Everyone, I suppose, has a sense of the what-if of history. What if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t gone to Ford’s Theater that night and avoided assassination? What if I had taken a […]
Like many history books, Steven Conn’s The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America For What It Is—And Isn’t is a showcase of and argument for nuanced thinking. In his […]
A strikingly drawn and boldly colored map, attributed to the Jesuit priest and explorer Jean de Brebeuf, is the image used on the cover of Mirela Altic’s Encounters in the […]
For more than 18 centuries, paper was made with rags—old clothes, sails, and ropes—the same way it had first been fashioned in China. But, by the 19th century, the process of […]
The late Indian writer Rajkamal Chaudhary (1929–1967) came to prominence in the first two decades of independent India in the 1950s and ’60s, producing a prolific number of works in […]
The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification By Julian Montague Second edition, 2023, University of Chicago Press Julian Montague published his first edition of The […]
If Shakespeare, instead of Mother Goose, had written “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” perhaps he would have penned a sonnet to take the young girl to task for abandoning “Thy […]
It’s something of a surprise to be reminded that Oscar Wilde—the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray and the subject of a scandalous 1895 trial over consensual homosexual acts—wrote […]
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 Homer: […]
The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America By Lisa Z Sigel Reaktion Books Masturbation is the only sex act that’s both universal and forbidden. Universal in that […]
Move on Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power By Aaron Cohen University of Chicago Press One of the pleasures of reading Aaron Cohen’s 2019 Move On Up: Chicago […]
Queer Legacies: Stories from Chicago’s LGBTQ Archives John D’Emilio University of Chicago Press Reviewed by Carr Harkrader Who doesn’t love a parade? It wouldn’t be completely wrong to describe Queer […]