The Women Who Preached in Their Sleep
Was sleep-preaching an ingenious way for oppressed women to subvert the social order through somniloquy?
Chivalric Romance, Meet Gunpowder Reality
The manly knight wouldn't have lasted a day in sixteenth-century combat. So why was he so popular as a literary figure at the time?
“Beating the Bounds”
How did people find out where their local boundaries were before there were reliable maps?
America, Lost and Found at Wounded Knee
Stephen Vincent Benét’s lost epic “John Brown’s Body” envisions a nation sutured together after the Civil War, but fails to reckon with the war’s causes.
The Tangled Language of Jargon
What our emotional reaction to jargon reveals about the evolution of the English language, and how the use of specialized terms can manipulate meaning.
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.
A Novel Defense of the Internet
Novel reading was once regarded as an idle occupation, just as Internet use is now.