Martin’s confession relates outlaw adventures that appear to be original. But were they real? 

Pet of the Petticoats extends the reach of Anglo-Atlantic anti-Catholicism to the stage, illustrating the ways its tropes and anxieties moved across genres and into sentimental stage comedy.

The Quaker spiritual journey, often invisible due to its silent, humble and individual nature, is illustrated in this map.

Though The Wide, Wide World is probably not familiar to many people today, the concerns and claims of these fan letters, rather remarkably, may be.

…without the bawdy world of Falstaff and Prince Hal and of Shakespeare’s jesters, beadles, and gravediggers or the hovering evil of murderous kings, corrupt priests, scheming witches, and ungrateful daughters there would have been nothing for those dissenting Puritans to dissent from.

I had a longtime fascination with both the Latter-Day Saints and the Inca Empire. To find this point of contact across centuries and hemispheres gave me something of the confused pleasure one feels on learning that two good friends know each other independently from oneself.

There is a kind of actor who inhabits his role rather than himself. His true life takes place onstage.

Despite its dramatic potential, however, the War of 1812 has suffered from a relative paucity of narrative attention.

Jones focuses on how a proslavery “common sense” was the dominant ideological platform against which black people sought to exercise self-determination.

There was something refreshing about reading a book like this, which I came to completely unburdened by expectations. There was no need to ponder, as I read, whether The Wonderful World of Disney had handled the material well.

Oral tradition, nationalism, and the invention of history

while students may giggle when the first clip begins, they really do listen to and enjoy the music.

Though it would take weeks to sort through the wreckage, it was immediately clear that the fire had caused casualties on a scale previously unimaginable.

Clay embodied both union and conflict. He had been the subject of political pageantry as politics and popular culture developed alongside one another in the early nineteenth century.

Once the students begin actively listening to the songs, their enthusiasm for the material grows.

As the century wore on, commercial music figured increasingly in the musical lives of Americans, significantly multiplying the choices available to audiences and elevating their aesthetic sophistication.

More than a historical resource, “The Lost Museum” invites us, then, to ponder the narratives with which we stage authenticity, the material objects and practices with which every generation reimagines the kinship of truth and fiction.

From imaginary vantage points along major streets, [writers] traced the life of the metropolis from its first vigorous stirrings before dawn through its murmurs and rustlings deep in the night.

Not everyone in colonial Philadelphia was pleased about having the hours rung on the state house bell.

“It is clear even to my own inexpert eye that the penned inscription “by Clement C. Moore, A.M.” is not written in Moore’s rather distinctive hand.”

In Rezek’s view, the national literatures of the U.S., Ireland, and Scotland look less like the pure reflections of their respective cultures or peoples than, collectively, like a set of provincial riffs off a metropolitan literary standard.

Dewulf is right to address the important West Central African influences on North American celebrations such as Pinkster. West Central Africans played an important role in many American slave communities, as several scholars have shown in recent years.

Jenna M. Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760-1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University […]

Vowell has a sharp eye for paradox, contradiction, coincidence, and most especially for hypocrisy. She delights in poking her finger into the eye of American complacency.

What distinguished these musicians […] was their firm belief that music, particularly the large instrumental works of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, not only symbolized the ideals of social harmony and equality, but also instantiated these ideals in performance.

Though hard to fathom in a twenty-first century devoid of such an entrenched dance ethos, in 1804, the French and Americans continued to battle over the form and shape of public musical life.

The Marquis de Lafayette visited Lexington, Kentucky, in May 1825 as part of his triumphal tour of the United States, […]

Deliberation is no doubt put to the ideological test in the pages of this book, and it does not always come out shining.

Although menagerie owners emphasized the educational value of their exhibitions, they were clearly driven by economic rather than educational imperatives. Menageries were both capital-intensive and risky ventures.

More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle placed “spectacle” (opsis, that which is seen) dead last in importance among the […]

Schultz paints a picture of an increasingly divided church in the United States, with miracles being only one of the issues on which the camps disagreed.

We are at sea even before the Pequod’s voyage begins.

