Walt Whitman

Megan Marshall | September/October 1987

Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody managed to extend the boundaries that cramped the lives of nineteenth-century women. Elizabeth introduced the kindergarten movement to America, Mary developed a new philosophy of mothering that we now take for granted, and Sophia was liberated from invalidism by her passionate love for her husband.

Other men,” Ralph Waldo Emerson told an admiring crowd in Boston’s Odeon Theater toward the end of 1845, “are lenses through which we read our own minds.” The eminent philosopher then went on to tell his audience of the importance in their lives of “Represent

Ten Books That Shaped the American Character

Jonathan Yardley | April/May 1985

Walden is here, of course; but so too is Fanny Farmer’s first cookbook.

America is not a nation of readers, yet books have had a deep and lasting effect on its national life.

Fear Of The City 1783 To 1983

Alfred Kazin | February/March 1983

The city has been a lure for millions, but most of the great American minds have been appalled by its excesses. Here an eminent observer, who knows firsthand the city’s threat, surveys the subject.

EVERY THURSDAY , when I leave my apartment in a vast housing complex on Columbus Avenue to conduct a university seminar on the American city, I reflect on a double life—mine.

“Half Song-thrush, Half Alligator,”

Justin Kaplan | October/November 1980

An exasperated Ralph Waldo Emerson said of his rudest, most rebellious—and most brilliant—protégé. Their turbulent relationship survived what one newspaper called “the grossest violation of literary comity and courtesy that ever passed under our notice.”

One Saturday evening early in March, 1842, a twenty-two-year-old journalist named Walter Whitman came to the reading room of the New-York Society Library on Broadway, a few blocks north of City Hall, to hear a public lecture on “The Poet.” He had just been ap

Two Civil War Letters

October 1957

Missives, one by Mark Twain, the other by Walt Whitman, reflect the impact of the Civil War on the nation.

Hardly a person in America was untouched by the Civil War, and Mark Twain and Walt Whitman were no exceptions. Because they were perhaps the most distinctly “American” writers of their time, their reactions to the conflict are particularly interesting.

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.