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Zora Neale Hurston browsing books at a book fair, looking at a book called "American Stuff."

The Zora Neale Hurston We Don’t Talk About

In the new nonfiction collection “You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” what emerges is a writer who mastered a Black idiom but seldom championed race pride.
by Lauren Michele Jackson via The New Yorker on February 14, 2022
Handwritten magazine index

‘Index, A History of the’ Review: List-O-Mania

At the back of the book, the index provides a space for reference—and sometimes revenge.
by Ben Yagoda via The Wall Street Journal on February 11, 2022
Profile photograph of Margaret Wise Brown.

The Radical Woman Behind “Goodnight Moon”

Margaret Wise Brown constantly pushed boundaries—in her life and in her art.
by Anna E. Holmes via The New Yorker on January 27, 2022
Three children playing on a frozen river.

The Ohio River

When the river freezes, lives change.
by Tiya Miles via Perspectives on History on January 27, 2022
Pastoral landscape with classical architecture. Copy after Thomas Cole’s “Dream of Arcadia”, by Robert Seldon Duncanson, 1852.

An Ugly Preeminence

On the devout abolitionists who excoriated American exceptionalism.
by Ian Tyrrell via Lapham’s Quarterly on January 26, 2022
Black and white photo of a beach with a wooden row boat beached on the shore.

The Pandemic Has Given Us a Bad Case of Narrative Vertigo; Literature Can Help

In the work of writers like W.B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf, we can find new ways to tell our own stories.
by Elizabeth Outka via Washington Post on January 25, 2022
Marian Anderson studying a musical score with the pianist Kurt Johnen, Berlin, 1931

Black Voices, German Song

What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms?
by Adam Kirsch via New York Review of Books on January 20, 2022
Black and white photograph of Lucille Clifton.

Lucille Clifton and the Task of Remembering

The poet’s memoir Generations is both a chronicle of her ancestral lineage and lesson in the centrality of Black women to the story of American history.
by Marina Magloire via The Nation on January 12, 2022
Collage of nature images and transcendentalists' faces, with flowers in Emerson's eyes.

Emerson and Thoreau’s Fanatical Freedom

Why do the Transcendentalists still have an outsize influence on American culture?
by Sarah Blackwood via The New Republic on January 6, 2022
Pen sketch of Robert Frost.

Frost at Midnight

A new volume of Robert Frost’s letters finds him at the height of his artistic powers while suffering an almost unimaginable series of losses.
by Dan Chiasson via New York Review of Books on November 24, 2021
The cover of the book "The Secret of Life"

Heels: A New Account of the Double Helix

How Rosalind Franklin, the crystallographer whose data were crucial to solving the structure of DNA, was written out of the story of scientific discovery.
by Nathaniel Comfort via Los Angeles Review of Books on October 26, 2021
A recreation of Viking grass covered structures at L’Anse aux Meadows

New Dating Method Shows Vikings Occupied Newfoundland in 1021 C.E.

Tree ring evidence of an ancient solar storm enables scientists to pinpoint the exact year of Norse settlement.
by Brian Handwerk via Smithsonian on October 20, 2021
Illustration of Henry David Thoreau and Lidian Emerson looking into each other's eyes

Thoreau in Love

The writer had a deep bond with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But he also had a profound connection with Emerson’s wife.
by James Marcus via The New Yorker on October 11, 2021
Left: Longfellow in His Study, by Worth Brehm, c. 1912. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Right: Dante Meditating on “The Divine Comedy”, by Jean-Jacques Feuchère, 1843.

As Far From Heaven as Possible

How Henry Wadsworth Longfellow interpreted Reconstruction by translating Dante.
by Ed Simon via Lapham’s Quarterly on October 4, 2021
Richard Wright.

Outcasts and Desperados

Reflections on Richard Wright’s recently published novel, "The Man Who Lived Underground."
by Adam Shatz via London Review of Books on October 4, 2021
Viking statues with a map background

Viking Map of North America Identified as 20th-Century Forgery

New technical analysis dates Yale's Vinland Map to the 1920s or later, not the 1440s as previously suggested.
by Matthew Gabriele, David M. Perry via Smithsonian on September 27, 2021
Women holding protest signs, demonstrating against school materials, 1975

When a Battle to Ban Textbooks Became Violent

In 1974, the culture wars came to Kanawha County, West Virginia, inciting protests over school curriculum.
by Ashawnta Jackson, Carol Mason, Paul J. Kaufman via JSTOR Daily on September 27, 2021
Bell in 1980. He handled civil-rights cases, then came to question their impact.

The Man Behind Critical Race Theory

As an attorney, Derrick Bell worked on many civil-rights cases, but his doubts about their impact launched a groundbreaking school of thought.
by Jelani Cobb via The New Yorker on September 10, 2021
Side profile of Julia Grant

Julia Dent Grant’s Personal Memoirs as a Plantation Narrative

Her memoirs contribute to the inaccurate post-Civil War memory of the Southern plantation.
by Nick Sacco via Muster on July 20, 2021
Building with a currogated tin facade and sign saying "Richard Perkins Contractor"

The Anti-Nostalgia of Walker Evans

A recent biography reveals the many contradictions of the photographer who fastidiously documented postwar American life.
by Rahel Aima via The Nation on June 8, 2021
Black children learning in a classroom

What’s Missing From the Discourse About Anti-Racist Teaching

Black educators have always known that their students are living in an anti-Black world and that their teaching must be set against the order of that world.
by Jarvis R. Givens via The Atlantic on May 21, 2021
Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln’s Rowdy America

A new biography details the cultural jumble of literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the making of the foremost self-made American.
by Sean Wilentz via New York Review of Books on April 29, 2021
Portrait of Walt Whitman.

How the American Civil War Gave Walt Whitman a Call to Action

Mark Edmundson on the great American poet as a defender of democracy.
by Mark Edmundson via Literary Hub on April 16, 2021
Black and white photo of poet John Berryman having a beer and a conversation with a group of men

‘The Roots of Our Madness’

John Berryman's Dream Songs made explicit the racialization of American poetry's turn—and the whiteness of lyric tradition.
by Kamran Javadizadeh via New York Review of Books on April 8, 2021
Joe Biden surrounded by words emanating from a book.

Can America’s Problems Be Fixed By A President Who Loves Jon Meacham?

How a pop historian shaped the soul of Biden’s presidency.
by Kara Voght via Mother Jones on April 2, 2021
Vincent Price.

The Strange Undeath of Middlebrow

Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.
by Phil Christman via The Hedgehog Review on March 25, 2021
Veteran and militia during 1919 Chicago Race Riot

Rereading 'Darkwater'

W.E.B. DuBois, 100 years ago.
by Chad Williams via National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) on February 22, 2021
Photograph of a newsstand selling magazines

What Are Magazines Good For?

The story of America can be told through the story of its periodicals.
by Nathan Heller via The New Yorker on February 16, 2021
Mitch McConnell wearing a mask
partner

McConnell’s Task: Purging the Crackpots and Bigots

The impeachment exposed the need for Republican leaders to banish the extremists and bigots from their movement.
by Kevin M. Schultz via Made By History on February 15, 2021
Gerd Stern.

Ping Pong of the Abyss

Gerd Stern, the Beats, and the psychiatric institution.
by Gabby Kiser via The Beat Museum on February 9, 2021
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