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Old Croghan Man

March 2, 2020

Only a torso now, the head
long severed from the neck, pelvis
twisted off like a stubborn root.

The Gargantuan Arm

March 2, 2020

Let us remember liberty was not popular,
six years it took Laboulaye to convince
Bartholdi a gigantic statue was 
what New York harbor needed. Eleven
years later

Photograph by Fred Viebahn

An Interview With Rita Dove

In Germany, I began to experience what it was like to think in another language. Also, the way Germans looked at me—with curiosity but no racial baggage—was so different than Americans. I began to understand a little bit more about my own country and how I fit in or not. 

Katrina: After the Flood. By Gary Rivlin. Simon & Schuster, 2015. 480p. HB, $27.

The Storm That Won’t Quit

The storm landed on August 29, 2005, right as winds mercifully dropped to 125 miles an hour, down from 175. But the real horror came afterward, in the wake of fifty-three levee breaches that caused New Orleans to fill up like a bathtub. When the air [...]

On Letters of Note

Letters of Note, a five-year-old blog run by Shaun Usher, is now a book. The blog offers correspondence “deserving of a wider audience” (as its tagline runs). When possible, Usher’s blog presents the letters in their original scans, preserving the quaint typewriter fonts, pretty letterheads, and handwritten annotations of their paper selves.

Howard Zinn. Photo by Robert Birnbaum

Howard Zinn: The People’s Historian

February 21, 2014

Historian, activist, playwright, expert witness, and Red Sox fan Howard Zinn passed away on January 27, 2010, leaving a legacy of provocative scholarship and exemplary advocacy for social and economic justice, antimilitarism, and anti-imperialism. [...]

Three Friends of Jefferson

For nearly a hundred years the great body of official and personal papers left by Thomas Jefferson has formed an almost bottomless mine of material for the historian dealing with political as well as with social questions. Although there have been four editions of his writings, they have emphasized mainly the public papers, and the wealth of the private letters has not yet been exhausted.

Footnotes to History

The revival of interest in our early history which the last dozen years have witnessed, has brought about certain curious phenomena. None is more so than the tendency for picking up odd bits of information about various characters or events, appending them to documents usually already well studied and published, and printing the result with a loud hurrah.

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