By Sabrina Völz

In his first speech as Pres­i­dent-elect of the Unit­ed States, Sen­a­tor Barack Oba­ma uttered the famous words which became the sound­bite echoed across the world: “Change has come to Amer­i­ca.” It was and is a high­ly opti­mistic state­ment, a state­ment that seems pre­ma­ture in light of the Michael Brown shoot­ing and all that has fol­lowed since then. And I would be the first to admit that there is still much to be done in the areas of dis­crim­i­na­tion, insti­tu­tion­al racism – well, racism of all sorts – and race rela­tions in the Unit­ed States. How­ev­er, the U.S. just might not be the coun­try that you think it is.

Change – mind-blow­ing change – has come to Amer­i­ca in the last two decades.  Read more »

By Shana Kennedy-Salchow

Imag­ine a child that does not show up on exam day or shows up and refus­es to take the exam. The child is not rep­ri­mand­ed by the par­ents but encour­aged as part of a polit­i­cal state­ment. Imag­ine no more. This is hap­pen­ing in the U.S., and it is called the Opt-Out Movement.

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By Lynette Kirschner

You’ve nev­er heard of it? Seri­ous­ly? This sub­cul­ture – which has every­thing from music, fash­ion, and lit­er­a­ture to LARPs (live action role plays), con­ven­tions and even schol­ars – is more pop­u­lar in the U.S. than in Ger­many. So what is it? If you look at steam­punk schol­ar Mike Perschon’s blog, you’ll see that it has aspects of retro-futur­ism, tech­no-fan­ta­sy, and neo-Vic­to­ri­an­ism, a move­ment not strict­ly lim­it­ed to a spe­cif­ic time frame. The main source of pow­er is steam, not gas or elec­tric­i­ty. Steam­punk is often seen as re-imag­in­ing the past not only to under­stand the present but also the sins of the past.

Is this sub­cul­ture inclu­sive or exclu­sive? When you con­sid­er that Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land wasn’t exact­ly a stel­lar time for peo­ple of col­or, gen­der or body auton­o­my, it makes you won­der why it is pop­u­lar. This is where the re-imag­in­ing comes in as some steam­punks sim­ply recre­ate this era. Per­son­al­ly, I have prob­lems with this type of rep­re­sen­ta­tion as I know my his­to­ry; how­ev­er, I also real­ize their intent isn’t to glo­ri­fy the wrongs. In fact, oth­er steam­punks re-imag­ine the past to cre­ate a nar­ra­tive for peo­ple who had no voice back then. This is what I love about steampunk.

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By Hans-Jürgen Völz

On the occa­sion of the Stop TTIP demon­stra­tion with 250,000 pro­tes­tors in Berlin on Octo­ber 10, 2015, Pres­i­dent Mario Ohoven of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Small and Medi­um Enter­pris­es (BVMW), Ger­many, declared: “TTIP and CETA must not fail. That would be a dev­as­tat­ing sig­nal for the future of Europe. It is absurd to say that TTIP and CETA will ruin the glob­al­iza­tion win­ner Ger­many, as claimed by the orga­niz­ers of the demon­stra­tion. For an export nation, such as Ger­many, free trade is and remains indispensable.”

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By Molly Martien

“An Adiron­dack camp does not mean a can­vas tent or a bark wig­wam, but a per­ma­nent sum­mer home where the for­tu­nate own­ers assem­ble for sev­er­al weeks each year and live in per­fect com­fort and even luxury.”
— William Fred­er­ick Dix [1903]

In the late 1800s to the 1920s, a select group of New York’s wealthy elite trav­eled up to their great camps in the Adiron­dacks to escape the hot and over-crowd­ed city. Upstate New York’s Adiron­dack State Park, locat­ed 3 hours out­side the city of New York, encom­pass­es count­less glacial and man-made lakes and spans 6.2 mil­lion acres, mak­ing it the largest state park in the U.S. In the Adiron­dacks, these great camps were made up of a series of hous­ing com­pounds sur­round­ing the lakes. Since these homes were in a remote wilder­ness, the camp’s archi­tects used numer­ous native resources to build the homes, con­se­quent­ly giv­ing the camps a unique rus­tic aes­thet­ic. This great camp’s archi­tec­ture par­tial­ly drew upon the Swiss chalet and the Japan­ese tea-house architecture.

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By Maria Moss

It was a clear and sun­ny day in ear­ly April when we arrived with a stu­dent group at Canyon de Chelly (pro­nounced dəˈʃeɪ/ or də·shā′). We had left our hotel on the Hopi reser­va­tion, locat­ed about one hun­dred miles to the north, ear­ly in the morn­ing. Our des­ti­na­tion: White House Ruin down in one of the creeks at Canyon de Chelly in north­east­ern Arizona.

As Sab­ri­na and I walked down the steep trail, we encoun­tered two peo­ple, a man and a woman. They were dressed in the offi­cial Nation­al Park Ranger out­fit and wore the firm felt hat so char­ac­ter­is­tic of out­door offi­cials in the Unit­ed States. White House Ruin, locat­ed with­in the bound­aries of the Nava­jo Nation, was built by the Anasza­si (or Ancient Ones), towards the end of the 11^th cen­tu­ry. Why the Anasza­si left around 1300 A.D. is still debat­ed among archae­ol­o­gists; lat­est find­ings indi­cate that cli­mat­ic rea­sons – the increase in tem­per­a­ture and the cor­re­spond­ing decrease in rain­fall – might have been the reason.

“Shall we ask them for an inter­view”? Sab­ri­na, cell phone in hand, looked ahead at the two peo­ple slow­ly approach­ing. Then she looked at me. I was doubt­ful: “Will they grant us an inter­view right here, on the spot?”

Well, they did.