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Portrait of Emily Dickinson next to a portrait of Susan Gilbert

Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert

“Come with me this morning to the church within our hearts, where the bells are always ringing, and the preacher whose name is Love — shall intercede for us!”

Reconsidering the Jewish American Princess

How the JAP became America’s most complex Jewish stereotype.

The Great War’s Great Price

Revisiting the wreckage on the centenary of the armistice.
Film still of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch.

How Reconsidering Atticus Finch Makes Us Reconsider America

A new book offers lessons drawn from Harper Lee's ambivalent treatment of this iconic character.

Columbus Believed He Would Find ‘Blemmyes’ and ‘Sciapods’ – Not People – in the New World

Columbus wasn't unique in his belief that bizarre, monstrous humanoids inhabited the far reaches of the world.
Collage of paper clippings including headless a running man, an explosion where his head would be, and a jet flying alongside him.

Ante Up: The Scales of Power Seen Through Norman Podhoretz’s Eyes

In retrospect, it was peculiar but not surprising that the Jewish-American novel peaked early—halfway through the beginning, to be precise.

The Surprising History (and Future) of Dinosaurs

For well over a hundred years, paleontology has done double duty as mass entertainment.
Children bringing home remains of a bed. Coal mining camp, Scotts Run, West Virginia. (1938)

James M. Cain and the West Virginia Mine Wars

Sean Carswell looks into James M. Cain and his time reporting on the West Virginia Mine Wars.

William Faulkner Was Really Bad at Being a Postman

Good thing he had other talents.

The Untranslatable Caudillo

Talk about caudillos is always, in reality, a discussion of their followers.

The Complicated Fight Over Walt Whitman's Sole Surviving NYC Home

A somewhat neglected vinyl-sided house is now at the center of a literary legacy battle.
illustration of orange groves with snow-capped mountains in the distance

The Dreams and Myths That Sold LA

How city leaders and real estate barons used sunshine and oranges to market Los Angeles.

Lonesome for Our Home

Zora Neale Hurston’s long-lost oral history with one of the last survivors of the Atlantic slave trade.
Thomas Jefferson's library at the Library of Congress.

Mr. Jefferson’s Books & Mr. Madison’s War

The burning of Washington presented an opportunity for Jefferson’s books to educate the nation by becoming a national library.
Intricately painted Easter eggs.

Why Easter Never Became a Big Secular Holiday like Christmas

Hint: the Puritans were involved.
Portrait of Charles Knowlton

Charles Knowlton, the Father of American Birth Control

Decades after Charles Knowlton died, his book would be credited with reversing population growth in England and the popularization of contraception in the U.S.
Victorian couple courting with a church steeple in the background

Victorian Era

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

Bohemian Tragedy

The rise, fall, and afterlife of George Sterling’s California arts colony.

A Terraqueous Counter-Narrative in US History

For hundreds of years, Florida has had the reputation of being a little unstable.

The Soul of W. E. B. Du Bois

Reflecting on the tremendous impact of "The Souls of Black Folk," on the 150th anniversary of Du Bois' birth.

Illustrating Carnival: Remembering the Overlooked Artists Behind Early Mardi Gras

A look at the ornate float and costume designs from Carnival’s “Golden Age."

Mark Twain’s Disturbing Passion for Collecting Young Girls

In his later years, the famous writer surrounded himself with a bevy of adoring adolescents.

Why A 19th Century American Slave Memoir Is Becoming A Bestseller In Japan's Bookstores

Why "Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl" by Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861), became a hit in Japan when it was published there in 2013.

Theodore Dreiser’s New York

Teddy Dreiser tries to make it.

The Amnesia Plot

How 1940s films reinvented the ways stories are told onscreen.

Hugh Hefner Was Never The Star of Playboy

Perhaps the only true generalization to make about Hefner is that he is given too much credit for his role in American history.

Wild Thing: A New Biography of Thoreau

Freeing Thoreau from layers of caricature that have long distorted his legacy.
Walden Pond through the trees.

Darwin's Early Adopters

A new book argues that Darwin failed to capture the American imagination because of the untimely death of Henry David Thoreau.
William Gropper's map of American folklore.

A Popular '40s Map of American Folklore Was Destroyed by Fears of Communism

The government saw Red when looking at William Gropper's painting of the United States.
Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Allan Poe and the Power of a Portrait

Edgar Allan Poe knew that readers would add their visual image of the author to his work to create a personality that informed their reading.

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