July/August 2009
In This Issue July/August 2009
Ain’t That the Truth
Webster's Third: The Most Controversial Dictionary in the English Language.
By David Skinner
Volume 30, Issue 4
Webster's Third Dictionary became infamous after mistaken reports that it treated ain't as proper English.
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Features
Living Off the Landscape
How Thomas Cole and Frederic Church made themselves at home in the Hudson River Valley.
By Tom Christopher
Swimming Through Libraries
What Herman Melville read, and how he read, inspired his masterpiece.
By James Williford
What IF?
The book gives way to the download, and solitary reading transforms into virtual conversations.
By Steve Moyer -
Departments
Statements
Reverberations of the Fourth of July
MASSACHUSETTS On July 5, 1852, while citizens across the country were still celebrating American freedom, Frederick Douglass, the country’s most prominent former slave, delivered arguably the century’
By Laura Wolff ScanlanGhost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby
While walking home on a snowy Michigan day in 1970 after taking pictures for his high school newspaper, fourteen-year-old Craig Varjabedian passed by an art gallery.
By Laura Wolff ScanlanTime Travels
Some thirteen thousand years ago, when most archaeologists agree that humans first populated North America, a Paleo-Indian tribe left a cache of stone weapons in southern Iowa, maybe to be finished an
By Amy LifsonCurio
Baskerville Hounded
From The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765–1810 by Thomas F. Bonnell, published by Oxford University Press, 2008.
Wild Time in the Poconos
From The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied, Volume I, May 1832–April 1833, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, 2008, in which the aristocratic naturalist and
Good Stable Manners
In Ancient Rome and Modern America, NEH-funded scholar Margaret Malamud looks at the ways visions of the imperial city have been incorporated into everything from the Constitution to Caes
Teenie Harris Image Collection
African-American news photographer “Teenie” Harris’s career at the Pittsburgh Courier spanned forty years, during which time he recorded daily life in Iron City’s many diverse neighborhoods.
Comanche Robe
This painted Comanche hide, which dates from the mid nineteenth century, served as a robe for a child.
Conversation
Reading Into the Great Depression
Critic Morris Dickstein talks about the culture of the thirties and the demise of theory.
Impertinent Questions
Impertinent Questions with Alan Houston
On the cosmopolitan Benjamin Franklin.
By Meredith Hindley (edited by)In Focus
Maryland’s Phoebe Stein Davis
Phoebe Stein Davis is determined to make the humanities relevant.
By Donna M. LuceyEdNote
Editor's Note, July/August 2009
I have become a regular purchaser of old books, and as I pull these worn-out tomes from my mailbox I wonder if anyone else is still reading these particular works.
By David Skinner
