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Jack Conroy

Jack Conroy and the Lost Era of Proletarian Literature

In the midst of the Depression, Conroy helped encourage a new generation of working-class writers.
by Devin Thomas O’Shea via The Nation on April 30, 2024
A family affair: Roosevelt was just 31 in 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson appointed him assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy — a post previously held by his cousin Teddy.

The Making of FDR

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s struggle against polio transformed him into the man who led the country through the Great Depression and World War II.
by Jonathan Darman via The Saturday Evening Post on April 5, 2024
Cesar Chavez standing next to Luis Valdez.

Cesar Chavez, Family and Filmmaking with Luis Valdez

Luis Valdez on his friendship with Cesar Chavez, his works in the National Film Registry, and a lifetime of activism.
by Luis Valdez, Stacie Seifrit-Griffin via Library of Congress Blog on March 27, 2024
Illustration of a literary rejection letter.

There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters

Autopsies of a changing publishing industry; frustrations with readers' tastes; and sympathies for poets and authors drawn to commercially hopeless genres.
by Melina Moe via Los Angeles Review of Books on March 26, 2024
Painting of Mercy Otis Warren by John Singleton Copley.

Mercy Otis Warren, America’s First Female Historian

At the prodding of John and Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren took on a massive project: writing a comprehensive history of the Revolutionary War.
by Nancy Rubin Stuart via The Saturday Evening Post on March 18, 2024
Content of Frank B's suitcase. A luggage tag, a black and white photograph of a young man in military uniform, a notebook with Frank's name written, a guide to Brooklyn, a copy of the Gospel of John, and an address book.

Tales From an Attic

Suitcases once belonging to residents of a New York State mental hospital tell the stories of long-forgotten lives.
by Sierra Bellows via The American Scholar on March 4, 2024
Woman creating a "zine", using a presumably Xerox photocopy machine.

American Counterculture, Glimpsed Through Zines

Zine-making is a tradition shared by the young and alienated, people enamored with the fringes of culture. Can a museum exhibit capture its essence?
by Hua Hsu via The New Yorker on February 14, 2024
A photograph of four people on donkeys from the late 1800s.

A Question of Legacy

Some of my ancestors had money, and some held awful beliefs. I set out to investigate what I once stood to inherit.
by David Owen via The New Yorker on January 2, 2024
Santa catches the trolly to Bloomingdales.

In the 1800s, a Group of NYC Artists and Writers Created the Modern-Day Santa Claus

See how Washington Irving, Clement Clarke Moore and Thomas Nast made Santa the merriest man in Manhattan.
by Lucie Levine via 6sqft on December 8, 2023
Illustration by Yannick Lowery. A drawing of watermelons between hills and valleys

Tell Me Why the Watermelon Grows

Throughout its botanical, cultural, and social history, the watermelon has been a vehicle for our ideas about community, survival, and what we owe the future.
by Jori Lewis via Switchyard Magazine on November 25, 2023
Peter Waddell's "A Vision Unfolds" imaginatively depicts Benjamin Banneker advising President Washington and fellow surveyor Andrew Ellicott on the layout of the proposed federal capital.

Banneker’s Answer to Jefferson: “I Am an American”

The black naturalist, astronomer, surveyor, and almanac-writer Benjamin Banneker took issue with Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward “those of my complexion.”
by Edward J. Larson via American Heritage on November 21, 2023
original

Edgar Allan Poe’s America

Tracing the life of the author who seemed to be from both everywhere and nowhere.
by Ed Ayers on October 2, 2023
An old journal with cursive writing on the pages

Slanting the History of Handwriting

Whatever writing is today, it is not self-evident. But writing by hand did not simply continue to “advance” until it inevitably began to erode.
by Sonja Drimmer via Public Books on August 9, 2023
A bowl of old-fashioned chowder with a spoon on the side

Chowder Once Had No Milk, No Potatoes—and No Clams

The earliest-known version of the dish was a winey, briny, bready casserole.
by Anne Ewbank via Atlas Obscura on May 16, 2023
An English revolutionary takes the crown off of the head of the dead King Charles I.

What Happens When You Kill Your King

After the English Revolution—and an island’s experiment with republicanism—a genuine restoration was never in the cards.
by Adam Gopnik via The New Yorker on April 17, 2023
64 East 7th Street, New York City, 2022.

