Humanities

In this excerpt from Henry David Thoreau: A Life (University of Chicago Press, 2017), NEH grantee Laura Dassow Walls chronicles the  turning point when Thoreau sold his first articles and began recording the observations that would make him famous. He was thirty years old, and, though not yet an established writer, he understood that “beauty & art” were his vocation.

Feature Excerpts from the writings of Harvey Mansfield. HUMANITIES, May/June 2007, Volume 28, Number 3 QUESTIONING MACHIAVELLI How can an author be a prince? How can the author of The Prince be considered one among the many princes he describes? An author and a prince seem quite distinct.

In Paris, Gerald became captivated by cubism. “There was a shock of recognition which put me into an entirely new orbit,” he said after visiting avant-garde art galleries. He rapidly gained fame as a distinctly American cubist painter, developing in seven years a small body of paintings now regarded as major works of American modernism. At the same time, he and Sara enthralled their new artist friends with their genius for transforming daily life into art.

Before Presley’s arrival, according to Peter Guralnick, the musical stage was set for something big to happen. “[Phillips] didn’t believe in luck necessarily, but the moon had to be in the right place, the wind had to be blowing in the right direction. . . .

Jonathan D. Spence, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, was born in England on August 11, 1936, the son of Dermot and Muriel Crailsham Spence. His was a lettered family. Professor Spence’s maternal grandfather taught at Clifton College in Bristol during the Great War, and his mother, who attended secondary school in London, was a passionate student of French language and literature.

Into this breach stepped a handful of scholars, including Philip Edward Mosely, the man who would become the most influential Sovietologist of the Cold War. He lacked the name recognition and elegant writing style of the diplomat George Kennan, whose 1947 “X” article introduced the concept of containment to the world.

Semiarid, constantly windy, and prone to droughts—with long dry spells coming along every twenty years or so—the grasses were what kept the land together, what kept it from deteriorating into outright desert. Their tangled roots held the topsoil in place, prevented it from blowing away and exposing the dense layer of hardpan underneath. But so much rich earth, left to the good graces of nature, is hard to resist.

During the previous decade, Nietzsche’s writings had taken German culture by storm. One of Kessler’s friends joked that “six educated Germans cannot come together for a half hour without Nietzsche’s name being mentioned.” Nietzsche had become a hero—and cult figure—to those who wanted to reimagine Germany; and a villain to those who remained attached to Germany’s Protestant roots and traditional order. The philosopher’s tragic decline only added to his mystique.

You’d think a guy with a name like Pudge Heffelfinger would have been mixed up in more than his share of schoolyard scuffles. Defending a Dickensian moniker like that, though, may have forged the gridiron talents that made him, in 1892, the first professionally paid football player, as the Allegheny Athletic Association’s ledger books clearly show.

But as the Roman statesman Cato the Elder so sagely commented: “I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one.” In Poe’s case, it’s fair to ask why. Fortunately, for inquiring minds, the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond provides the necessary information to make the query. Located in the Old Stone House, built in the eighteenth century, the museum includes a series of exhibits on Poe’s life and his enduring relationship with the American public.