Guest Contribution 
On the morning of Thursday, November 2, 1854, Mary Lincoln was up at dawn. Overnight the fickle Springfield weather had turned cold and damp, and to make matters worse, the fire in the Lincoln’s new Thompson stove had gone out. Now Mary could only hope that she could get another started in time for the …
Read moreMary Todd Lincoln: Managing Home, Husband, and Children
Recent discoveries have provided much new information on the emergence and spread of modern humans.[1] Scholars in the field of genetics have established that Homo sapiens originated in Africa in about 200,000 B.P., and that our species subsequently displaced all previous hominid species. Recent results in paleontology have gone far toward confirming these views.[2] Further, …
The moon, for early modern Englishmen , was comfortingly familiar yet achingly distant. Countrymen looked to the moon, “the queen of heaven,” to understand “alterations and changes of humors, times, seasons,” and perturbations of “man’s body, the air, and all other things under her orb.” The moon and its phases helped regulate mundane activities, from …
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon offers a powerful critique of colonial rule, while at the same time providing a call for violent and revolutionary struggle against European imperialism. Written in 1961 and in the context of the Algerian War of Independence, Fanon extols the virtues of violence as a means to liberate …
Read moreMao and Fanon: Competing Theories of Violence in the Era of Decolonization
When, in the summer of 1846, Abraham Lincoln stood for election to the U.S. House of Representatives, running as a Whig in the Seventh Congressional District of Illinois, his opponent was the popular and formidable Methodist circuit rider, Peter Cartwright. During the final days of the campaign, Lincoln discovered that the Democrats were slyly circulating …
TO WRITE A HISTORY of colonial America used to be easier,” Alan Taylor’s fine new synthesis begins; “the human cast and the geographic stage were both considered so much smaller.” The past quarter-century of scholarship has enlarged that cast and stage exponentially. Instead of thirteen British colonies hugging the Atlantic seaboard, historians now must consider …