19th century

• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  5/17/2023
  

  A Biography of Writer Lydia Marie Child Exemplifies a Revisitation of 19th Century Women

  by Susan Cheever

  A biography of the writer seeks to rectify a widespread phenomenon: women influential in their own time whose significance has been obscured in later histories. 

• 
• 4/2/2023
  

  Learning from Historical Fiction: A Family Tale Reveals a Brief Multicultural Moment of the American West

  by Alix Christie

  One novelist's work adapting the story of her 19th century forebears (the last Hudson's Bay Company trader in the US, his Nez Perce wife, and the family that they raised) led her to archives, historians, and the challenge of narrating the complexities of the period when conquest supplanted a hybrid indigenous-European society between the Rockies and the Pacific. 

• 
• SOURCE: Public Books
  9/21/2021
  

  Fin de Siecle Vienna: Art and Culture in Schorske's Century

  by Thomas Bender

  Carl Schorske's work on 19th Century Vienna was a masterwork of intellectual history that incorporated interdisciplinary approaches to politics and culture to model new approaches to scholarship in the humanities. A colleague traces his intellectual development.

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  9/22/2021
  

  Climate Anxiety and the Return of Arctic Horror

  by Bathsheba Demuth

  As climate change driven by capitalism threatens the polar ice caps, new miniseries return to the themes of arctic exploration, where cold and ice threaten humans and commerce, rather than the other way around. 

• 
• 6/14/2020
  

  Hungarian-American Relations in 1849 and Today: Why We Need Another Lajos Kossuth

  by Tim Roberts

  A Hungarian nationalist visited the United States in 1849 to plead the case for an independent, democratic state, inspiring the cause of abolition in America. Today Hungarian-American relations are running in the direction of authoritarianism. 

• 
• 5/10/2020
  

  Spiritualism and Suspension Bridges: John Roebling and a Biographer's Sympathy for the Weird 19th Century

  by Richard Haw

  A biographer of Brooklyn Bridge designer John Roebling expected to write about a genius. He also ended up writing about a complete weirdo, and how one man could be both.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/19/2020
  

  Covid-19 is Forcing Us to Dwell in Uncertainty. History Can Help.

  by Sari Altschuler

  Writings on long-ago cholera outbreaks contain lessons in navigating unknowns.

• 
• 4/12/2020
  

  The Other Booths

  by David O. Stewart

  The notoriety of the Lincoln assassination has obscured the other Booths in history, but some were as well known as John Wilkes--or even better, at least until he pulled the trigger in the president’s box at Ford’s Theater, 155 years ago this week. 

• 
• SOURCE: Nursing Clio
  3/26/2020
  

  The Lone Woman of Kokura

  by Nyri A. Bakkalian

  Who was the Lone Woman in the Kokura Castle town ruins that day in 1866? We don’t know her name, though we know where she died in Kokura.

• 
• SOURCE: The New York Times
  1/22/20
  

  The Myth of Middle-Class Liberalism

  by David Motadel

  The bourgeois are supposed to ensure open, democratic societies. In fact, they rarely have.

• 
• SOURCE: Smithsonian Magazine Online
  11/26/19
  

  A Brief History of the Crock-Pot

  Eighty years after it was patented, the Crock-Pot remains a comforting presence in American kitchens.

• 
• SOURCE: Telegraph
  1/15/19
  

  Women used to grow whiskers for bizarre 19th century trend, historian discovers

  Whiskers were so popular in the 19th century that even women wanted to grow sideburns.