muscles leave modern viewers scratching their heads. Some appear to

On a cold January evening in 1958, an open cornfield near a quiet pond in Robeson County, North Carolina, became the unlikely stage for one of the most remarkable local acts of defiance against the Ku Klux Klan in American history. Known variously as the Battle of Hayes Pond, the Battle of Maxton Field or simply the Maxton Riot, this clash did not spring from any grandly orchestrated civil rights campaign but from a fiercely local resolve by the Lumbee people to defend their

There is no singular standard of beauty. Throughout history and across continents, human beings have continually reimagined what it means...