I started researching trafficking and its attendant forms of child exploitation in the late 1990s. Back then, if I mentioned that I was working on “trafficking,” most people assumed I meant drug trafficking. A few even responded by telling me...

Among the most powerful artifacts I know of early American women’s work isn’t an artifact at all.  It is the darkened wood around some eighteenth-century flooring, shown to me many years ago now by an architectural conservator at work in the...

The only book about Staten Island I can remember reading as a child was Paul Zindel’s The Pigman which probably most Staten Islanders have been assigned to read at one point in middle school. I liked The Pigman, the working-...

The plot of the hit show Stranger Things revolves around another dimension, the Upside Down, where people’s thoughts and behaviors are controlled by an organism known as the Mind Flayer. When the Mind Flayer crosses into our world, it...

Alim, an immigrant from Liberia, was quick to realize why fewer passengers were using his services as an airport-shuttle driver at the Dallas Fort Worth airport. A few weeks earlier, Thomas Duncan, a native of Liberia, had died of Ebola at a...

JHU Press recently invited me to comment on...