Tag: common assumption
The U.S. Child-Welfare System Fails Its Children
When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, my parents both died. Like many American children, I had been steeped in stories about orphans for years, but the books I had read and movies I had watched (Jane Eyre, Annie) failed to mirror my experience of parental loss. They also contributed to my mistaken understanding of orphanhood and the makeup of our child-welfare system—misconceptions that many Americans hold today.
For one, I believed that orphanages were
The Second Elizabethan Age Has Ended
The first Elizabethan era ended on March 24, 1603, when 69-year-old Queen Elizabeth I died in her sleep at Richmond Palace. “This morning, about three o’clock, her Majesty departed from this life, mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree,” the lawyer John Manningham wrote in his diary. Elizabeth I’s 45-year reign was a “golden age,” a course of events that no one would have predicted at her birth. She had survived her mother’s execution,