From the murky circumstances of her birth in Geneva in 1877 to her dramatic death in a flash flood in Ain Sefra, Algeria, Isabelle Eberhardt lived an unconventional life. At twenty, she unshackled herself from the “fetters” of modern... Read More

Although most Americans have some knowledge of the history of the civil and women’s rights movements, comparatively few possess awareness of the trials and tribulations and subsequent self-determination of this country’s largest... Read More

In the years between 1918 and 1920, influenza swept across the globe, killing at least fifty million people, with more than half a million of them in the United States. What’s particularly striking about the epidemic is the way that it... Read More

More than 27 million people today in the United States—roughly 11 percent of the population—are living with heart disease, says the US Centers for Disease Control. It’s the nation’s No. 1 killer, resulting in approximately... Read More

It’s difficult to find a new way to examine an iconic figure, especially one as popular as Marilyn Monroe, but "Dressing Marilyn", by Andrew Hansford, manages to do precisely that. In cataloging the costumes created for Monroe by... Read More

“There is hardly anything so elusive,” writes the celebrated Irish poet Eavan Boland, “as the way in which a poetic inheritance is sifted and re-arranged from one generation to the next.” This collection of essays tracks and... Read More

America has long been revered as a melting pot or a salad bowl, a nearly fabled place where almost everyone has come from somewhere else. As David Mura says in "The Chalk Circle"’s introduction, “America is and always has been... Read More

Reading Edward Hoagland, accomplished naturalist and writer, or rather, losing oneself in Hoagland’s muscular and multitasking prose, one is quickly convinced that the only reliable way to depict a place is by the written word. Alaskan... Read More