The Nineteenth-Century Ordnance Survey of Ireland (06/26)
In the early nineteenth century, Ireland was newly under British rule due to the Act of Union of 1800, which abolished Ireland's parliament, and led the British government to have an interest in recording Irish tenement valuations for taxation purposes. In 1824, a historic ordnance survey commenced—Ireland was about to become ...
The Angels of Mons (06/26)
Daniel Kraus's novel Angel Down is set on a WWI battlefield in France. After a particularly brutal shelling, Private Cyril Bagger is sent along with a small group of others to "take care of" someone shrieking nonstop in No Man's Land. Instead of a wounded comrade, however, he discovers what appears to be an angel. One of...
The Life and Death of Elizabeth Barton (06/26)
Born in the early 1500s in Kent, England, Elizabeth Barton was known throughout her short life by various sobriquets: while her supporters called her the 'Nun of Kent' and the 'Holy Maid of Kent' both during and after her life, her detractors labeled her the 'Mad Maid of Kent' after she confessed to having fabricated her visions. But what...
Edgar Allan Poe's Marriage to Virginia Clemm (06/26)
Edgar Allan Poe looms over
Fox—quite literally, in fact. Mr. Fox has a large bronze bust of Poe with a raven on his shoulder, a prize for winning a poetry contest, displayed in his office. But even beyond the bust, Poe recurs throughout the narrative. Not only does
Fox become a detective story,
a form Poe invented, Mr. Fox idealizes...
Jennicam and the Rise of a Life Lived Online (05/26)
If you think about internet influencers, you might first consider your favorite cookbook blogger, Instagram fashion icon, or YouTube content creator. But, as Sophie Gilbert notes in a chapter on the rise of reality television in her book Girl on Girl, the very first person who might stake a claim to that title is a woman who, back in 1996...
The Heist of the Century: The Antwerp Diamond Heist (05/26)
It's been called the heist of the century, despite happening only three years after the turn of the millennium. At the start of the business day on February 17, 2003, police were called to the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC) by frantic jewel traders claiming their highly secure vault had been breached. Investigators found the ...
The Life of a Hungarian Diplomat in the 1980s (05/26)
In Fran Fabriczki's debut novel Porcupines, Sonia's father is a retired diplomat. His job deeply influenced her family's lifestyle, as they divided their time between their home country, Hungary, and the United States, specifically Washington, DC, where he was posted. Part of the story takes place during the 1980s in Budapest, the capital...
Judith Clark and the 1981 Brink's Truck Robbery (05/26)
The Hill is very loosely based on author Harriet Clark's experiences as a girl visiting her mother, Judith Clark, in prison. Judith Clark's crime was driving a getaway car during the robbery of a Brink's truck that was making deliveries to banks. One guard and two police officers were killed. In the novel, Suzanna's mother went to ...
Two Major Works that Shaped American (and Américan) Thought (05/26)
In America, América, historian Greg Grandin references two major intellectual works of history and philosophy that influenced the worldviews of peoples in the Americas and in Europe. These two books offer much in the way of understanding the evolution of both the United States and Latin America in relation to one another and are ...
The Silent Generation in The Usual Desire to Kill (05/26)
In 1951, Time magazine described the youth of the era in the following terms: 'The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today's younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not ...
The Pandemic-Era National Park Boom (05/26)
If Bo Burnham's Inside captured the feeling of pandemic-induced isolation in 2020, Lindy West's memoir Adult Braces taps into the one that possessed many Americans the year after: the urge to get out of the house.
As she describes herself setting out on a cross-country odyssey in 2021, West explains her need to escape—a need ...
The Lewinsky/Clinton Scandal (04/26)
In Dear Monica Lewinsky, a fictionalized, supernaturally powerful version of Lewinsky helps a woman experiencing shame and confusion about a past sexual experience with a much older man. In real life, Lewinsky is an activist committed to fighting the shaming of women—and this career path is the direct result of her own trauma.
...
Anna Darvulia: Killer, Healer, or Victim? (04/26)
One thing that quickly becomes clear in Shelley Puhak's The Blood Countess is that Elizabeth Bathory, accused of being a serial killer, wasn't alone in whatever her activities were. She had a mysterious confidant, Anna Darvulia—to some, a sadistic torturer; to others, a skilled midwife and healer caught in political and patriarchal ...
Effects of the 2008 Financial Crisis on South Korea (04/26)
Che Yeun's debut novel, Tailbone, is set in Seoul, South Korea, during the 2008 global financial crisis. In it, the unnamed narrator observes how the crash impacts the women in her boarding house, all of whom are sex workers.
The international Great Recession was triggered in mid-September 2008, when the housing bubble in the United ...
The Plow That Broke the Plains: A Dust Bowl Documentary (04/26)
One of the protagonists in The Antidote is Cleo Allfrey, a photographer dispatched by the Resettlement Administration to document life in Nebraska's Dust Bowl. She and others in the book mention a similar, real-world project: a documentary titled The Plow That Broke the Plains.
