Ed Simon

Samuel Roth was the sort of bookseller whose wares came wrapped in brown paper.

On the porous, ever-shifting boundaries between science and speculation.

Forged in the cauldron of Chicago’s streets and factories, born from the experience of workers in the mills and plants of Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.

A reconsideration of Robert Frost at 150.

Jonathan Edwards’s sermon reflects the complicated religious culture of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but Newtonian physics as well.

In a covenantal nation like the United States, words are the very ligaments that hold the body together, and what words we choose become everything.

Is Jefferson's Bible evidence that the Founding Fathers engaged with scripture to birth a Christian nation? Or that they sought to foster a new secular order?

The US Supreme Court's most recent decisions undermine centuries of established secularism within American government.

The captivity narrative as creation myth.

Coming to love Puritan poetry is an odd aesthetic journey. It's the sort of thing you expect people partial to bowties and gin gimlets to get involved with.

How Henry Wadsworth Longfellow interpreted Reconstruction by translating Dante.

Pittsburgh as a symbol of America itself.

A review of "Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America."

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 denigration of kitsch betrays a latent anti-Catholicism, one born from centuries of class and ethnic divisions.

Stephen Vincent Benét’s lost epic “John Brown’s Body” envisions a nation sutured together after the Civil War, but fails to reckon with the war’s causes.

In Theodor de Bry’s illustrations for "True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia," the Algonquin are made to look like the Irish. Surprise.

Thomas Paine, the most radical of American revolutionaries, perhaps most fully understood the millennial potential of the new Republic.

The ever-shifting curve of shoreline and river is no match for the infinite, idealized straight line.

In early 20th-century St. Louis, Pearl Curran claimed to have conjured a long-dead New England Puritan named Patience Worth through a Ouija board.