History

Staff Holiday Picks: For the Radical Photographer

Follow @yaleARTbooks Yale University Press Executive Editor, William Frucht, weighs in on the history of photography and its intersection with art and politics from the pages of The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951, by curators Mason Klein and Catherine Evans; the catalogue accompanies an exhibition currently on view at the Contemporary

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John Sutherland on Kurt Vonnegut

Some authors create from scratch, imagining situations and characters to fill their pages; others live and write their realities. In John Sutherland’s playfully encyclopedic Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, he works to catalog the methods and experiences of 294 notable writers. In this passage,

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Building the Cloisters

Follow @yaleARTbooks At first glance The Cloisters might be seen as an anachronism to its northern Manhattan neighborhood. Nestled within Fort Tryon Park (opened 1935), sitting above a grid of 1920s low-rise apartments, 1950s high-rise housing projects and the requisite array of fast food franchises, parking garages, and bodegas that

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For the Devoted Teacher

When Anna Catherine Bahlmann was twenty-four years old, a young girl named Edith Jones became her newest student. Bahlmann constantly had to add more folklore and poetry to the German curriculum to satisfy Jones’ ever-expanding curiosity. Sensing the girl’s potential, Bahlmann carefully preserved the early letters exchanged between the two

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For the Busy Lover of Science

It’s no easy feat to provide an account of the entire history of science in a single book, much less make that history a “little” one: nevertheless, an undaunted William Bynum sets out to fulfill this very task in his latest project. A Little History of Science traces the march

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To London, with Love: For Every Man of Words

Ivan Lett— Rare is the book campaign that immensely satisfies both personally and professionally. As work began for The Richard Burton Diaries, edited by Chris Williams, there was a typical shape to the assumptions for such a book coming from Yale University Press: “Oh great, the diaries of the Victorian

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John Sutherland on Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita has become a literary classic, read over and over by those who cannot pull themselves away from Humbert Humbert’s troubling yet tragically beautiful prose. In John Sutherland’s Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, he traces beloved authors like Nabokov back through when

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For the Harlem Renaissance Man

Emily Bernard starts her biography, “This book is a portrait of a once controversial figure, Carl Van Vechten, a white man with a passion for blackness.” And while today more people can recognize Carl Van Vechten as a patron and leader of the black arts and Harlem Renaissance movement, in

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Francis Bremer on Boston’s Forgotten History

Here, Francis J. Bremer, author of the recently published biography, Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds, discusses the intertwined religious and political histories of Boston, the first founders—its clergy, and their importance to our historical understanding. Francis J. Bremer— At a time when religion is politically

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John Sutherland on Charles Dickens

Michael Slater, author of The Great Charles Dickens Scandal is not the only one preoccupied with the secret affairs of Charles Dickens. In his sweeping guide Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, John Sutherland introduces and explores 294 of literature’s greatest artists, providing biographical details

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