The French writer Chateaubriand made up or copied a great deal of what he wrote about the early United States. What he said had tremendous influence.

Black Muslims have been an influential force in the prisoners' rights movement and criminal justice reform as early as the World War II era.

Since the nineteenth century, peat (or turf) has brought social consciousness to art. In the 1800s, Pre-Raphaelite paintings focused on the fact that the poor harvested it.

In Iowa, between 1964 and 1991, groups of women—the wives of pork farmers—boosted the supposed benefits of pork-heavy diets. They were the Iowa Porkettes.

Michelangelo, perhaps the greatest artist the world has produced, wasn't a child prodigy like Mozart. He learned on the job. So maybe there's still hope for the rest of us.

In the late 1800s, American women began to move more freely in public. In response, public libraries created sex-segregated reading rooms, intended to keep women in their proper place.

The idea of a President Oprah has sparked excitement rather than ridicule. Americans value symbolism as much as political experience; while Oprah has little of the latter, she is practically made of the former.

Remembering history helps us to parse the present, and it follows that women struggling to process these "decades of pent-up anger" can find apt reading material in the feminist fiction of the 1970s.

Fifty Shades of Grey sells an absurd fantasy version of a romantic relationship—as between man and woman, so between capitalism and female workers.

For Karen Blixen, the Danish author of "Out of Africa," role, purpose, fate and destiny are intertwined