The Story Of A Coral Necklace

A literary and cultural history of coral—as an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a personal ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphor Today, coral and the human-caused threats to coral reef ecosystems symbolize our ongoing planetary crisis. In the nineteenth century, coral represented something else; as a recurring motif in American literature and culture, it shaped popular ideas about human society and politics. In Coral Lives, Michele Currie Navakas tells the story of coral as an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a cherished personal ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphor. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including works by such writers as Sarah Josepha Hale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and George Washington Cable, Navakas shows how coral once helped Americans to recognize both the potential and the limits of interdependence—to imagine that their society could grow, like a coral reef, by sustaining rather than displacing others. Navakas shows how coral became deeply entwined with the histories of slavery, wage labor, and women’s reproductive and domestic work. If coral seemed to some nineteenth-century American writers to be a metaphor for a truly just collective society, it also showed them, by analogy, that society can seem most robust precisely when it is in fact most unfree for the laborers sustaining it. Navakas’s trailblazing cultural history reveals that coral has long been conceptually indispensable to humans, and its loss is more than biological. Without it, we lose some of our most complex political imaginings, recognitions, reckonings, and longings.

Hate divides, but love brings us together. In our darkest times, simple acts of kindness speak louder than the most ornate words - we can travel through time and experience how Shri Mataji demonstrated compassion in action when India was going through the agony of Partition. Shri Mataji's life was full of instances where she changed destinies and elevated ordinary people into something greater - Bringing out the best in them through her love and understanding. 'The Power oof Love' is a story taken from Shri Mataji's talk that illustrates how Her selfless acts of kindness and bravery saved three refugees' lives and returned to Her as ripples of love. So may we all learn to be brave and kind and overcome all the darkness dividing humanity.

Honored by Time magazine as one of the year's ten best plays and winner of the Drama Desk and Hull-Warriner Awards, this vivid and deeply affecting drama combines humor and power in capturing the sense of black consciousness in America during a time of tr