history
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The Book as Christmas Present
Starting in the 1820s, when Christmas was still largely a day of feasting and religious observance, publishers helped pioneer the concept of giving mass-produced goods as presents, inventing an entire genre of books, called Gift Books, designed to be presented…
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Weekly Geekery
The digital life at sea. The unlikely history of video games. All those YouTubers sound the same. Once again, the Internet is ruining all good things.
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Building the Idea of Home
At JSTOR Daily, Livia Gershon offers a brief history of the concept of “home.” Gershon traces the changes not only in the emerging role of the home as a private retreat, but also the people who could define a household…
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Between Living and Dying
At the Public Domain Review, Sharon Ruston examines contemporary influences on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, specifically with regards to scientific developments in discovering the line between life and death.
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On Ladies’ Creative Pursuits
There are certain stereotypes about women’s creativity prior to the twentieth century, and generally they revolve around appropriately domestic novels, amateur watercolors, needlework, and “folk art.” But there’ve always been women who found ways around those rules. For Pictorial at…
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Defining America through Marriage
At Marginalia, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Darryl W. Stephens reviews a new history of 19th century marriage by Leslie Harris. Harris’s book documents the ways public rhetoric and legal proceedings reshaped marriage into a new…
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Pynchon in Colonial New England
At the Public Domain Review, read about Thomas Pynchon’s oldest colonial ancestor, who also happened to be a writer—though he was much less successful and much more heavily censored.
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A Figurative Recovery from War
In his review for Hyperallergic of a new MOMA exhibit, Thomas Micchelli writes about the work of artists during and immediately after their experiences in World War II. In the exhibit, Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World…
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Saving History through Translation
At Lit Hub, André Naffis-Sahely discusses the vital importance of translation as a way to preserve a cultural/historical record. Translation improves a book’s chances of survival. In a way, it must. What one culture proves indifferent to, might find a better…
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The Mystery of Shakespeare’s Skull
There is this skull sitting there on its own and we would love to know who it is. At the Telegraph, read about how a £300 bet, an ancient curse, and a lawyer might keep us from knowing once and…
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Who Hunts the Witch Hunters?
Rachel Kincaid writes for Autostraddle on the twisted power dynamics inherent in witch trials, both in history and fiction, in the past and in the present day: But what rings most dangerously prophetic about Salem is the ideology that suggests…
