The General 1998

True story of the saga that was hoped to be the long-awaited justice brought to bear upon Augosto Pinochet, Chilean dictator from 1973 to 1990. In September 1998, Pinochet flew to London on a pleasure trip but experienced back pain and underwent an operation in the London Clinic. Upon waking, he was arrested by Scotland Yard. Could it be that this was to become the first Latin American dictator to answer for crimes while serving as Head of State? After 500 days of house arrest, he nevertheless eventually returned unscathed to Chile, despite the compelling case built against him before & during this period by a young Spanish prosecutor, Carlos Castresana.

1905 was Einstein’s magical year. In that year, he published three articles, on light quanta, on the foundations of the theory of Special Relativity, and on Brownian motion, each one separately worthy of a Nobel prize. Immediately after his work on Special Relativity, Einstein started thinking about gravity and how to give it a relativistically invariant formulation. He kept on working on this problem during the next ten years, doing little else.

The dreams of abundance, choice, and novelty that have fueled the growth of consumer culture in the United States would seem to have little place in the history of Mississippi – a state long associated with poverty, inequality, and rural life, But as Ted Ownby demonstrates in this innovative study, consumer goods and shopping have played important roles in the development of class, race, and gender relations in Mississippi from the antebellum era to the present.