history
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Michelangelo vs. Raphael
Having goaded the formerly pre-eminent Michelangelo by winning papal favour and sneaking into his as-yet unfinished Sistine Chapel, Raphael further insulted his Florentine rival in the Laocoön competition. The Public Domain Review tells the story of how the restoration of Laocoön and…
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat With Camille Rankine
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Camille Rankine about her new book Incorrect Merciful Impulses, history, and trying to be a writer every day.
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Phillis Wheatley, Poet
For Lenny Letter, Doreen St. Félix writes on the legacy of Phillis Wheatley, the first black poet to have her work published in America: In her second life, Wheatley’s poetry—and the imagined determination it took to create it, to appropriate…
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Celibacy, Masculinity, and the Clergy
Jennifer Thibodeaux discusses in an interview with Notches her recent work on the historical emergence of celibacy among clergy. In particular, Thibodeaux focuses on how the clergy created an image of masculinity and sexual desire that remains with us to…
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The Lives of Unfamous Women
Anne Boyd Rioux reviews a new biography on the wife of Lord Byron, Anne Isabella Milbanke. In her review, Rioux evaluates the still-too-high standard set for women’s biographies, particularly when those women lived in the shadow of famous men: Insisting…
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The Jokes That Define Us
Vulture has a retrospective of 100 years of history-defining jokes. Like this one from The Producers: Springtime for Hitler, and Germany / Deutschland is happy and gay / We’re marching to a faster pace / Look out, here comes the master…
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A New Scientific History
Did Du Bois and the Atlanta School have a distinct standpoint? Of course…. But white privileged departments of Sociology also had their distinct standpoint. And theirs was the standpoint of imperial power. In the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Julian Go…
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A Tale as Old as Time
Fairytales are some of the oldest stories we know, and as it turns out, they might be even older than we thought. The Guardian looks into the mysterious origins of stories like Rumplestiltskin and Beauty and the Beast.
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Immortalizing History
Literature continually reminds us that we are not alone and (to paraphrase Kundera) that things are not always as simple as they seem. With so many stories, histories, characters and figures populating a reader’s mind, it’s easy for us to…
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The Rumpus Interview with Mira Ptacin
Author Mira Ptacin discusses her memoir Poor Your Soul, what inspires her to write, motherhood, and why she considers her beat “the uterus and the American Dream.”
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Museum Stories
For Longreads, Jaime Green writes about the narrative styles employed in exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History. Green focuses on the work of one of the AMNH’s directors, Albert E. Parr, and his efforts to connect the science…
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Shocking the American Short Story
Three more anthologies published last year suggest that while the [short] story remains one of our most flexible popular literary forms, and the quickest to absorb signals from the culture, if we’re on the verge of another revolution, the shockwaves…