“To Eat This Big Universe as Her Oyster”: Margaret Fuller and the First Major Work of American Feminism

By Randall Fuller

“As a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded” — this is the kind of life envisioned by Margaret Fuller in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). With an ear attuned to the transcendentalist’s inimitable voice, Randall Fuller revisits the intellectual context, interviews with female prison inmates, and personal longing that informed this landmark feminist work. more

The Man and The Crowd (1928): Photography, Film, and Fate

By Gideon Leek

“Make films about the people, they said”, Jean-Luc Godard once quipped, “but The Crowd had already been made, so why remake it?” Gideon Leek rewatches King Vidor’s classic, in which a young man with big dreams moves to New York City and becomes an identical cog who learns to love the machine of modernity. more

Talking Lightly About Serious Things: Henri Rochefort and the Origins of French Populism

By Vlad Solomon

A man who “believed in nothing, not even himself”, Henri Rochefort is now a minor footnote in the annals of modern journalism. However, at the height of his notoriety, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, his writings, political activities, imprisonments, and escapes were the stuff of newspaper gossip around the world. How did a self-described “errant journalist and literary poacher” rise to power on the wings of sarcasm and ridicule to reshape France’s political landscape? Vlad Solomon explores the life and times of this populist forerunner. more

Gottfried Mind, The Raphael of Cats

By Kirsten Tambling

Labelled a “cretin” and “imbecile” in his lifetime, the Swiss artist Gottfried Mind had profound talents when it came to drafting the feline form. Kirsten Tambling reconstructs the biography of this elusive figure, whose savant-like qualities inspired later French Realists, early psychiatric theorists, and Romantic visions of the artist as outsider. more

Scenes of Reading on the Early Portrait Postcard

By Melina Moe and Victoria Nebolsin

When picture postcards began circulating with a frenzy across the United States and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, a certain motif proved popular: photographs of people posed with books. Melina Moe and Victoria Nebolsin explore this paradoxical sign of interiority and find a class of image that traverses the poles of absorption and theatricality. more

Our Mortal Waltz: The Dance of Death Across Centuries

By Allison C. Meier

The sight of a skeletal corpse rarely inspires a rollicking jig. Yet for more than half a millennium, the dance of death in European visual art has imagined a tango between the quick and the dead. Allison C. Meier tracks the motif’s evolution across history, discovering how — through times of disease, war, and economic inequality — printmaking offered a means to both critique social ills and reflect upon new forms of human devastation. more

Sensitive Material: Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Blackmail, and the First Motion Pictures

By Irfan Shah

The story of early cinema may have been different had Wordsworth Donisthorpe been better at blackmail. Irfan Shah goes digging in the archives to recover the details of this forgotten polymath — political individualist, chess reformer, inventor of a peculiar kind of film camera — and finds a fierce debate about the history of English wool combing improbably implicated in the rise of motion pictures. more

From Fire Hazards to Family Trees: The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

By Tobiah Black

Created for US insurance firms during a period of devastating fires across the 19th and 20th centuries, the Sanborn maps blaze with detail — shops, homes, churches, brothels, and opium dens were equally noted by the company’s cartographers. Tobiah Black explores the history and afterlife of these maps, which have been reclaimed by historians and genealogists seeking proof of the vanished past. more

“You Are My Friend”: Early Androids and Artificial Speech

By Jessica Riskin

Centuries before audio deepfakes and text-to-speech software, inventors in the eighteenth century constructed androids with swelling lungs, flexible lips, and moving tongues to simulate human speech. Jessica Riskin explores the history of such talking heads, from their origins in musical automata to inventors’ quixotic attempts to make machines pronounce words, converse, and declare their love. more

Same as It Ever Was?: Eternal Recurrence in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

By Claire Hall

While Friedrich Nietzsche popularised the notion of an “eternal return” — in which one’s life would occur again, forever, exactly as it did before — the concept was itself a repetition. Claire Hall explores various shades of this idea in ancient philosophy, from Pythagorean metempsychosis to Stoic predictions about a cosmological reset. more

Professor Megalow’s Dinosaur Bones: Richard Owen and Victorian Literature

By Richard Fallon

Richard Owen, the Victorian scientist who first named the “dinosaurs”, claimed that he could identify an animal, even an extinct one, from inspecting a single bone. Richard Fallon revisits other Owen-inspired fictions — by R. D. Blackmore, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Kingsley — and finds literature layered with scientific, religious, and political interventions, spurred by the discovery of prehistoric life. more

Pseudo-Boccaccio, Yiddish Pulp Fiction, and the Man Who Ripped Off Joyce

By Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti

In 1927, a pair of lurid “translations” appeared in English, marketed as authentic tales by Giovanni Boccaccio and illustrated with supposedly new works by Aubrey Beardsley. Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti search for the origin of these fakes, in which illicit sex begets terrible violence, and uncover a story involving pseudotranslation, Yiddish shund literature, and the piracy king of literary modernism, Samuel Roth. more