Newest Portraits

The Virginia of 1943 was a land of deep divides, and none so stark as that which separated the Black and White populations of the state. Though the Civil War had ended some eight decades prior, and Black individuals were proudly serving and dying for their country in the fight against the Axis powers, it was still overwhelmingly the case that the quality of your life on a material, medical, educational, and social level was entirely determined by the color of your skin at bir

For most, their pantheon of nursing reformers from the 19th century is a list containing precisely two people: Florence Nightingale, whose superhuman efforts during the Crimean War translated into a drive in England to make nursing a respectable occupation for middle class women, and Clara Barton, whose equally driven work during the American Civil War ultimately culminated in the creation of the American Red Cross. And certainly, these figures are both foundational, but the

Being a bug is a chancy thing. From the moment your egg is laid, you are the target of a vast array of predators hungry for your gushy, nutritive innards. Chances are, you will never make it out of your egg, as hosts of other insects either eat you directly or scoop you out to make room for their own babies to grow in the resources prepared by your mother. Out of a hundred eggs laid, it is a good day if a few dozen occupants make their way out, hopelessly, ludicrously exposed

The American West in the mid 19th century made profound demands on all those fated to experience it. The cost for even momentary lapses of vigilance was often death, and the people raised under the intense pressures and expectations of this time and place were a hard lot - self-sufficient almost to a fault, capable of feats of endurance and application that beggar belief today. Competence and self-reliance on that scale, however, usually comes at a steep cost. Having done so

At 10:17 in the morning on June 17, 1929, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook New Zealand’s Murchison region, causing landslides that claimed seventeen lives, and sending seismic P-waves throughout the Earth’s interior, to be picked up by seismology stations scattered across the globe, including to a handful of outposts that, according to everything everybody knew about the inner structure of the Earth, should not have been able to detect the quake. For some, these results were