Herman Melville

Can we appreciate Herman Melville’s work without attributing to it schemes for the uplift of modern man?

In every generation, writers and readers find new ways to plumb the depths of Herman Melville and his work.

The novelist drew on far-flung voyages to create his masterpiece. But he could finish it only at his beloved Berkshire farm.

Herman Melville likely saw the panorama “Whaling Voyage,” which records the sinking of the whaler Essex, while staying in Boston in 1849.

There was little indication 166 years ago that the book would enter the canon of great American fiction.

He would point out that what plagues us are America's sins coming home to roost.

On the trail of whales, Melville, and Douglass in New Bedford.

He demonstrated how the frontier wasn’t an incubator of democratic equality but a place of unrelenting pain, cruelty, and suffering.

Dispatches from a spine-tingling day of visits to the places where James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Thomas Cole created their most famous works.

Recorded accidentally by the Navy during the Cold War, "Songs of the Humpback Whale" became a hit album that changed perceptions about the natural world.

American fiction of the 19th century often featured a cruel doctor, whose unfeeling fascination with bodily suffering readers found unnerving.

For Herman Melville, the color white could be horrifyingly bleak.

The difference between the careers and reputations of the three famous authors is about gender as well as genius.

The horrors of the fugitive slave laws, the costs of union, and the value of comity.

Piecing back together the forgotten history of Herman Melville's second son.

Ross Bullen explores the curious case of Prince George Washington, a 19th-century Siamese prince.

George Washington scales new heights.

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

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.