Freedom Seekers will show how all kinds of men, women, and children who escaped were important actors in the challenge not just to their own enslavement but to slavery more broadly.

To judge from the Concord collection, the public forum of antebellum America was no model of democratic deliberation.

So, what is the right decision for Commonplace when it comes to choosing a social media strategy?

The success of miscellanies such as Littell’s Living Age depended on the U.S. Congress’s repeated refusal to pass an international copyright law and on the cultural prestige of foreign periodicals.

[BLOGITORIAL NOTE: Just to model the true spirit of democratic pluralism, we wanted readers to know up front that today’s […]

Newspapers have included a letter to the editor section as a public forum for debate for as long as they have circulated, yet we remain divided on how to read them.

Postbellum Teenage Subculture and the Amateur Press

“When an AP story on an errant buffalo in Ulster County or a canine candidate for statewide office in Florida is not available, Sun reporters produce their own accounts of dogs rescued at sea or giant turtles recaptured by German police.”

Magazines warrant fresh analysis that will enable readers to understand “the modernization of America.”

In eighteenth-century America, Christmas gift exchange was marked by a powerful reciprocity: one gave a present and received one back

Writing from Washington, where he spent the war years as a devoted hospital visitor or nurse, Whitman deployed his considerable skill as a journalist to introduce readers everywhere to the suffering of the hospitalized soldiers, focusing particularly on syndromes that, he claimed, were not well understood: trauma and its intersection with a wide range of disabilities.

If newspaper producers had aspirations to grandeur in their self-presentation, readers took a somewhat dimmer view.

The heart of Fagan’s argument concerns how black newspapers transmitted, shaped, and fostered the myriad “practices of a dynamic black chosenness,” a powerful ideological tradition linking the experiences of black Americans with God’s chosen nation.

We talk with Benjamin Fagan about the first black newspapers in the United States, biblical inspiration for freedom, and the place African Americans sought in society.

If there ever was a time when American media was unbiased, it was certainly not during the Revolutionary War.

While readers may remain unconvinced that Fenno or Duane should share the spotlight with Thomas Jefferson, this book makes it abundantly clear that they were not bit players.

In essence, what is taken as the fruit of the fig is its flower.

Keeping up with the news

Currier and Ives never intended to produce prints of great value. They sold their products for as little as fifteen cents and no more than three dollars. Rather than aspiring to have their work exhibited in the nation’s fine-art museums and galleries, they sought to have it hung on the walls of America’s homes, stores, barbershops, firehouses, barrooms, and barns.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Photographs did eventually replace wood engravings in illustration, but before that photography joined and transformed wood engraving so as to favor its claims as a fine art.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Unlike the starving seamstress or the prostitute, both represented as victims of male commercial culture, the women trained as designers, wood engravers, and illustrators represented a new, respectable, potentially comfortable form of female industry.

Unlike traditional classification systems where texts are fit into preexisting schema (such as Library of Congress subject headings), topic modeling determines the comprehensive list of subjects through its analysis of the word occurrences throughout a corpus of texts.

Author’s Note: As I hope will become readily apparent, The Hungry Eye is a work of historical fiction. Some of its characters […]

Author’s Note: As I hope will become readily apparent, The Hungry Eye is a work of historical fiction. Some of its characters […]

“[W]hile the New York Times and the Boston Globe are gleefully covering Historygate, is anyone, besides the Weekly World News, talking about history?”

When horticulturists began developing varieties of the European roots, their delectability for animals mattered as much as their taste as human food.

The cry for ‘apology,’ no matter how heartfelt, sounds positively quaint against the hotter rhetoric today’s activists embrace: Restitution. Redress. And, especially, reparation.

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