On a farm in Waitsfield, Vt., in 1945, a Merchant Marine cook named Ralph Ellison was resting after his tour of duty.
"One morning scribbling, I wrote the first sentence of what later became The Invisible Man: 'I am an invisible man,' " Ellison recalled in an interview for National Educational Television.
He wrote that his protagonist — a Negro, as Ellison always put it — was young, powerless and ambitious for the role of leadership, a role at which he was doomed to fail.
Love songs are like the meat and potatoes of most rock and pop music, but sometimes you need something different. For the band Delta Rae from Durham, N.C., inspiration for new material comes from stuff like graveyards and being stuck in the wrong job.
Delta Rae is a six-piece band that includes three siblings: Ian, Eric and Brittany Holljes. Their music is like a kind of modern folklore.
"Supergenerations" of monarch butterflies migrate over 2000 miles from Canada to Mexico.
Credit SK Films
More than three decades have passed since Catalina Aguado and her husband discovered a monarch butterfly sanctuary in a Mexican forest — and helped solve the mystery of the monarch's migration.
A young boy in Canada wondered where butterflies go in the winter — and spent 40 years trying to answer that question.
In 1973, Dr. Fred Urquhart — all grown up by then — placed an ad in a newspaper in Mexico looking for volunteers to tag and observe butterflies and find their destination. A woman named Catalina Aguado and her American husband, Kenneth Brugger, answered that ad. They spent two years searching in remote parts of Mexico.
Richard Aoki was known as the "minister of education" for the Berkeley, Calif., chapter of the Black Panther Party.
Credit AP
The Panthers were fundamentally a political party. Here, Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard calls for a new U.S. Constitution from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on June 19, 1970, to guarantee all Americans the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — rights they say blacks had been denied.
Credit AP
Bobby Seale, Panther chairman and co-founder, campaigns on a rush-hour bus in Oakland, Calif., on April 13, 1973, to be Oakland's mayor. He lost, coming in a close second place, showing the strength of the party in the city where they formed.
Credit Walt Zeboski / AP
On May 2, 1967, Black Panthers amassed at the Capitol in Sacramento brandishing guns to protest a bill before an Assembly committee restricting the carrying of arms in public. Self-defense was a key part of the Panthers' agenda. This was an early action, a year after their founding.
Credit Rusty Kennedy / AP
Huey Newton co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., with Bobby Seale. This 1970 photo shows Newton in Philadelphia.
Credit Jim Palmer / AP
Black Panther members stage a protest outside the Canadian Consulate in San Francisco on June 27, 1977. The Canadian government detained Huey Newton as he returned from self-imposed exile in Cuba to stand trial for a 1964 murder. He was not convicted.
Credit AP
Police display guns and ammunition seized by officers on April 16, 1974, when 14 Black Panther Party members were arrested at the party's precinct headquarters. Bobby Seale called the raid a plot to discredit them, timed to hurt the organization's chances of winning a majority of seats in next year's City Council.
Credit Courtesy of Seth Rosenfeld
Click on the documents above to read excerpts from Richard Aoki's FBI file.
Credit AP
The iconic panther symbol was first used by Eldridge Cleaver as part of a Lowndes County Freedom Organization, a political party organized to represent African-Americans in central Alabama. In the picture is Jesse Favor, a candidate for Lowndes County sheriff in 1966.
Credit AP
Chicago police remove the body of Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, who was slain in a gunbattle with police in Chicago on Dec. 4, 1969, when police tried to search the group's office. Hampton was one of several Black Panthers who were killed in shootouts with police.
Credit David Fenton / AP
Two young men are shown at a May 1, 1970, rally in support of Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale and other Panthers in New Haven, Conn., who were being tried for the murder of a fellow Panther who confessed to being a police informant.
Credit Courtesy of Harvey Dong
Aoki was an avid firearms collector and military enthusiast. After high school, he joined the Army and later was a reservist.
Originally published on Wed October 3, 2012 2:27 pm
In an interview with Vanity Fair's contributing editor, President Obama said if Osama bin Laden was captured alive, he would have favored putting him on trial in a federal courtroom.
Originally published on Sun October 21, 2012 7:41 pm
Economic sanctions have a reputation for being the international equivalent of a slap on the wrist. But in Iran, there's evidence that they are working, and that the country's flamboyant President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might pay the price.
In the past year, Iran's currency has shed 80 percent of its value against the dollar, dropping by 25 percent in just the past week. That's caused a scramble for the few U.S. dollars available in the black market as people seek a safe haven against the free-falling rial.
Originally published on Mon October 15, 2012 10:38 am
David Wax Museum fuses traditional Mexican and American folk music into what the band calls "Mexo-Americana" — a style that's lively and unique. David Wax and Suz Slezak, the band's core members, met in Boston in 2007. After spending summers working with Quakers in rural Mexico, Wax spent a graduate fellowship year studying the local music of Mexico.
