“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841. While this statement may read like an innocuous truism today, the c

Walt Whitman wrote three distinct editions of Leaves of Grass before the Civil War. During those years he was passionately committed to party anti-slavery, and

The word “freedom” is so overly used—and frequently abused—that it is always in danger of becoming nothing but a cliché. In Another Freedom, Svetlana B

The use of race in studies of insanity in the 1840s and 1850s gave rise to politically charged theories on the differential biology and pathologies of brains in

An NPR Best Book of 2020 - An O, The Oprah Magazine Best LGBTQ Book of 2020 - An Electric Literature Favorite Nonfiction Book of 2020 - A Largehearted Boy Favor