Lillian Faderman’s scrupulous mining of the original documents and court transcripts of a scandalous 1810 Edinburgh trial in which two mistresses of a fashionable girls’ boarding school sued a wealthy matron for besmirching their names and...
His first name, Wilbury, had a slightly frivolous sound, like that of a furry character from Beatrix Potter or A.A. Milne, but no student would have thought of using it, even behind his back, for Mr. Crockett was the antithesis of frivolity...
If you might wonder why some persons try to move heaven and dirt to despoil the nomination to the U. S. Supreme Court of a legal scholar (as distinguished from a former law student who would have gained either legal or judicial experience...
Pragmatism was once called America’s philosophy. The pragmatic cast of mind was practical, even-tempered, experimental, effective. These qualities were ascribed to Americans generally, and the reading public that accepted the description...
Harry S. Truman was as ill prepared to be president of the United States as any man who has occupied the White House in the last century, yet he was confronted, immediately on being catapulted into office, with a wide variety of dramatic...
This is an age obsessed by the need for moral guidance. After God died and our faith in universal reason collapsed, we look everywhere for advice on how to find the good life. Even The New York Times Sunday Magazine has become a source of...
Jean Rhys’s haunting and hallucinatory prose poem of a novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), boldly tells the story— authentic, intimate, and unsparing, because first-person confession—of Mrs. Bertha Rochester, the doomed madwoman of Charlotte...
The era of the Civil War and Reconstruction remains the crucible of American history, the trial that decisively defined this country and its self-perceived mission. The American people seem to recognize that fact, for no era in our history...
Louis Rubin should have been with us. One year short of Street’s magic dozen, 1946—57, he abandoned journalism to earn distinction at Hollins College and then the University of North Carolina as a teacher, critic, author, publisher, and...
