検索キーワード： 著者 "David Boles" すべてのカテゴリー

What do the living owe the dead?Emma Vogel finds a photograph in her father's nightstand two days before they bury him: a young man in uniform, a young woman with dark eyes, and a name on the back—Ruth, 1946. The photograph her father carried for more than fifty years. The secret that changed...

In the British Museum's Mesopotamian galleries, behind glass, sits a clay mask approximately three thousand eight hundred years old. The face was made to terrify. Hooded sockets sink the eyes into darkness, intestinal coils wrap the brow, and a chipped tooth grins from the left side of the mouth. The mask was paid for. Somebody walked silver from a temple administrator's hand to a workshop, where an artisan converted clay and several days of labor into a working monster, and the figure left the workshop on a delivery cart for a fee. The specific contract has not survived.

Paris, August 19, 1839. François Arago reads the technical details of Louis Daguerre's photographic process into the joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Within weeks the satirical press is mocking photographers as mechanics and copyists. Twenty years later, Charles Baudelaire writes the canonical hostile statement: photography belongs in the museum of records, not the gallery of art. The painters of 1839 were wrong. They were also partly right. The Scientific Aesthetic begins with that double judgment and works through its consequences.

An argument for taking a stolen title back. In 1595, in the Italian city of Padua, a medical student climbed a dark staircase and came out standing at a wooden rail, inside a funnel of carved walnut six galleries deep, every eye aimed at one lit table. The Greek word for a theater means the seeing-place, and the men at that rail knew what kind of room they were in. The anatomists knew too. They had built a theater on purpose. For most of Western history, art meant a principled, teachable discipline of making and doing, judged by its work.

The Confederacy lost the war and won the memory. Its armies were destroyed, its claim to nationhood erased, and the idea those armies carried into the field outlived them all. In The Synthetic Cause, David Boles traces how a beaten cause captured the story of its own defeat. It wrote the textbooks, raised the monuments, sainted the losers, and walked back into American institutions through the front door. The old machinery worked in bronze and marble and said out loud what it wanted. The machinery running now has learned to hide.

In 1545, the richest vein of silver ever found split open a mountain in the Andes.

Sixty years ago, Peter Brook opened The Empty Space with a bare stage, a man walking across it, and someone watching, and the theatre took the sentence as scripture. The Occupied Space answers at the anniversary: the floor was never bare. Somebody owns it, somebody polices it, and somebody pays for it. The figure who crosses it can die, and the room knows. Written from inside the working theatre, this book puts the most quoted stage doctrine of its century on trial without borrowing a sentence of it.

Ottawa, February 2022. Canadian banks freeze the accounts of protest donors without a court order, and people learn at store counters that their cards have stopped working. Four years later, in January 2026, Canada's Federal Court of Appeal rules the emergency invocation behind those freezes unreasonable and beyond the law. Between those two dates sits the question this book exists to answer: what is money worth if someone else decides when it works?

Verlin Bluffs, Nebraska. For more than a century a Black funeral house has kept the county's dead: washed, carried, and entered by name in a register whose Remarks column holds what no courthouse form would take. In 1919 a drowned stranger comes off the river with a debt fastened to his body, and August Wardlaw writes him into the book as No. 611, man unknown.

In the spring of 1973, a teacher in a Lincoln, Nebraska classroom handed an eight-year-old boy a blue armband marked S, for slave, and set the brown-eyed children over him for the day. The next morning the roles reversed. No one in that room was Black. The lesson, the teacher said, was empathy.

Everyone is your friend now. The word that once required an altar can be had for a thumb. For fifty years, David Boles ran his life on one blanket rule: if I know you, you are my friend. Then an actor he calls Curtis said six words in a rehearsal room, and a laugh came out where a sentence should have been, a sentence thirty years in the carrying. This book opens that ledger and refuses to close it politely.

To recant is to take back a belief in public, under pressure, in front of the people who demanded the reversal. The word carries an older sense underneath the modern one. It comes from the Latin for singing again, and the act it names is a song performed backward, on command, so that the saying can stand in for the truth. In My Mind I'm Standing Up is a history of that act, traced from the Inquisition and the Reformation through the Moscow show trials, the Hollywood blacklist, and the Maoist struggle session, and into the public apology of our own moment.

An argument against rule by the dead. In January of the year 897, the reigning pope had his predecessor's corpse pulled from its tomb, dressed in full vestments, propped upright, and put on trial in Rome. A deacon answered the prosecution in the dead man's voice, and the sentence was carried out on the body. History treats the Cadaver Synod as a medieval freak show. Barbarous Ancestors treats it as a method, and follows that method into the marble courtroom where it now decides American life.

On April 23, 2016, a warning went up in a comment thread beneath a blog entry about the ugly laws: the ADA is in danger, and the disabled are being propelled backward. Ten years later came the memorandum that proved the warning right. Back to Willowbrook is the record of how America taught itself to see disabled people as citizens, and of how fast that teaching is being unlearned.

You have heard that the human attention span has fallen below a goldfish's. It is one of the most quoted statistics of the digital age, repeated in TED talks and tenth-grade classrooms, in newspaper trend pieces and the pitch decks of companies selling a cure for the affliction they just named. The claim has a single defect its champions rarely raise. There was never a study. There was never a goldfish. The number was invented, and a century took it as a verdict on itself. The Eighteen-Minute Lie is the biography of that lie.

On January 30, 2026, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia. The federation that had carried American public broadcasting from the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act through fifty-eight years of programming, political contestation, and federal appropriation reached its legal end. UNDERWRITTEN is the first full institutional history of that federation.

Two words in red ink killed a screenplay and began a book. In 1985 a young dramatist sent a teleplay about William Jennings Bryan to a historian for review. It came back with BAD DRAMA scrawled across the title page, and the play was buried. Forty years later the writer went back to find out whether the verdict had fallen on his work or on the man he had dared to take seriously.

In the fall of 1984, in a darkened lecture hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, two professors offered competing arguments about why beauty matters. The art historian said beauty connects. The film scholar said beauty instructs. Both were right, and both were incomplete. The question that has taken forty years to formulate is the question this book attempts to answer: if beauty connects and instructs, who controls the connection, and who writes the lesson plan? The Human Universal Beautiful proposes a new framework for understanding how beauty operates as a historical force.

The Brittle Self is a history of one of the oldest fears a mind can hold: that the self is fragile, that it can be seen through, broken, switched off, or shown to be unreal. Across six hundred years the fear holds steady while its costume keeps changing, and the book follows that single dread from a medieval palace to a present-day clinic. It begins in 1393, when Charles the Sixth of France forbade his court to touch him, certain his body had turned to glass and would shatter at a careless hand.

The conquest of Native America is usually told as two thefts, the theft of the land and the killing of the people. Beyond the Burial Tree adds a third, harder to see because it left no acreage and no body count: the seizure of a people's authority over its own dead. The right to decide how the dead are mourned, where they rest, and whether they remain present to the living was carried off along with the ground and the lives, and that taking is the subject of this book. David Boles tells it through the people whose river raised him.