November 17, 2023
Whitney Barlow Robles— The serpent who beguiled Eve. Medusa’s ossifying glance. The hypnotic command of Kaa in Kipling’s Jungle Book. Harry’s second year at Hogwarts, turned upside down by a basilisk…. READ MORE
October 27, 2023
Henry Petroski— The bubonic epidemic known as the Great Plague broke out in London in 1665 and lasted for two years. During that time, citizens who could escape to the… READ MORE
September 7, 2023
Charles R. Geisst— Since antiquity, the idea of basic fairness and equity in society has been hotly debated. In many cases, the ideas remained general and very fuzzy, content with… READ MORE
July 28, 2022
The life of the iconic libertine Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) has never been told in the depth it deserves. An alluring representative of the Enlightenment’s shadowy underside, Casanova was an aspiring… READ MORE
September 23, 2021
Nina Rattner Gelbart— Biography is a curious genre, morphing over time, and writing about the lives of other individuals goes back to antiquity. Plutarch and Suetonius, both working from the… READ MORE
March 4, 2021
Peter E. Gordon— In 1770, the empress Maria Theresa summoned to the Viennese court an imperial counselor named Wolfgang von Kempelen, a man from the Hungarian city of Pressburg who… READ MORE
May 26, 2020
J. H. Elliott— When asserting their equality of status with English men and women in the British national enterprise, Scots in the 1760s and early 1770s could point to Scotland’s… READ MORE
July 2, 2018
Caroline Winterer— What happened to enlightened ideas after the long eighteenth century? As more scholars are placing ideals of enlightenment in their global contexts, we are learning that the conventional… READ MORE
November 1, 2016
Kenneth Stow— In 1749, a young Jewish girl of Rome, the eighteen-year-old Anna del Monte, was kidnapped and taken to the Catecumeni, the Roman House of Converts. She had been… READ MORE
October 27, 2016
Caroline Winterer— In the dark years of World War II and the Cold War, Americans invented a national mythology that we hold dear to this day: the myth of the… READ MORE
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