Fred R. Shapiro— The New Yale Book of Quotations uses pioneering research methods to trace famous quotations to their true origins. In particular, extensive searching of online historical books and newspapers has been employed to improve upon our knowledge of quotation provenances and histories. One result of these investigations has been
Sumana Roy— In How I Became a Tree, I was looking for people who had wanted to become or live like a tree. Since then, I’ve been trying to speculate in the opposite direction – what might it mean for plant life to live in the human social world? How I Became
Nicholas Orme— This is a scene from a fifteenth-century stained-glass window at Doddiscombsleigh: a country church in Devon, in the south-west of England. It shows what would have been a familiar event. A baby is brought to church to be baptized. The ceremony takes place at a font: a stone
Bentley Layton— The Gospel according to Thomas (“The Gospel of Thomas”) is an anthology of 114 “obscure sayings” of Jesus, which, according to its prologue, were collected and transmitted by St. Didymus Jude Thomas. The sayings do not appear within a biographical narrative about Jesus, although some of them individually
Kevin Madigan— Around 1870, evangelical Christians, as their Catholic adversaries would put it, “invaded” Italy in large numbers. Before unification and the inception of a new liberal order, the extension of rights of toleration to Jews and non-Catholic Christians, and the dispossession of the papal states, Protestant missionaries, by and
Early this summer, we proudly released Duo Duo’s new collection of poems, Words as Grain. Lucas Klein, editor and translator of the career-spanning anthology, notes in his introduction that the poet’s early work has often been seen as an expression of the era, yet his poetry “has never been reducible
Jennifer A. Quigley— People today don’t usually think of going to the bank, buying groceries, and signing a lease as religious acts, but in the ancient world, they very often were. While many people today tend to think of religion and the economy as distinct, in the ancient Greco-Roman world,
Kathryn Tanner— The Protestant ethic was the spirit of industrial capitalism in its Fordist varieties, where investments sunk in expensive equipment dedicated to the production of one thing meant mass production and mass consumption. That Protestant ethic was composed of a set of values in which hard work was a
Zander Brietzke— On January 1, 1935 Eugene O’Neill outlined a series of four plays about four brothers (a ship captain, a gambler, a politician, and a railroad magnate) set in the second half of the nineteenth century. O’Neill called this group his Cycle because each play was to circulate the
Alexandra Dunietz— Would Sydney Taylor, author of the All-of-a-Kind books, have had a Facebook page? I usually avoid counterfactual history, but while helping June Cummins with research on Taylor, I occasionally wondered what she would have made of the internet. What makes me think she would have engaged in some