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H.P. Lovecraft.

The Shadow Over H.P. Lovecraft

Recent works inspired by his fiction struggle to reckon with his racist fantasies.
Veteran and militia during 1919 Chicago Race Riot

Rereading 'Darkwater'

W.E.B. DuBois, 100 years ago.
An illustration of an accordion being played.

The "Good Old Rebel" at the Heart of the Radical Right

How a satirical song mocking uneducated Confederates came to be embraced as an anthem of white Southern pride.
A man watching a maypole celebration.

Lord of Misrule: Thomas Morton’s American Subversions

When we think of early New England, we picture stern-faced Puritans. But in the same decade that they arrived, Morton founded a very different kind of colony.

The Improbable Journey of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes

After two decades in a filing cabinet and three next to a parking lot in Baltimore, the author returns to New York.

Songs in the Key of Life

A new book presents an expansive vision of soul music.

Why the Black National Anthem Is Lifting Every Voice to Sing

Scholars agree the song, endowed with its deep history of Black pride, speaks to the universal human condition.

Standing on the Crater of a Volcano

In 1920, James Weldon Johnson went to Washington, armed with census data, to fight rampant voter suppression across the American South.

All the World’s a Page

Paper was never simply a writing surface, but a complicated substance that folded itself into the fabric of culture and consciousness.
Zora Neale Hurston in a bookstore with a copy of 'American Stuff'

How Did Artists Survive the First Great Depression?

What is the role of artists in a crisis?
An image of Bob Dylan performing with a spotlight on him.

Tangled Up in Bob Stories: A Dylan Reading List

The author reflects on his own journey with Dylan, and shares some of his favorite pieces of Dylanology.
A portrait of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with white hair and a full beard.

A Beautiful Ending

On dying and heaven in the time of Longfellow.

Patients and Patience: The Long Career of Yellow Fever

Extending the narrative of Philadelphia's epidemic past 1793 yields lessons that are more complex and less comforting than the story that's often told.
The Oakland Municipal Auditorium set up as a hospital, with Red Cross nurses tending to flu patients, 1918.

The 1918 Flu Pandemic Killed Millions. So Why Does Its Cultural Memory Feel So Faint?

A new book suggests that the plague’s horrors haunt modernist literature between the lines.
A hospital filled with patients during the influenza pandemic of 1918

How Pandemics Seep into Literature

The literature that arose from the influenza pandemic speaks to our current moment in profound ways, offering connections in the exact realms where art excels.

The Young Lords’ Revolution

A new book looks at the history of the Afro-Latinx radical activist group and how their influence continues to be felt.
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Transcontinental

Ed Ayers visits the site where the transcontinental railroad was completed. He considers the project's human costs, and discovers how the environment and photography played key roles on the rails.
Minskoff Theatre entrance.

Shakespeare Wrote His Best Works During a Plague

The qualities for which live theater is celebrated—audiences responding with laughter, tears, gasps, and coughs—accelerate its danger.
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Red Chicago

A visit with artists and public historians in Chicago who are working to keep the memory of the city's "Red Summer" alive.
Caricature of Oscar Wilde in between a sunflower in a vase with the U.S. dollar symbol on it, and a lion with sunflower petals for a mane.

The Wilde Woman and the Sunflower Apostle: Oscar Wilde in the United States

Victoria Dailey looks back at Oscar Wilde’s wild ride through the United States in the early 1880s.
Writer Dorothy Parker sitting.

When Dorothy Parker Got Fired from Vanity Fair

Jonathan Goldman explores the beginnings of the Algonquin Round Table and how Parker's determination to speak her mind gave her pride of place within it.

Ride Shotgun through Mid-Century LA with Ed Ruscha’s Photos and Jack Kerouac’s Words

A kinetic slice of Americana so pure you can almost smell Kerouac’s invoked apple pie – or maybe it’s the faint stench of exhaust fumes.
Lewis Leary.

Alive With Ghosts Today

Lewis Leary, who volunteered in John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, later inspired poetry by Langston Hughes.
Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling, American Imperialist

What the author of "If—" learned about empire from the United States
Glowing white "No" against a red background.

“Perhaps We’re Being Dense.” Rejection Letters Sent to Famous Writers

Some kind, some weird, some unbelievably harsh.
"Fleet" Walker (middle row, far left) poses with Oberlin College's first varsity baseball team in 1881. Walker went on to become the first African American major leaguer.

The First African American Major League Baseball Player Isn’t Who You Think

As the country celebrates Jackie Robinson Day, let’s consider the career of Fleet Walker.

A Social—and Personal—History of Silence

Its meaning can change over time, and over the course of a life.
Young Japanese American girl Yoshiko Hide Kishi. Tom Hide Collection, Washington State University Libraries' MASC.

The Complex Role Faith Played for Incarcerated Japanese-Americans During World War II

Smithsonian curator of religion Peter Manseau weighs in on a history that must be told.
U.S. Base hospital No. 13, Dansville, NY, with porches and awnings over open windows.

Neuro-Psychiatry and Patient Protest in First World War American Hospitals

Though their wishes were often overshadowed, soldier-patients had voices.

Catching Up to Pauli Murray

From today's vantage, the remarkable achievements of the writer and social justice activist are finally coming into focus.

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