In the handful of years after the Civil War, Illinoisans went crazy for baseball, a game that was then spelled as two words “base ball.” But, by 1868, an editor [...]
Dick Simpson is one of those rare political scientists who has also been a politician. He knows how the sausage is made, even if there is much he doesn’t like [...]
Maybe it was funnier and more interesting back in 1986 — Paradise, I mean, the thin, wispy novel by Donald Barthelme. Or maybe Barthelme just had a harder time sustaining [...]
If Homer’s epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey were movies, they’d come with a content warning: Graphic Violence. After all, the one is all about the bloody and gruesome [...]
Nobody knows anything about Homer except what’s in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and, even there, it gets dicey, as James I. Porter details in his challenging and provocative book [...]
Frederick Busch’s 1990 novel Harry and Catherine is a love story about fear. Harry Miller and Catherine Hollander had been together in Vermont when young — Harry, a New York [...]
It is astonishing to turn to pages 102-103 in Mario Ruspoli’s The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographs and find the curving wall and mural in the Hall of Bulls, [...]
Major-General James Wolfe, commander of the English forces at the Plains of Abraham on the morning of September 13, 1759, had already been shot twice in the battle against the [...]
Modern folklore says that the Inuits (Eskimos) have more than fifty words for snow and ice, but, apparently, the fact is there are only about half that many. In his [...]
There’s a tendency to think of great painters such as Michelangelo and Rembrandt as geniuses who worked alone. Of course, they’d have a lot of support staff, if only to [...]
