Young Bertie Canfield wrote in his diary that although he thought his new home in Kansas looked “very funnie” because the landscape had no fences, he was nonetheless enthusiastic about his family’s move west from New York state... Read More

Welcome to Swinging London, circa 1720. A dyspeptic poet (Alexander Pope, in charming cameo) proves how appearances must indeed govern reality, for women now fit their amoral conduct to follow their dressmakers’ sumptuary, immodest... Read More

What would the United States look like today if Thomas Jefferson’s argument to measure land according to metric units had succeeded? Would road atlases and other maps show the system of squares and grinds that so simply marks the... Read More

“We read and perform Shakespeare because, at this particular moment, this play speaks to us as no other play can or will; because we have a hunger to create and share this particular event with other human beings.” With this... Read More

In Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s Night, he writes of sharing the same concentration camp barracks with his father and watching him as he’s beaten and broken “like a dry tree struck by lightning.” Night is one of thousands of... Read More

The fist in the title is an appropriate image for a book of poems about rough edges and marital disillusion, though this fist is womanly-curvaceous and quick. The poet’s rage is elegant, but she’s not wholly resentful, perhaps... Read More

The search for the roots and legacies of America’s second Civil War—the 1960s—continues unabated in the many books investigating this tumultuous era. Writers such as Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and Terry... Read More

“The Truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind, at once quietly and with power.” These words from the Second Vatican Council embody what is at the center of the world’s... Read More