How 19th Century Women Were Taught to Think About Native Americans
In nineteenth-century American women's magazines, Native American women were depicted as attractive, desirable, and pious.
Celebrate Banned Books Week
The last week of September is Banned Books Week, when the American Library Association calls our attention to works that have been censored.
Stephen King’s Prophetic Early Work
King of Horror Stephen King celebrates his 70th birthday. Will he finally get the respect he deserves from academia and the culture industry?
America’s Unlikely Cold War Weapon
During the Cold War years, the distribution and selection of American books had to change with changing objectives overseas.
Sentenced to Death (and Other Tales from the Dark Side of Language)
One cold morning in 1953, Derek Bentley, a nineteen-year-old youth in the wrong place with the wrong words, was hanged for a murder he did not commit.
How We Escape It: An Essay
Escape is an ancient word, escapism, a modern one, and the designation of a genre—“escape literature”—dates to the 1930s.
What Herman Melville Can Teach Bob Dylan about Plagiarism
Bob Dylan delivered his Nobel Prize lecture on June 4, just days before a deadline that would have ...
Fighting Words With the Unabomber
Some of the world's most baffling criminal cases were solved thanks to some seemingly harmless point about language. Take the Unabomber, for example.
Branwell: The Other Brontë
It's the 200th anniversary of the birth of Branwell Brontë, who isn't nearly as famous as his three sisters but remains a key player in the family drama.
How Mad Magazine Informed America’s Cultural Critique
When Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD—Humor in a Jugular Vein first erupted onto the streets in 1952, it was like nothing ever seen before.