The Greater Journey, by David McCullough, lists some of the most well-known artistic, scientific, and literary figures of the Civil War era among those who “made…
Nineteenth-century memoirs, letters, newspaper stories, and novels in the US were loaded, and sometimes larded, with American dialect. Civil War U.S. Navy paymaster William Keeler…
Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, by Elizabeth Brown Pryor. Pryor searched Lee’s letters to find (to quote…
Far down below I hear the river rush, / And standing in this city of the dead, / The voice of waters seems a human cry…. The…
The stories of a bunch of cranky, power-hungry, opinionated, brilliant, and idealistic men…. Some favorites (links go to Indiebound.org) Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, by…
Ginger was used in nineteenth-century medicine to treat everything from scurvy to cholera to impotence to lead poisoning. And, as in TR Hummer’s poem “Whitman’s…