More than 150,000 books were published this year; in 1709, in the British colonies of North America, that number was just 31. Out of those, the historian Jill Lepore gives us her Top 10. Unsurprisingly, New Englanders, the likes of Increase Mather and his son Cotton, dominate the list. Virginia, after all, was “one of [...]

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From the Wilson Quarterly, history professor Anders Hendriksson compiles verbatim excerpts from several decades’ worth of freshmen papers, so offering their “more striking insights into European history from the Middle Ages to the present.” Here’s the beginning: History, as we know, is always bias, because human beings have to be studied by other human beings, [...]

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The details of this particular academic kerfuffle are less interesting (to me) than the fact that John Stauffer, a professor of history at Harvard University and author, with Sally Jenkins, of The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy, defends Hollywood films: I’ve been amazed by the deep animosity that [...]

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From Ta-Nehisi Coates: We have too much faith in talk,—or rather we have too much faith in big men to control events through talk. The obsession with a “dialouge around race” is nauseating. I can’t tell if it’s real, or just a notion that (much like “postracial”) that cable news hosts put to their guests. [...]

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“You are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always well taken care of if you come from Iowa.” – Gertrude Stein “Seldom has a people been less interested in spiritual self-expression and more concerned with hog nutrition.” – Johan J. Smertenko [...]

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As noted previously, Alfred Appel Jr. has died, and Appel wrote a book about jazz in which he mentioned the baseball player Van Lingo Mungo, whose name was so cool that the jazz musician Dave Frishberg wrote a song about it—a song whose lyrics consisted of only the names of baseball players. Frishberg also wrote [...]

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Look, I know this has no connection to Virginia—although, for the record, I used the full power of Google to try create one. But we’re going to go ahead and mourn the loss of Alfred Appel Jr. anyway. After all, we are not only about the Civil War here, or history; we are about Nabokov [...]

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