Lewis and Clark were not the first European Americans to see grizzly bears, but, argues the author, “for the practical purposes of how we perceive the bear today they might well have been.” Using various journals and diaries from the... Read More

The Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave. Actually, freedom was a result of the Union victory and of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, a piece of legislation that wasn’t ratified until eight months after the end... Read More

In the United States, thirty-one percent of nine-year-old girls are afraid of getting fat. Eighty-one percent of ten-year-old girls report the same fear. Ninety percent of female adolescents diet regularly. Why are our young women so... Read More

“The British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott began an autobiography that he never finished. The first paragraph simply says, ‘I died.’ In the fifth paragraph he writes, ‘Let me see. What was happening when I died? My prayer had been... Read More

It happens every month. About eight to ten days before your period starts, you notice the symptoms. Maybe you cry for no apparent reason. Maybe you’re anxious or short tempered or depressed…Then your period appears and miraculously,... Read More

“When I walked through the ditches on my way from the pickup to a waiting tractor, no grasshoppers clacked aloft to startle me. As a child, I had grown oblivious to their landings on my breastbone. The snake population had diminished... Read More

Arriving in Boston from Brittany during World War II, Yvette Greville takes a room at a boarding house where she meets her second husband, the consumptive Albert Pleven. A composer, Pleven courts Yvette by arranging a melody that... Read More

“This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of everything’s being dull and insipid about this house! I must be in love,” declares Jane Austen’s Emma.... Read More