Mary F. Corey is a senior lecturer in American history at UCLA specializing in intellectual history, popular culture, and Black nationalism. She is the author of The World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury (Harvard University Press, 1999) and is currently working on a book about Black blackface performance, tentatively titled “They Stooped to Conquer.” Corey is a recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award.
Mary F. Corey
Articles
Nettie in Pantherland
Mary F. Corey reviews Fabienne Josaphat’s new novel “Kingdom of No Tomorrow.”
Confederate Dunces: On Percival Everett’s “The Trees”
A comic condemnation of white racism with a Twainian level of wit and meanness.
Lying with Numbers
At the end of the 19th century social scientists embraced statistics that “proved” Black criminality. Therein lies a tale.
The Prophet Is Human
A towering new biography of a great American orator and public intellectual.
A Holocaust in Slow Motion: On Kelly Lytle Hernández’s “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, And The Rise Of Human Caging In Los Angeles, 1771-1965”
Mary F. Corey reviews “City of Inmates” by Kelly Lytle Hernández, a historical account of mass incarceration and genocide in Los Angeles.
Cruel but Not Unusual: Putting Down the Attica Uprising of 1971
Mary F. Corey on Heather Ann Thompson's Pulitzer Prize–winning "Blood in the Water: The Attica Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy."
Love Lays Ghastly Traps for the Soul
“Love lays ghastly traps for the soul,” in Tremain’s engrossing tales, but her characters accept their unhappiness as the necessary antidote to meaninglessness.
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