The new Common-place is up! David Shields edits a special issue on foodways in early America.

Jill Lepore, "Poor Jane's Almanac," NYT, 24 April, contrasts the experience of Benjamin Franklin and his younger sister, Jane Franklin Mecom.

Willibald Sauerländer, "The Quiet Genius," NYRB, 28 April, reviews "L'Armoire secrète: Eine Leserin im Kontext" [The Secret Cabinet: A Reader in Context], an exhibit at the Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland; and Mariantonia Reinhard-felice, ed., Oskar Reinhart Collection Am Romerholz Winterthur: Complete Catalogue.

Debby Applegate, "A Nation Stirs, the Civil War Begins," NYT, 21 April, reviews Adam Goodheart's 1861: The Civil War Awakening.

Jonathan Barnes, "The Victorian art of murder," TLS, 13 April, reviews Judith Flanders's The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians revelled in death and detection and created modern crime.

Thomas Powers, "Incandescent Memory," LRB, 28 April, reviews Harriet Elinor Smith et al., eds., Autobiography of Mark Twain Vol. I.

David Greenberg, "Democracy" by Henry Adams, Slate, 20 April, offers to explain "why it's the only lasting anonymous Washington novel."

Vivian Gornick, "History and Heartbreak," Nation, 2 May, reviews Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza, eds., The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg.

Alan Wolfe, "The Visitor," The Book, 21 April, reviews Lawrence A. Scaff's Max Weber in America.