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A drawn portrait of James Baldwin in front of a line drawing of a classroom with desks.

The Fire This Time

How James Baldwin speaks to lethal myths of white innocence—and why his work belongs in public-school classrooms.
by Sana Hashmi via The Forum on August 30, 2022
Lithograph of a a band playing and upper-class people dancing in a park.

The Scandalous Roots of the Amusement Park

The "Pleasure Gardens" of the 18th Century captivated the public with a heady mix of fantasy and vice.
by Cath Pound via BBC News on August 21, 2022
Black and white photo of children holding signs about remembrance, at a depot in New York City to greet their parents after a mass strike parade in 1911.

The Building Blocks of History

A lively defense of narrative history and the lived experience that informs historical writing.
by Walker Mimms, Richard Cohen via The Nation on August 17, 2022
People in Ukrainian subway station converted into bomb shelter with makeshift beds and kitchen.

The History of the Family Bomb Shelter

Throughout history, the family bomb shelter has reflected the shifting optimism, anxieties, and cynicism of the nuclear age.
by Thomas Bishop via Zócalo Public Square on April 18, 2022
Portraits of Dean Dixon, William Grant Still, and Margaret Bonds, three African American classical musicians.

A Prophecy Unfulfilled?

What a new book and six companion videos have to say about the fate of Black classical music in America.
by Mark N. Grant via The American Scholar on April 2, 2022
Cartoon illustration featuring Pauline Hopkins (center), Booker T. Washington (left), and John C. Freund (right)

Contending Forces

Pauline Hopkins, Booker T. Washington, and the fight for "The Colored American" magazine.
by Tarisai Ngangura via The Believer on March 29, 2022
A crowd watches a roller skater dance at block party in the Bronx.

The Stories of the Bronx

"Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin" is a vibrant cultural history that looks beyond pervasive narratives of cultural renaissance and urban neglect.
by Emily Raboteau via New York Review of Books on March 17, 2022
Photograph of John Gunther, an American journalist.

The Book That Unleashed American Grief

John Gunther’s “Death Be Not Proud” defied a nation’s reluctance to describe personal loss.
by Deborah Cohen via The Atlantic on March 8, 2022
Henry James; illustration by James McMullan

Visions of Waste

"The American Scene" is Henry James’s indictment of what Americans had made of their land.
by Peter Brooks via New York Review of Books on March 3, 2022
Lithograph of men and women drinking and dancing at an American Dance House.

The Influences of the Underworld: Nineteenth-Century Brothel Guides, Cards, and City Directories

Brothel guides tended to be small, making them easy to conceal. They also mimicked other publications to make it easier to hide the guides’ true purpose.
by Brittney Ingersoll via Commonplace on March 1, 2022
Patricia Hearst in front of SLA flag, 1974; CSU Archives/Everett Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

American Captivity

The captivity narrative as creation myth.
by Ed Simon via The Hedgehog Review on March 1, 2022
Undated photograph by “Miss Carter” of William James in a séance with the medium Mrs. Walden.

“Pajamas from Spirit Land”: Searching for William James

After the passing of William James, mediums across the US began receiving messages from the late Harvard professor.
by Alicia Puglionesi via The Public Domain Review on February 23, 2022
Ernest Hemingway and his wife Mary Welsh.

For Whom The Bell Tolls

Close your eyes and imagine you’re married to Ernest Hemingway. Now, imagine it twice as bad, and you’ll be approaching the life story of Mary Welsh Hemingway.
by Anne Margaret Daniel via The Spectator on February 20, 2022
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 Magazine 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 Magazine on September 27, 2021
Women holding protest signs, demonstrating against school materials, 1975
partner

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
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