Jazz great Dave Brubeck died on December 5, one day short of his 92nd birthday.  Since then, there have been many retrospectives – in print, on television, on radio, and on line.  Almost all of those remembrances mention the goodwill tour of Poland and the Far East that Brubeck and his quartet made in 1958 [...]

In her 2005 study Drawing The Line: Nature, Hybridity and Politics in Transboundary Spaces, geographer Juliet Fall recounts a parable from a tumultuous corner of Europe: “A local tale told of a man who was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, christened in Czechoslovakia, married in Hungary, had his first child in the USSR, and died [...]

  From 1943 to 1946, Colonia Santa Rosa in Guanajuato, Mexico was the site of a US-government sponsored home for Polish refugees. About 240 miles northwest of Mexico City and “10 minutes’ ride by mule-drawn tram from the Leon railway station,” the hacienda included a 39-room ranch house, a flour mill, ten wheat storage warehouses, [...]