Vicky Alvear Shecter

The handsome, boyish man's man and the powerful, dangerous vixen who steals his heart -- it's a trope that started waaaaay before Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie highjacked the tabloids.

The original outrageous, illicit power couple was none other than the pair who refuse to die in our imaginations...

When I tour school children through our museum's classical galleries, I tread carefully around some of the uglier aspects of Greek mythology. I might say something like, "Zeus fell in love with Europa and took her to Crete." Or, "Zeus loved Leda and came to her as a...

Denial is a powerful and frightening thing.

What else could convince otherwise good people to believe that what think they see in front of them -- no matter how horrendous -- isn't really happening? Or that the person they consider such a "nice guy" could really be capable of doing...

Michelle Bachmann claims that Hurricane Irene was God's way of telling American politicians to cut spending.

She follows in the footsteps of another former presidential candidate, Pat Robertson, who claimed that the earthquake in Haiti was the fault of a "pact with the devil" and...

Getting teens to care about history is always a challenge. But let someone drop a forbidden word and suddenly they're all ears.

Take, for example, what happens when I talk about a certain Egyptian queen. "Let's play a word association game," I start. "Tell me the first words that come...