What the author finds is that Jefferson had an abiding interest in all things medical. He owned more than one hundred medical texts and treatises (about 3 percent of his pre-1815 holdings); counted among his friends a number of noted...
I spent three years as a rock music critic in El Paso, Texas, which was where I lived at the tail end of the eighties and where I came of age, in a sense—grew old enough, that is, to recognize that heavy metal was, essentially, tribal in...
or most North Americans travel means moving sideways or, slightly more exotically, south. The former journey unwires one’s circadian rhythm while the latter equinoctially scrambles the night sky. What of going North, then? As it turns out...
America had many poets before Walt Whitman, but there was never an American poet before he held the country in the sea-to-sea embrace of his imagination, named its wonders like a latter-day Adam, proclaimed its common men and women to have...
While the American military conducted a war promoted in metaphysical terms—“a war against terror”—two occasions invited self-reflection. An election approached, followed by a date of more specialized interest: the 150th anniversary of Leave...