HERMAN MELVILLE

Charles Fuller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of the searing and acclaimed “A Soldier’s Play” who often explored and exposed how social institutions can perpetuate racism, has died.

Roughly 15 years before Herman Melville introduced the world to Moby Dick, a whaling ship from Massachusetts sank near the mouth of the Mississippi River. Nearly 190 years later, experts say, it’s still the only whaler known to have gone down in the Gulf of Mexico, where the threat of enslavement at Southern ports posed a risk for Black and mixed-race men who often were part of whaling crews. An old news clipping found in a library shows its 15 or so crew members were rescued by another whaling ship and returned home to Westport, Massachusetts, said researcher Jim Delgado of SEARCH Inc.

Eight Cuban migrants made landfall on Monday in the Florida Keys.

FILE - Julie Dash attends the New York Film Critics Circle Awards on Jan. 3, 2017, in New York. Dash's work will be featured in Turner Classic Movies' four-month Women Make Film series, airing every Tuesday night through December. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)Associated Press Film Writers Lindsey Bahr and Jake Coyle pick some programming highlights from Turner Classic Movies' four-month Women Make Film series, airing every Tuesday night through December. In her 1976 film (airing Sept. 15 on TCM), Kopple intimately documents a grueling, 13-month coal miner's strike in a small Kentucky town. They just thought I was a funny little girl who carried a tape recorder and a camera. The film won Kopple her first Oscar.