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Here is a strange confession for someone who has been for most of the past forty years a historian of the early American republic: I have been fascinated by Theodore Roosevelt and his times since the age of fifteen. That year, as a tenth grader, I happened to...

As a graduate student in early American literature, I came across a mystery on the title pages of several hymnals from the US’s first decades. Many of these books shared a similar idea in their subtitles, variants of “for the use of religious assemblies and...

Many people have asked me why I wrote the book and why I chose the title, The American Lab. Much of the motivation arose out of the events associated with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s 50th anniversary in 2002, the last major event that I...

Most journalists believe in their heart that they “have a book in them.” Too often, however, events and circumstance prevent most reporters from digging into that compelling story. Reporting assignments pile up. Your editor says, “Leave of absence? Are you...

Although “Franken” has in the cultural zeitgeist become a watchword for the power of science to destroy humanity, Mary Shelley had a far more open view of science. Don’t mistake the messenger, Victor, for the message. In fact, in her day, “science” had a lower...

A pair of Haverford College librarians recently published "False Starts and Breakthroughs:Senior Thesis Research as a Critical Learning Process" in the journal portal:Libraries and the Academy. Haverford students have to complete a senior thesis or work...

One of the claims I make in Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is that the feeling of not having time to read is almost as old as books themselves. We tend to imagine that when books were new media people struggled to put them down, a bit...

Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay came out in 2000, but still resonates in literary circles nearly 20 years later. The Spring 2018 issue of MFS Modern Fiction Studies featured "The Politics of Escapistry...

For generations, school children remembered the Webster-Hayne Debate by memorizing the ending to Daniel Webster’s Second Reply to Robert Y. Hayne. Its soaring articulation of nationalism and American nationhood—“Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and...

When Andrew Benjamin Bricker watches Saturday Night Live or the Jordan Peele film Get Out, he thinks of the eighteenth century. An Assistant Professor in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University in Belgium, Bricker recently published "After the...