A Turning Point in Time

“All these streams—political, personal, and cultural—came together and interacted,” Bloom said recently, citing the convergence of the anti-war, civil rights, and women’s liberation movements, plus technological changes and what he called the “centrality of youth culture” in the 1960s zeitgeist. Bloom himself was coming of age during the tumultuous year of 1968, when he graduated from the University of California–Santa Cruz with a degree in history. He then earned his master’s and PhD from Boston College, where he taught history at the Woods College for years. Today he’s a professor at Wheaton College.

Bloom said that 1968 became a year of catalytic change in part because a rapidly evolving media ecosystem allowed for powerful images of protest to be broadcast around the world faster than ever before, helping to amplify the grassroots energy that powered a surge of student-led uprisings, from Vietnam War protests in America to the anti-authoritarian Mexican Student Movement to the mass demonstrations of the Prague Spring. Bloom said he was interested in reexamining the past in 1968, his third book about the sixties era, to help explain how we’ve arrived at so many similarly significant political inflection points today. “I don’t want to think that history repeats itself,” he said, “but history does tell us how we arrived at a moment.” ◽

Concert Black
By Michael O’Donnell JD’04

This thriller, the second novel from best-selling author O’Donnell, follows an intrepid biographer named Ellen Wroe as she doggedly pursues Cecil Woodbridge, a legendary but secretive conductor with a dark past. O’Donnell’s story about ambition and obsession traces the pair for years as Woodbridge evades the ambitious Wroe and her prying pen from London to Chicago, until he finds he can’t run any longer.

Christopher Bruell: Essays of Five Decades on Philosophy and Philosophers
Edited by Eric Buzzetti PhD’98 and Devin Stauffer PhD’98

This anthology includes nearly all of the essays, lectures, and book chapters ever written by Bruell, a revered BC political science professor and scholar of political philosophy who died in 2024, including three previously unpublished essays. Edited by two college professors, the collection covers topics ranging from the nature of citizenship to the question of happiness, with an overarching theme of reexamining classical political philosophy. 

Ways of Virtue
by Liz O'Neill, marketing director at BC’s Center for Corporate Citizenship

Set in 1950s Martha’s Vineyard, O’Neill's romantic novel concerns Sabrina McTigue, a young socialite whose domineering Aunt Poppy has orchestrated every detail of her life, including the man she’ll marry. Those plans become complicated by Sabrina meeting Colin Hatch, a roguish pilot and notorious island bachelor. As a summer hurricane bears down on the island, Sabrina navigates coming-of-age chaos, a dramatic love triangle, and her scheming, parochial peers.

— Elizabeth Clemente