history
-
Writing In Another Dimension
Edison floods the world with light; biologists discover germs and defy Death; botanists grow tropical plants in Parisian glass-houses and affront Nature with hot-house orchids; the phonograph and the cinema fold Time and Space for the masses. And for some…
-
The Power of the Ellipses
The Guardian presents a history of this tantalizing punctuation. They’re irresistible…
-
The Rumpus Interview with Margo Jefferson
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson talks about her new memoir, Negroland, and about growing up in an elite black community in the segregated Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s.
-
Your Brain on History
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Larry S. McGrath writes about the growing role of neuroscience in writing new historical narratives. McGrath frames this discussion in a review of historian Lynn Hunt’s Writing History in the Global Era, looking…
-
Have You Met the Huckster?
At Notches, a peer-reviewed blog on history and sexuality, Robert J. Gamble explores the figure of the 19th century female huckster as well as the middle-class anxieties that slandered and vilified them.
-
The First Urban Apocalypse
This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a bronchial spasm. For the Public Domain Review, Brett Beasley examines Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City, widely considered to be the first science fiction novel…
-
Remembering Your Online Life
After all, a toy boat is hardly its former self after a lifetime at the bottom of the sea. No matter how intact an archive, it can never fully reconstruct the texture and completeness of the original memory. For Aeon,…
-
The Noble Fish and the Man Who Loved Them
Nothing, in the opinion of a New Yorker, can exceed boiled sheep’shead served up at a sumptuous dinner. . . This noble fish . . . the feats of hooking and pulling him in, furnish abundant materials for the most…
-
The Rumpus Interview with Susan Barker
Susan Barker discusses her third novel, The Incarnations, writing dialogue in a second language, the Opium Wars and Chinese history, and the years of research that went into her book.
-
Silent Reading… or Not
But do we actually scan the written word silently? Recent neurological research questions whether silent reading actually is silent. Evidence grows that the brain interprets “silent” reading as an auditory phenomenon. Our ancestors most likely read aloud, in public, rather…
-
The Volcano that Defined the 1816-7 Art Scene
“The year without a summer,” as 1816 came to be known, gave birth not only to paintings of fiery sunsets and tempestuous skies but two genres of gothic fiction. The freakish progeny were Frankenstein and the human vampire, which have…