July/August 2009

Photo caption

Webster's Third Dictionary became infamous after mistaken reports that it treated "ain't" as proper English.

Dona Bagley

July/August 2009

Volume 30, Issue 4

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HUMANITIES: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities

In This Issue

Ain’t That the Truth

Webster's Third: The Most Controversial Dictionary in the English Language

David Skinner

Living Off the Landscape

Thomas Cole and Frederick Church in the Hudson River Valley

Tom Christopher

Swimming Through Libraries

What and How Herman Melville Read

James Williford

Also in this issue

Proud Flesh

A recollection of Wallace Stegner

Kenneth Fields

What IF?

The book gives way to the download, and solitary reading transforms into virtual conversations

Steve Moyer

Reverberations of the Fourth of July

Revisiting Frederick Douglass's landmark anti-slavery speech of July 5, 1852

Laura Wolff Scanlan

Khrushchev in Iowa

Coon Rapids, Iowa, was crawling with spies.

Michael Knock

Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby

A meeting with Ansel Adams sealed a photographer's future

Laura Wolff Scanlan

Time Travels

Looking for antiquity in Iowa

Amy Lifson

Baskerville Hounded

NEH Staff

Wild Time in the Poconos

Prince Maximilian of Wied visits Pennsylvania

NEH Staff

Reading Into the Great Depression

A Conversation with Morris Dickstein

NEH Staff

Impertinent Questions with Alan Houston

On the cosmopolitan Benjamin Franklin.

Meredith Hindley

Maryland’s Phoebe Stein Davis

Phoebe Stein Davis is determined to make the humanities relevant.

Donna M. Lucey

Editor's Note

What Books Are For

David Skinner