Herman Melville

About 1.5 million Africans were carried across the Atlantic in Liverpool ships, but the city's slave trade was barely acknowledged until recently.

"The Atlantic" was born in an era of information overload.

Exploring ropemaking, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Jeremiah N. Reynolds’s wild tale.

One hundred years ago, "The Great Gatsby" was first published. It remains one of the books that almost every literate American has read.

Survivors of the whale attack drifted at sea for months, succumbing to starvation, dehydration—and even cannibalism.

We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both composers mined the past to root themselves in an unstable present.

The story of the tempestuous collaboration of Ray Bradbury and John Huston on the production of the 1956 movie “Moby Dick.”

Alexander Hamilton’s anonymous essay challenged the voting citizens of New York to hold fast to the truth when deciding to ratify (or not) the US Constitution.

On the TransAm Trucking case, legal reasoning, and the Fugitive Slave Act.

Stephanie Mueller´s book sheds light on the percieved death of liberalism and the fear of corporations.

The earliest-known version of the dish was a winey, briny, bready casserole.

A new book explores the final days of Ralph Waldo Emerson - traveling from Concord to California, and beyond.

When most U.S. nationals in the early republic thought of the Pacific Ocean, they conjured lands instead.

On Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville, and the gentle art of looking back in time.

In a new exhibit, Winslow Homer, once seen as the oracle of the nation’s innocence, is recast as a poet of conflict.

A history of imperial forgetting.

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

"Virginia Arcadia: The Natural Bridge in American Art,” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, surveys the arch as icon and propaganda.

In 1838, as the U.S. began its Exploring Expedition to the South Seas, Edgar Allan Poe published a novel that masqueraded as a travelogue.

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.