The Same-Sex Household That Launched 3 Women Artists
The "Red Rose Girls"—Violet Oakley, Jessie Wilcox Smith, and Elizabeth Shippen Green—met at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the 1880s.
Why We Still Love The Twilight Zone
Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone stood out in the "vast wasteland" of television in the early 1960s and still resonates today.
When Landscape Painting Was Protest Art
The landscape painter Thomas Cole celebrated the American landscape, but also expressed doubts about the limits of civilization.
The Restoration’s Filthiest Poet (and Why We Need Him)
Creature of the court, royalist and fop, dandy and dilettante, John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, knew how to scandalize with verse.
The Lost Language of American Loggers
Logger slang may have coined terms like "punk," "haywire," and "pie in the sky." One lexicographer attempted to catalogue the industry's slang in 1942.
The Art of Walking
Walking as an art has a deep history. By guiding participants, or their own bodies, on walks, artists encourage us to see the extraordinary in the mundane.
Revisiting the Messy Language of the Second Amendment
The debate over the Second Amendment is not just about guns—it's also about grammar.
What, Prithee, Is a Poetess?
The loss and recovery of a poetic genre shows how the canon of literary history treats women writers the moment they start to gain attention and approval.
The Privileged and Impoverished Life of Phillis Wheatley
The first African American of either gender to publish a book of poetry has remained a controversial figure in the black community.
Should We Thank Frig it’s Friday?
The Anglo-Saxon goddess Frig has often been cited as the origin of the word Friday, but one scholar questions whether such a deity ever existed.