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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
A diagram of the phases of the Moon.

Man-Bat and Raven: Poe on the Moon

A new book recovers the reputation Poe had in his own lifetime of being a cross between a science writer, a poet, and a man of letters.
by Mike Jay via London Review of Books on June 24, 2021
Illustration of a stick figure on a ladder adding to very tall stacks of paper

Living Memory

Black archivists, activists, and artists are fighting for justice and ethical remembrance — and reimagining the archive itself.
by Megan Pillow via Guernica on June 23, 2021
Dr. Lawrence Matsuda portrait, 2015, Painting by Alfredo M. Arreguin

Japanese Internment, Seattle in the 50s, and the First Asian-American History Class in Washington

Lawrence Matsuda talks about his family history, his experiences of discrimination, and his work in bilingual and Asian American representation in education.
by Lawrence Matsuda, Casey McNerthney via History Link on June 16, 2021
Black children learning in a classroom

What’s Missing From the Discourse About Anti-Racist Teaching

Black educators have always known that their students are living in an anti-Black world and that their teaching must be set against the order of that world.
by Jarvis R. Givens via The Atlantic on May 21, 2021
Detail of Anti-Slavery Picnic at Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts (c1845) by Susan Torrey Merritt. Courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago

New England Kept Slavery, But Not Its Profits, At a Distance

Entangled with, yet critical of, colonial oppression and the evils of slavery, the true history of Boston can now be told.
by Mark A. Peterson via Aeon on May 3, 2021
H.P. Lovecraft.

The Shadow Over H.P. Lovecraft

Recent works inspired by his fiction struggle to reckon with his racist fantasies.
by Siddhartha Deb via The New Republic on March 19, 2021
Veteran and militia during 1919 Chicago Race Riot

Rereading 'Darkwater'

W.E.B. DuBois, 100 years ago.
by Chad Williams via National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) on February 22, 2021
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.
by Joseph M. Thompson via Southern Cultures on January 21, 2021
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.
by Ed Simon via The Public Domain Review on November 24, 2020

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.
by Laurie Gwen Shapiro via The New Yorker on September 4, 2020

Songs in the Key of Life

A new book presents an expansive vision of soul music.
by Danielle Amir Jackson via Bookforum on September 3, 2020

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.
by Janelle Harris Dixon via Smithsonian on August 10, 2020

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.
by Dan Bouk via Census Stories, USA on July 27, 2020

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.
by Gill Partington via Public Books on July 16, 2020
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?
by David A. Taylor via Literary Hub on June 29, 2020
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.
by Aaron Gilbreath via Longreads on June 24, 2020
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.
by Nicholas A. Basbanes via Humanities on June 15, 2020

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.
by Simon Finger via The Panorama on May 18, 2020
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.
by Rebecca Onion, Elizabeth Outka via Slate on May 3, 2020
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.
by Elizabeth Outka via The Paris Review on April 8, 2020
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