“Little by little, the spirit gets broken here,” says Caro Spencer in May Sarton’s novel As We Are Now, describing her life in Twin Elms. Sarton based the nursing home she’s speaking of on a “disgraceful” facility she visited... Read More

A dozen children of different ages sit on benches in a sunlit room in The Country School, Winslow Homer’s 1871 painting. The teacher looks at the three boys to her right; like most of the other children in the painting, they are... Read More

“Human females are not as easy to investigate as are rabbits,” complained Katherine McCormick, the philanthropist who funded the development of the contraceptive pill. She asked for a “cage of ovulating females to experiment... Read More

“During recent years there has been a growing interest in devising some plan for checking or limiting the tide of immigration whose waves sweep in upon the United States almost daily in constantly increasing volume,” wrote Simon... Read More

Edward Hopper started his well-known painting Nighthawks with a sketch. Seated at a restaurant counter are a man and woman, looking at each other, about to speak. When he transferred them to canvas, Hopper made a change—in the painting... Read More

“What we call History, considered as giving a record of notable events, or transactions, under names and dates,” said the American pastor, Horace Bushnell, “I conceive to be commonly very much of a fiction.” Our historical... Read More

Gin Lane, William Hogarth’s 1751 print, shows a boy and a dog sharing a bone in front of a pawnshop in a London slum, a child drinking gin, and another falling over the railing as his drunken mother sprawls, half-naked, on the steps... Read More

When United Nations Special Rapporteur Nigel Rodley visited pre-trial detention centers in Moscow in 1994, he was appalled by what he saw. He would “need the poetic skills of a Dante or the artistic skills of a Bosch adequately to... Read More