Thomas Cole Arcadia painting

When Landscape Painting Was Protest Art

The landscape painter Thomas Cole celebrated the American landscape, but also expressed doubts about the limits of civilization.
Restoration Poet

The Restoration’s Filthiest Poet (and Why We Need Him)

Creature of the court, royalist and fop, dandy and dilettante, John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, knew how to scandalize with verse.
Loggers slang

The Lost Language of American Loggers

Logger slang may have coined terms like "punk," "haywire," and "pie in the sky." One lexicographer attempted to catalogue the industry's slang in 1942.
Walking Natan

The Art of Walking

Walking as an art has a deep history. By guiding participants, or their own bodies, on walks, artists encourage us to see the extraordinary in the mundane.
Second Amendment language

Revisiting the Messy Language of the Second Amendment

The debate over the Second Amendment is not just about guns—it's also about grammar.
Felicia Hemans portait

What, Prithee, Is a Poetess?

The loss and recovery of a poetic genre shows how the canon of literary history treats women writers the moment they start to gain attention and approval.
Phillis Wheatley

The Privileged and Impoverished Life of Phillis Wheatley

The first African American to publish a book of poetry has remained a controversial figure in the Black community.
Frig goddess

Should We Thank Frig it’s Friday?

The Anglo-Saxon goddess Frig has often been cited as the origin of the word Friday, but one scholar questions whether such a deity ever existed.
Bedridden King Charles VI

The French King Who Believed He Was Made of Glass

King Charles VI of France was the most exalted representative of a rash of "Glass Men," who appeared throughout Europe between the 15th and 17th centuries.
Augustine Addiction memoir

The New Sameness of Leslie Jamison’s Addiction Memoir

Leslie Jamison's The Recovering is self-aware about being the same old story, recalling the redemption narratives of Rousseau and St. Augustine.