Sarah Osborn was a prolific writer, drafting a memoir as well as an additional two thousand pages documenting her life. And while few people will ever write that much about their lives, even fewer will have a story to tell as fascinating and enlightening as Sarah’s. Ms. Osborn, a wife,
You may know Thomas Jefferson as the third U.S. President but ever consider that he has, thus far, been our nation’s only epicurean president? In his book “A Rich Spot of Earth”: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello, Peter J. Hatch introduces yet another of Jefferson’s many extra-political interests that
Read an excerpt from Elizabeth and Hazel There are no simple stories, if they’re true. Fifty five years ago, a young black student named Elizabeth Eckford moved toward Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas to attend class for the first time. She was part of what would be known as
Charles Dickens is perhaps the most beloved figure of British literary heritage. His writing has become a revered aspect of Great Britain’s national identity, one entrenched with the warm Victorian traditions of family, hearth and home. Michael Slater, in his new biography, The Great Charles Dickens Scandal connects Dickens’ celebrity with
After the turkey has been carved, served, and eaten with thanks and all of the sides, after the pies have been admired and devoured, Thanksgiving Day calls for an extended time of post-meal relaxation – a recuperative period after the culinary undertaking and to support the digestive efforts. There is
Acclaimed Israeli novelist Amos Oz is not religious, and yet underpinning his knowledge and his identity, his life and learning, and his family relationships, are Hebrew texts—Torah, Talmud, and Haggadah as well as modern literature and timeless lore. In Jews and Words, published today by Yale University Press, Oz and
Follow @yaleARTbooks In the introduction to Circus and the City: New York, 1793-2010, the catalogue accompanying a fabulous exhibition of the same name currently on view at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan, curator Matthew Wittmann recalls his own experience watching the hulking elephants of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and
There was a time when historians would have to accept some details of the past as great unknowns. Without the ability to go back in time, recording and relating history will always pose difficulties. But each year, more and more of these oppositions are being removed. Today, modern archaeological research
Follow @yaleARTbooks Caroline Hayes— Upon visiting two exhibitions currently on display in New York City on the subject of the Japanese Rinpa aesthetic—at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Designing Nature: The Rinpa Aesthetic in Japanese Art and at the Japan Society, Silver Wind: The Arts of Sakai Hōitsu (1761-1828)—I noticed
Follow @yaleARTbooks Fashion is a world with its own language, rules, and aesthetic. It is a world at once self-consciously divorced from the everyday—a place where beauty, artistry and fancy flourish, assiduously protected against the stultifying demands of practicality or pedantic taste—and whose survival yet still depends on translating itself