A Cultural Historian’s View of Civil War Memorials at Appomattox, Fredericksburg, and Island Mound When I go to the battlefields, […]

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“[G]iven the sorry record of ‘legitimate’ European medicine in the period, a profession that one historian of medicine recently noted was as likely to kill a patient as to cure her, it is no surprise that Mesmerism–which at least did no damage–successfully passed itself off as the cutting edge of Enlightenment science.”

The actors who clawed their way to fame in the early decades of the American theater labored in an entrepreneurial industry that was far more reminiscent of prospecting for gold or financing merchant ships than it was of modern industrial production.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

The prehistory of American bestsellers takes us beyond questions about the content and literary value of bestselling texts and invites us instead to explore just what makes such a phenomenon possible.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson On a chilly weekend shortly before Christmas, the Stunning Significant Other (hereafter, SSO) and I took […]

Dancers and musicians, who work primarily with physical knowledge and sensation, perceive jigs differently than historians who rely on written evidence.

Having been to more than my share of very sparsely-attended indie rock shows and history conference panels in recent years, the thought has occurred more than once that “mid-career” academic historians have much in common with a lot of the veteran indie musicians I go to see: well-known within a certain dispersed circle of cognoscenti, perhaps even established in certain way, but doing something too particular in its appeal to ever achieve more than the most modest sort of popularity.

How should we understand the major role European classical music has played in American cultural history?

Hayley’s arrival in Boston was reported in newspapers from New England to South Carolina.

Why are the tropics so appealing to reality-TV producers and viewers?

“[I]f Joss Whedon, spy in the house of love, isn’t willing or able to wrestle with the legacy of slavery, who is?”

I am trying to be a serious person in these serious times, but permit me to take moment to follow […]

“In part, the recurring taste for folk music has to be explained by a recurring desire in American culture: the desire to strip away the awful effects of consumer culture and return to a simpler, harder, more authentic time.”

“As white fascination with black actors imitating white theatrical performances began to give way to the more racy thrills of minstrelsy, Hewlett found diminishing interest in his act as ‘Shakespeare’s proud representative.'”

In [Grant’s] view, offered in the form of a press release issued for the painting’s public debut, the cherry-tree story was at once too good to be true and “too good to lose.”

“[T]he full hall at the Virginia Theatre snickered every time God, the Devil, or magic was mentioned. For a New York theater-going audience the notion that such ideas could carry intellectual and emotional weight seemed ludicrous.”

Mary Clark Carr, it turns out, is even more interesting than Ann Carson. Anyone with a gun and a few friends can kidnap a governor, but how many women in the early republic had the talent, initiative, and opportunity to earn their living by writing?

June 30, 2008 The Age of Analogies   One of Josh Marshall’s posts last week noted the dismal failure of […]

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

In answer to Ben’s comment, of course Sir Lord Baltimore counts, and who could forget Paul Revere and the Raiders, […]

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“As early-nineteenth-century Americans set out to conquer the western wilderness, this mythical creature helped them imagine themselves as new rulers of the natural world.”

August 29, 2008 Vice Grip . . . on the media’s imagination, blogosphere included. Finally, we come to the sense-shattering […]

I found out my pirate name: Calico Bess Kidd. I installed a Multi-Lingual Pirate Insult Generator on my laptop, you poxy bilge rat. […]

“Did the family-owned San Antonio printing company really print the paper money that helped finance the Mexican Revolution, as the current owner has heard rumored? Is the salty old New Englander right when he says that the whaling ship his grandfather skippered out of New Bedford sheltered escaped slaves among its crew?”

This page presents some of the same links that appear on my original home page, along with some new ones, […]

“What would it be like to step inside the memory of the diarist? To experience a diary as if it were a video replay? What would I ask an enchanted diary if it one day spontaneously responded to my marginal annotations?”

This summer, public television stations across the U.S. aired The 1900 House, a four-part series billed on PBS’s website as […]

Far reaching in its range, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture” amasses a rich archive of textual material in print, sheet music, song, illustration, and film, allowing viewers to encounter the many faces of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The reverend author of this book before us, which we are at a loss whether to denominate a biography, or a novel, founded on fact, has presented a specimen of writing, which for variety and oddity is almost an unique in the annals of literature.

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