The Pima Indians of Arizona have one of the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the United States. Half of the people living on the Pima reservations, along the Gila and Salt River valleys in Arizona, suffer from diabetes. However, their tribal cousins, the Nevome of Mexico, don’t have anywhere near the same incidence […]
When it was published in 1975, with text by John Berger and photos by Jean Mohr, A Seventh Man made the invisible visible. In Germany and Britain at that time, one in seven manual workers was an immigrant. In France, Switzerland, and Belgium, the corresponding figure was 25 percent. European prosperity during the Cold War […]
She was seventeen when she decided to learn Spanish. Until that time, Rigoberta Menchu Tum spoke only Quiche, a Mayan language. In Guatemala, where 65 percent of the population is indigenous, it was not difficult for a young Quiche woman to maintain distance from the Spanish-speaking dominant culture. But as Rigoberta Menchu became involved in […]
Located in the coastal city of Mombasa in Kenya, Bombolulu Workshops employs 150 artisans, most of them with physical disabilities. They make jewelry, clothes, and wooden sculptures. In addition to being a major center for rehabilitation, Bombolulu functions like a modern enterprise with its own marketing and design departments. The center derives some of its […]
In 1777, long before the advent of sex change operations, Charles d’Eon de Beaumont abruptly changed his gender. Soldier, royal censor, diplomat, and spy, d’Eon was a famous figure in pre-revolutionary France. At a young age he became a member of the King’s Secret, a network of spies in the service of the French king. […]
On a fall day in 1964, civil rights activist Mario Savio took off his shoes, climbed atop a police car on Berkeley campus, and started a movement. Inside the police car sat Jack Weinberg, a Berkeley alumnus arrested for distributing civil rights literature from a table in front of Sproul Hall. The crowd of students […]
The women of Afghanistan have rarely enjoyed equal status with men, not under the kings that ruled the country for centuries, not under the Soviet-backed regime that took over in a 1979 coup, and definitely not under the fundamentalist Taliban who seized power in 1992. In this country, with one of the lowest rates of […]
In 1835, when Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands 800 kilometers off the coast of Ecuador, the nearly pristine isolation of the volcanic archipelago and its many unique species inspired his theory of natural selection. Although isolation had been the best insurance policy for the island’s ecology, the Galapagos quickly lost that distinction. Nineteenth-century whaling […]
When upstart Japan defeated the Russian empire in 1905, the world was stood on its head. It was the first time in modern history that the East had beaten the West. Japan presented its expansion of influence in the region under the rubric of “Asia for Asians.” As the century progressed and Japan became ever […]
When the Workers Party took over the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 1989, they introduced “participatory budgeting.” It was a radical experiment for this industrial city of 1.3 million people. Ordinarily, the city budget was an opportunity for political elites to distribute funds and contracts to their cronies. The Workers Party changed all that […]