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The title card for Little House of a Prairie on a green hill.

50 Years Ago: America Loved a Little House

The beloved family show left a lasting legacy.
by Troy Brownfield via The Saturday Evening Post on September 11, 2024
The original cover sketch of "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go," by Richard Scarry, with cartoon animals in vehicles.

On Richard Scarry and the Art of Children's Literature

Scarry’s guides to life both reflected and bolstered kids’ lived experience, and in some cases even provided the template for it.
by Chris Ware via The Yale Review on September 9, 2024
Audre Lorde

A Book That Puts the Life Back Into Biography

To capture the spirit of the poet Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs decided to break all the rules.
by Danielle Amir Jackson via The Atlantic on September 8, 2024
Tourists on a ferry sailing along the coast of Maine.

A Picture-Book Guide to Maine

Children’s stories set on the coast suggest a wilder way of life.
by Anna E. Holmes via The New Yorker on September 8, 2024
James Baldwin

Racism, Jazz, and James Baldwin’s “Sonny Blues”

Baldwin wrote with the knowledge that change would be hard and slow to achieve.
by Tom Jencks via OUPblog on August 2, 2024
Norman Mailer.

The Tough Guy Crew

Jewish masculinity and the New York intellectuals.
by Leonard Benardo via New Statesman on June 12, 2024
Ella Watson in American Gothic, photographed by Gordon Parks.

She Was No ‘Mammy’

Gordon Parks’s most famous photograph, "American Gothic," was of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. She has a story to tell.
by Salamishah Tillet via The Atlantic on May 8, 2024
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Glad to the Brink of Fear

A new biography reveals how Ralph Waldo Emerson gave Americans a vocabulary to understand themselves in an era even more tempestuous than our own.
by Nicole Penn via American Purpose on March 13, 2024
Chickens.

Our Pets, Our Plates

In defense of the furred and the hoofed.
by Anne Matthews via The American Scholar on March 10, 2024
A photograph of George Washington Cable with Mark Twain.

The Dying Pelican

Romanticism, local color, and nostalgic New Orleans.
by Eleanor Stern via 64 Parishes on February 29, 2024
Willa Cather wearing a mink shawl and a large hat in Paris

Prairie Swooner

The hardscrabble origins and unique vision of novelist Willa Cather.
by Eric Banks via Bookforum on February 6, 2024
Black and white portrait of Jones Very

The Voice of Unfiltered Spirit

In the poetry of Jones Very, whom his contemporaries considered “eccentric” and “mad," the self is detached from everything by an intoxicated egoism.
by Brenda Wineapple via New York Review of Books on January 18, 2024
A faux Brazilian village constructed for Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici on the banks of the Seine in Rouen, France, and inhabited by fifty Tupinambá people who were forcibly brought there from Brazil, 1550.

The Discovery of Europe

A new book investigates the indigenous Americans who were brought to or traveled to Europe in the 1500s—a story central to the beginning of globalization.
by Álvaro Enrigue via New York Review of Books on December 28, 2023
Silhouette of Oppenheimer wearing a fedora.

How Do We Know the Motorman Is Not Insane?

Oppenheimer and the demon heart of power.
by James Robins via The Dreadnought on December 20, 2023
Israel Joshua Singer.

The Forgotten Giant of Yiddish Fiction

Though his younger brother Isaac Bashevis Singer eventually eclipsed him, Israel Joshua Singer excelled at showing characters buffeted by the tides of history.
by Adam Kirsch via The New Yorker on November 27, 2023
Blanche and Alfred Knopf

Toward the Next Literary Mafia

Understanding history can help us understand what will be necessary if we’re serious about finally having a more diverse, less exclusionary publishing industry.
by Josh Lambert via Public Books on November 21, 2023
Illustration of multiple people drawing the same cover of a book

Big Publishing Killed the Author

How corporations wrested creative control from writers and editors—to produce less interesting books.
by Scott Wasserman Stern via The New Republic on November 15, 2023
Willa Cather sitting on a bench, wearing a fur scarf and feathered hat and looking at the camera

Never-Ending Nostalgia: Who and What Inspired Willa Cather

On the early years of America's chronicler of the Great Plains.
by Benjamin Taylor via Literary Hub on November 15, 2023
Illustration of Chalude Shannon, William Weaver, and Italo Calvino, placed on a background of binary code

Language Machinery: Who Will Attend to the Machine's Writing?

The ultimate semantic receivers, selectors, and transmitters are still us.
by Richard Hughes Gibson via The Hedgehog Review on November 7, 2023
Statue of Paul Revere on Boston's Freedom Trail.

On the Trail—to Freedom?

Touring the palimpsests of cities.
by Charlie Riggs via The Hedgehog Review on November 1, 2023
Lenore Kandel’

The Forgotten Poet at the Center of San Francisco’s Longest Obscenity Trial

Amid Reagan’s late-sixties crackdown on the California counterculture, a jury was tasked with deciding whether Lenore Kandel’s psychedelic sex poems had “redeeming social importance.”
by Joy Lanzendorfer via The New Yorker on October 13, 2023
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Great Zimbabwe, circa 1996; photograph by Graham Smith.

Finding My Roots

The storytellers who taught me over the course of my career all knew how to bring Black history vividly to life.
by Henry Louis Gates Jr. via New York Review of Books on September 29, 2023

What Even Is "Leadership"?

And why won't all the worst people stop talking about it?
by Charles Petersen via Making History on September 21, 2023
Chairs on top of tables in an empty classroom

Are A.P. Classes a Waste of Time?

Advanced Placement courses are no recipe for igniting the intellect beyond high school. They’re a recipe for extinguishing it.
by Aaron R. Hanlon via The New Republic on September 6, 2023
The Garden Cafeteria, New York City.

Jews and Joe

From European streets to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Jews have been deeply involved in the history of coffee and the café scene.
by Orge Castellano via Tablet on August 29, 2023
An old journal with cursive writing on the pages

Slanting the History of Handwriting

Whatever writing is today, it is not self-evident. But writing by hand did not simply continue to “advance” until it inevitably began to erode.
by Sonja Drimmer via Public Books on August 9, 2023
Captain Lightfood on horseback firing a pistol.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot: The American Creation of Irish Outlaw Folk Heroes

Martin’s confession relates outlaw adventures that appear to be original. But were they real? 
by Jerry Kuntz via Commonplace on August 8, 2023
Edgar Allan Poe

Poe vs. Himself: On the Writer’s One-Sided War with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The story of the Little Longfellow War.
by Anne Whitehouse via Literary Hub on July 24, 2023
Basketball players resting on court

Game Changer

On the mismatched sporting advice of Clair Bee and John R. Tunis.
by Dan McQuade via Lapham’s Quarterly on July 10, 2023
The stairs leading to the segregated section of a cinema in Belzoni, Mississippi, in 1939.

The Writers Who Went Undercover to Show America Its Ugly Side

In the 1940s, a series of books tried to use the conventions of detective fiction to expose the degree of prejudice in postwar America.
by Samuel G. Freedman via The Atlantic on July 10, 2023
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