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What Books Are For

Phoebe Stein Davis is determined to make the humanities relevant.

On the cosmopolitan Benjamin Franklin.

A Conversation with Morris Dickstein

Prince Maximilian of Wied visits Pennsylvania

Copyright and the plight of English publishers

Looking for antiquity in Iowa

A meeting with Ansel Adams sealed a photographer's future

Coon Rapids, Iowa, was crawling with spies.

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

Ken Sullivan stresses the role of the Civil War in the formation of his state.

On the private life of Emily Post.

A rare view of a Victorian science at work

There is pleasure to be had in looking to the past for examples of the familiar or near familiar. But one can also look to it for a good blast of the freaky, the strange, and the unrecognizable.

St. Francis has gone in and out of style.

Familiarly known as the “Ocean State,” Rhode Island’s full official name includes “and Providence Plantations,” words the state legislature has resolved to drop.

The Twin Cities host a six-mile-long art gallery.

Happy Campers convene in Oregon.

Denver's Union Station made the city take off.

West Virginians battled over their school books in 1974.

Gale Peterson’s plan to teach high school history had one fatal flaw. Not his B.S. in History and Government from Iowa State University.

On how books were used as weapons in World War II