The Parsonage

An unprepossessing townhouse in the East Village has been central to a series of distinctive events in New York City history.
by David Hajdu via Places Journal on April 1, 2023
Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Allan Poe Had a Promising Military Career. Then He Blew it Up.

Netflix’s “The Pale Blue Eye” portrays Edgar Allan Poe as a young West Point cadet. Here’s the true story of his brief, failed military career.
by Dave Kindy via Retropolis on January 19, 2023
Woman standing on a wall of books, holding a megaphone, 1919.

Choice Reading

Nineteenth-century New York City was filled with books, bibliophilia, and marginalia.
by Denise Gigante via Lapham’s Quarterly on November 21, 2022
Sign that reads "Instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry living in the following area"

Memory Work: Reading and Writing Japanese American Incarceration

What new possibilities might arise if we were to consider history as ongoing memory work, rather than a set narrative of progress or as singular “truth”?
by Erin Aoyama via Los Angeles Review of Books on June 9, 2022
Illustration by Nilé Livingston of the many flags used throughout America as symbols of freedom, patriotism, and protest.

Scars and Stripes

Philadelphia gave America its flag, along with other enduring icons of nationhood. But for many, the red, white and blue banner embodies a legacy of injustice.
by Martha S. Jones via Philadelphia Inquirer on April 6, 2022
Photo of Jack Kerouac, 1956

Jack Kerouac’s Journey

For "On the Road"’s author, it was a struggle to write, then a struggle to live with its fame. “My work is found, my life is lost,” he wrote.
by Joyce Johnson via New York Review of Books on March 2, 2022
Undated photograph by “Miss Carter” of William James in a séance with the medium Mrs. Walden.

“Pajamas from Spirit Land”: Searching for William James

After the passing of William James, mediums across the US began receiving messages from the late Harvard professor.
by Alicia Puglionesi via The Public Domain Review on February 23, 2022
Vintage drawing of a Victorian-era drugstore

Was Edgar Allan Poe a Habitual Opium User?

While Poe was likely using opium, the efforts to keep him quiet suggest that he was also drinking.
by Elizabeth Kelly Gray via Commonplace on February 7, 2022
Colorful portrait collage of Harriet Tubman with stars in the background

The Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project

The Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project explores the meaning of freedom through the example of one extraordinary life.
by Janell Hobson via Ms. Magazine on February 1, 2022
Black and white photo of a beach with a wooden row boat beached on the shore.

The Pandemic Has Given Us a Bad Case of Narrative Vertigo; Literature Can Help

In the work of writers like W.B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf, we can find new ways to tell our own stories.
by Elizabeth Outka via Washington Post on January 25, 2022
Collage of photo of geologist Ellen Sewall Osgood and rock crystals.

In 19th-Century New England, This Amateur Geologist Created Her Own Cabinet of Curiosities

A friend of Henry David Thoreau, Ellen Sewall Osgood's pursuit of her scientific passion illuminates the limits and possibilities placed on the era's women.
by Reed Gochberg via Smithsonian on November 19, 2021
Illustration of Achsa Sprague by Fan Pu

She Spoke to the Dead. They Told Her to Free the Slaves.

In 1850s Vermont, Achsa Sprague swore that the spirits who helped her walk again also possessed her with a crucial mission: freeing every soul in America.
by Madeline Bodin via Narratively on October 21, 2021
Oil cloth cape, worn to protect a firefighter’s upper body from embers and water. Likely from the Shiffler Fire Hose Company No. 32, of Philadelphia, founded in 1846.

There Was an Ashli Babbitt in the 19th Century. His Story Is a Warning.

To understand the right’s plans for Babbitt, look to George Shiffler.
by Zachary M. Schrag via Slate on September 1, 2021
Photo of immigants being detained.

‘I Became a Jailer’: The Origins of American Immigrant Detention

The massive U.S. apparatus for holding immigrants has a long American tradition.
by Ariel Aberg-Riger, Tanvi Misra via CityLab on July 20, 2021
The writer (seen here in a picture from the eighteen-eighties) hid his own life story.

Are All Short Stories O. Henry Stories?

The writer’s signature style of ending—a final, thrilling note—has the touch of magic that distinguishes the form at its best.
by Louis Menand via The New Yorker on June 28, 2021
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