Lapham's Quarterly

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• “What might be useful in the memory of the Revolution?” (Boston Review) • On the “pompous know-it-all” archetype in Renaissance theatre. (Public Domain Review) • “The most memorable frenemies and catfights from American history.” (Bowery Boys) • Overlooked World Cup history, captured in “sportraits.” (Hyperallergic) • “The protagonist may be male, but The Odyssey is a story in which women predominate.” (BBC) • On the de-extinction debate.

In this semiquincentennial year, as an accompaniment to Lapham’s Revolutionary America, a special series of The World in Time, we are publishing readings from the past and the present that speak to the meaning of the nation’s founding. Among the many figures whose portraits Jill Lepore draws in These Truths, her single-volume history of the U.S., is Maria W. Stewart, a member of Beacon Hill’s free Black community in antebellum Boston.

• “Ultimately, the American Revolution was hardly an anti-colonial movement…the argument for independence was a resistance to the British Proclamation of 1763 that said that colonists cannot move beyond the Appalachian Mountains. And in the end, they were pushing against British limitations on expansion. In other words, they wanted more empire for themselves.” (Democracy Now) • “But the bicentennial took place at a time when the moment of maximum danger for the republic seemed to have passed.

The American historian Gordon S. Wood died at age 92 on June 7, 2026. In the foreword he wrote for Ted Widmer’s new book, The Living Declaration, from which this essay has been adapted, Wood reflected, one final time, on the Declaration of Independence, returning to a theme that he pursued throughout his career, across many books on the American Revolution: the primacy of creed over blood in America’s national story. That theme animates the conversation Wood recorded with Lewis H.

Gordon S. Wood (1933–2026). Photograph by Kenneth C. Zirkel, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin. Subscribe to This Podcast iTunes Spotify SoundCloud Google Podcasts RSS “What’s extraordinary in those speeches that Lincoln gave on the eve of the war,” says Gordon S. Wood in this episode of The World in Time, “is his realization of how diverse America had become.

Ask about the unconscious and most neuroscientists will acknowledge its existence, grudgingly, before going on to explain that consciousness is hard enough to study as it is, without complicating the matter by bringing in something as elusive and ill-defined as unconsciousness. Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, a Bulgarian-born psychologist at the University of British Columbia, is a notable exception, a self-described misfit in the field.

• “The letter W is a child of the fall of Rome.” (Literary Hub) • On the first years of the HIV epidemic in New York City. (Mother Jones) • A history of terrible World Cup video games. (Guardian) • “How Hawai‘i Became the Most Unionized State.” (Current Affairs) • On the origins of our relationship with fire. (ScienceNews) • On our “longstanding practice of buying sovereignty.” (n+1) • Removed: Artwork criticizing Winston Churchill’s role in the Bengal Famine.

Detail from Lainey’s Garden (The Garden of Love), by Walter Sickert, ca. 1927–1931. The Fitzwilliam Museum. Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin. Subscribe to This Podcast iTunes Spotify SoundCloud Google Podcasts RSS “We have language. That’s the best tool we have for understanding the consciousness of another,” says Michael Pollan on this week’s episode of The World in Time.

Be Careful What You Wish For Winning the lottery: not always so lucky in the end.