As reported by the Yale Daily News earlier this month, the new Henry Roe Cloud series on American Indians and Modernity was announced by Ned Blackhawk, a Yale professor of History and American Studies, and Christopher Rogers, Editorial Director of Yale University Press. Cloud was the first known Native American
Between 1917 and 1937, Alfred Stieglitz took 331 photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. Along with the thousands of letters the two exchanged throughout their 30-year romance, these photographs occupy a sort of middle ground between documentation and expression, between correspondence and art. They are an eloquent testament to a profound and
In The Flowering of New England, a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of 19th century Boston, historian Van Wyck Brooks creates an American mythology of individuals. Falling somewhere between collective biography and literary narrative, the book tracks a flourishing of intellectual output concentrated in the Boston area between the War of 1812
On a surface level, Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire exposes and defends an overlooked narrative in American history. His book tells the story of the Comanche people, from their first mention in the ledgers of a Spanish colonial official in 1706 to their decimation by famine and an expanding United States
While the Great Depression has been a heavily referenced subject, almost exclusively in its negative sense, it’s worth considering the aesthetic aspects of the period that appeared and endured alongside, or in spite of, worldwide economic restraints. At a time when the United States had emerged as a world power
This morning, Ken Corbett, author of Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities, contributed to a segment on ABC’s Good Morning America called “Pageant Boys,” examining the increasing participation of young boys in beauty pageants. Corbett’s book adds to recent literature such as Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia on expectations
If you missed it on NPR’s All Things Considered last weekend, be sure to listen to Adam Bradley‘s brief interview on lyrics as poetry: NPR.org. NPR’s “The Record” blog also followed up with Sam Anderson after his rave review of The Anthology of Rap in New York magazine, and you
Hard to believe, but it has now been three years since the death of Norman Mailer. Mailer was one of the most important American writers in the postwar era, winning a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for the unusual nonfictional novel, The Armies of the Night, and another Pulitzer
This year the Whitney Museum of Art presents a retrospective of the American artist, Paul Thek. Seeing his wide range of work makes clear that Thek’s status as a little known artist does not befit the radicalism found in his art. The exhibition at the Whitney successfully presents the work
In the prologue to Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, historian Nicholas Phillipson acknowledges the difficulty of writing about a man who left little to write about. A fastidious author and scholar who disdained any prospect of misinterpretation, Smith had his letters, notes, and unfinished manuscripts destroyed before his death in