No American of any century has excelled in a greater number of diverse areas than a New Englander named George Perkins Marsh, who was born in the town of Woodstock, Vermont in 1801. Marsh is best remembered today for his pioneering book on...
The people who built The Great Wall are now building The Great Dam—the world’s greatest. The reservoir will flood an area 370 miles long. Disappearing under water will be 890 square miles of farmland. Totally or partially, 13 cities, 140...
The Bicentennial of the American Revolution ought to be a time for restoring the dialogue between the spirit of the past and the spirit of the future in our national life. We commemorate our origins because our origins are intertwined with...
Joan Givner’s biography of Katherine Anne Porter possesses this “passion for life”; it is a full and moving dramatization of an inner portrait of Porter as she fought to establish an artistic integrity for herself against the most unlikely...
Caroline Rody’s revisionary literary criticism offers new and persuasive ways to understand the “renaissance” of African-American women writers and of Caribbean women writers during the past three decades. What has allowed U.S. writers Toni...
Just hours before the tanks and armored personnel carriers clattered and blasted their way down Changan Avenue and into Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, loudspeakers in the square crackled into life, and, as in Auden’s “The Shield of...
The appearance of the non-ethnic words “males” and “heterosexual” in the last sentence is no accident. The oppressiveness of the so-called white race over all others is almost as a matter of course equated by multiculturalists with male...
Merrill Peterson’s subject in this detailed and masterly study is the “intermediate” generation that followed the founders of the republic. Their ascendancy extended from the era of the War of 1812 to the eve of the civil war they labored...