My friend (and probably yours), retired University of South Florida lobbyist Kathy Betancourt, greeted me at a recent function by saying that she was going back out to her car to get something she had been carrying around since March. I assumed that the faded appearance of the New York Times was because of our summer sun – but no, the newspaper deliberately made the front page of this special section look old and ghostly. It was titled “Overlooked: Revisiting 167 years of New York Times history to provide obituaries to women who never got them.” Read More
Doris writes a weekly column for LaGaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper, which has pages in English, Spanish, and Italian. Begun in 1922 for Tampa's immigrant community, it continues to thrive more than a century later. Her column is titled "In Context," as it aims to put contemporary issues in the context of the past.
Children at the Crossroads
June 18, 2018
It seems that nothing about the Trump administration has hit the public imagination – especially Republican women – as much as the separation of children from their parents during the immigration process. Former First Lady Laura Bush even wrote a piece for the Washington Post decrying the new policy imposed by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). She compared it to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, but that is not a correct analogy, as men, women, and children were allowed to live as families in those camps. It’s more akin to Hitler’s concentration camps, where Jews and others were separated by gender and age. Think Sophie’s Choice. Read More
The Good News Keeps Rolling In
June 11, 2018
I’ve always been an optimist – probably too much so – but decades of researching and writing history compel me to see the sunny side. We have historical high points and low points, but in the long term, the valleys rise to become mountains. This has been the case ever since we climbed out of the sea. Progress is not straight, but it is steady. Read More
Nothing Lasts Forever
June 4, 2018
You see those wretched pictures of the Middle East, with bombed out concrete homes that always were ugly on their sea of sand, and you wonder, “What happened to the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon?” Or maybe you go to Egypt and marvel at the pyramids and see the chaotic state of life there today, and think “what happened?” Ditto with the abandonments of the Aztec and the Inca in Latin America and the once-Great Wall of China and many more. Read More