A UNM UNDERGRADUATE named Federico Antonio Reade called me in Santa Fe in the fall of 1980 asking to record my recollections of the Rio Arriba County Court House Raid — a northern New Mexico rebellion that already was fading beneath a wash of scholarly interpretation. I had been the only journalist (and the only […]
JOURNEYS
My travel articles, high and low, east and west.
“My fellow citizens,” Abraham Lincoln said, addressing Congress in December 1863. “We cannot escape history.” The sentiment and, “The past never dies. It is not even past,” a line from William Faulkner that has been elevated by quote pickers to the status of an aphorism about the South, hummed like a soundtrack in my
By LARRY JOSEPH CALLOWAY (C) Southern Arizona is known for some spectacular views of . . . the heavens. Kitt Peak, which we visited, has 25 big astronomical telescopes, most of them owned by universities. Other land-based optical observatories (to use the technical term accommodating the space age) are scattered on other Arizona peaks. Before
By Larry Joseph Calloway © A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA by Joshua Kurlantzick (Scribner, 2017) Laos is a great place to be a tourist. It has Luang Prabang, with its French colonial architecture and Buddhist monasteries along a simple historic main street. It
Singapore political architect Lee Kwan Yew and his offhand critic, the American global anthropologist Clifford Geertz, needed to talk. About colonialism, democracy, culture. . . First of two essays on the possible city-state of the future.
What is culture? At first glance the amiable sales person was Chinese, but this was not China and we were dealing in English. I wanted a cultural experience, not the camera. Or so I thought.