In the late 1850s, when a young Sarah Morgan Bryan began to publish her poems in magazines and journals (her first collection, A Woman’s Poems, appeared in 1871 under her married name Sarah Piatt), poetry was one of America’s most popular literary forms. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and their fellow Fireside Poets […]
Tag Archives: Ben Railton
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Oct
Oct
Recently, my sons and I enjoyed the unique pleasure of losing ourselves for a few nights of bedtime reading in a compelling children’s book, Kate Milford’s The Boneshaker (2010). The book, a richly imagined historical novel set in 1914 Missouri, has as much to tell us about history, community, and early 20th century America as […]
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Aug
Aug
Classic American literature can sometimes feel as distant in time as it does in style from our 21st century moment. But just as our histories continue to echo into our present, so too do classic texts have a great deal to do with society and culture today. Indeed, many such texts offer vital lessons for […]
In the early 1930’s, a time of economic turmoil and inequality, and a period of deep national tensions and divisions, Carlos Bulosan immigrated to the United States from the Philippines to find work as a migrant laborer. He was far from the first from his country to do so; indeed, there had been Filipino American […]
There’s no doubt that it is a dark and divided moment in American society—one that both echoes some of our darkest prior periods and presents its own unique and evolving challenges. In such a moment, literature can feel like at best an irrelevant luxury, and at worst a distraction from the collective work we should […]
A mixed-race man who began life as an indentured servant, served in the army during the War of 1812’s Quebec campaign, and became a traveling Methodist minister. The author of the first published Native American autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829). A passionate advocate of Native American rights who helped foment the groundbreaking Mashpee […]
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Oct
Oct
On images of the Salem Witch Trials in historical romance, horror, and collective memory. Nathaniel Hawthorne famously complained, in the Preface to his novel The Marble Faun (1859), about “the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong.” It’s easy, and […]
A century before Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Gish Jen, Sui Sin Far wrote fictional, autobiographical, and journalistic works that portray Chinese American identities and communities, experiences and worlds, discrimination and successes, with nuance and power. Far, christened Edith Maude Eaton before adopting her Chinese pen name for all her published writings, was born […]
When it comes to issues of race, our collective memories of the century between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement focus almost entirely on Jim Crow segregation. Writing from the heart of that largely forgotten period, Charles Chesnutt produced works of fiction that both engage deeply with […]
In the late 19th and early 20th century, the destructive forces of the reservation and residential school systems worked to sever Native American communities from the rest of American society and young Native Americans from their own heritage. Born and educated in these destructive worlds, Dakota Sioux writer, musician, educator, and activist Zitkala-Ša worked throughout […]