The award, one of the most prestigious among scholars of American history, honors “scope, significance, depth of research and richness of interpretation.” Read more
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The award, one of the most prestigious among scholars of American history, honors “scope, significance, depth of research and richness of interpretation.” Read more
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In “The Bishop and the Butterfly,” Michael Wolraich tells the story of the sensational true crime that dominated headlines and helped topple Tammany Hall. Read more
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New Jersey is a typical entry in the FWP’s American Guides series, published during the late 1930s and early ’40s. The series comprises shaggy biographies of all the then 48 states; pick one at random and you’ll find a smorgasbord of history, legends, jokes, industrial data, social analysis, epitaphs, old letters, old newspaper clippings, old diaries, ghost stories, dubious tales, and half-forgotten anecdotes. You’ll find handsome line illustrations alongside photographs of houses and monuments and people at work. You’ll find scattered, subtle reports on how people were sustaining themselves through the Depression and how New Deal policies were reshaping the country. You’ll find a little practical advice for travelers and a lot of information whose purpose is more obscure. You’ll find a guidebook that seems, itself, to have wandered off and gotten lost. Read more
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A Florida textbook publisher removed all references of race from a lesson about civil rights icon Rosa Parks in order to get a Florida committee’s approval, according to The New York Times. Read more
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From Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones comes the greatest story never told. The 1619 Project premieres January 26th only on Hulu. Watch trailer
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Alan Taylor, the author of “American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850,” has been named the winner of the New-York Historical Society’s 2022 Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize, which is awarded each year for the best work of American history or biography. Read more
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Last week, the Biographers International Organization (BIO) announced Megan Marshall as the winner of its 13th annual BIO Award, bestowed annually “to a distinguished colleague who has made major contributions to the advancement of the art and craft of biography.” Read more
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“Black Reconstruction,” published against a backdrop of violence and segregation, met with a vitriolic reception. White writers leveled sharp-tongued critiques. Black journalists assessed the work favorably but with reservations. Despite the early criticism, over time “Black Reconstruction” came to be recognized as a towering analysis of American culture and an important work of history. Nonetheless, the book’s contribution to the understanding of American racism is, nearly 90 years after its publication, still subject to stale objections that echo those heard when it first hit bookstore shelves. Read more
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In this important work of biographical history, novelist Sohn traces the career of Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), special agent to the U.S. Post Office and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. For more than 40 years, Comstock, a deeply Christian dry goods seller from Connecticut, harassed and imprisoned many of the important pioneers in the birth control movement. Read more
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…a dynamic and discriminating cultural history that speaks to both readers who know something about the project and those who don’t. Like the American Guides these Depression-era writers worked on, Borchert’s book teems with colorful characters, scenic byways and telling anecdotes; his own writing style is full of “verve” — the much prized quality that so many of the guides themselves possessed. Read more
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