The Plow That Broke the Plains was a controversial, ...
The 2023 Writers Guild of America Strike (04/26)
Hallie Cantor's novel, Like This, But Funnier, is about a TV writer who, in 2023, is stalled in her career and hasn't been able to find steady work—a situation that makes her feel ashamed and financially anxious. In a letter to the reader at the beginning of the book, Cantor is up front that this is based on her own life: 'I felt ...
Sisters, Not Friends: Mary and Anne Boleyn (04/26)
There is a warning about children born into the same family. Three children are problematic because one can always be left out and two can gang up on one. That was the case in the Boleyn family. Mary was the oldest. The other two, Anne and George, were best friends. They were sophisticated, intelligent, religious, loved art and literature...
Agnes Martin's Relocation to New Mexico (04/26)
In
I Am Agatha by Nancy Foley, the protagonist is loosely inspired by the late
Agnes Martin, a famed abstract expressionist painter who spent a period of her life in New Mexico, during which the story is set. In 1967, Martin stopped painting and left New York City, then disappeared from public view for 18 months before reappearing in ...
The Jeju Uprising (04/26)
Han Kang's latest novel, We Do Not Part, delves into a dark part of Korean history known as the Jeju uprising, the Jeju massacre, or (in Korea) 'Jeju 4.3,' for the day it began. Jeju, Korea's largest island, located southwest of the Korean peninsula, is sometimes today called 'the Hawaii of Asia.' In the introduction to a recent article ...
The Bracero Program: Social and Political Consequences (03/26)
The Bracero Program, a joint US–Mexico labor agreement, began during World War II and ran from 1942 to 1964. It was created to address severe farm labor shortages in the United States due to the war draft, while also providing jobs for unemployed Mexican farm workers. It was formally established by the 1942 Farm Labor Agreement, and...
Gender Fluidity and Trans Identity in the Old West (03/26)
The titular 'novel' from Torrey Peters' book Stag Dance takes place in an illegal logging camp in early 1900s Montana. During a cold and lonely winter, the lumberjacks there hold a dance, with some men designating themselves as women by placing a triangle of fabric between their legs, showing that they wish to be courted by the others. ...
The Social Impact of COVID-19 on Young Adults (03/26)
COVID-19 has had an immense impact on people of all ages, in all stages of life, and in all parts of the world. Mahogany L. Browne's novel A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe focuses on the various effects on young people's lives, which are still being felt and studied today. Along with the widespread death, disability, and ...
The Buffalo Jills Lawsuit (02/26)
The main character of Karen Parkman's novel The Jills is a cheerleader on the Buffalo Jills cheer squad, and the terrible working conditions she faces are based in reality. The Buffalo Jills were the Buffalo Bills' official cheerleaders from 1967 to 2014—when the team disbanded after a lawsuit by former members. The legal ...
The Preppy Killer (02/26)
A crime that occurred in the summer of 1986 in New York City inspired Cynthia Weiner's A Gorgeous Excitement. On August 26, a cyclist discovered 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in New York City's Central Park, dead due to strangulation and half naked behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, badly bruised and with cuts on her face. She had been ...
A History of Strip Clubs in the United States (02/26)
In the novel Soft Core, protagonist Ruth works at a San Francisco club as a stripper, a profession with a long history in the United States. The first striptease acts in America were part of vaudeville shows at carnivals and burlesque theatres around the turn of the twentieth century. One early "disrobing act" by a trapeze ...
The Kent State Pietà (01/26)
Of all the unsettling photos taken at Kent State University on May 4th, 1970, one of them became the iconic image of unthinkable tragedy. In
this photo, twenty-year-old student Jeff Miller lies face down bleeding as fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio screams in horror over his body. The photographer was KSU student John Filo, and the ...
Isolation, Alienation, and Escapism: Observing Two Thriller Narratives (01/26)
It's 2024. COVID-19, while still dangerous, is no longer the unknown factor it once was, and extended quarantines are no longer mandated as in the earlier days, pre-vaccination. Though the world has never stopped talking about what isolation has done to our collective psyche, I think it's only this year that we're starting to see some of ...
The Manhattan Project in Media (01/26)
'Choose Your Own Apocalypse' is a delightful name for a story all on its own; doubly clever when you learn it's about the Manhattan Project. But author Senaa Ahmad isn't making use of the Choose Your Own Adventure format for the sake of cheap juxtaposition. Sure, the real J. Robert Oppenheimer didn't become an eldritch abomination due to ...
British Involvement in Albania During World War II (01/26)
Indignity author Lea Ypi's grandfather—her grandmother Leman Ypi's husband—was charged by the Hoxha regime with espionage because of his interactions with British nationals in Albania. Vandeleur Robinson, Eliot Watrous, and Brigadier Edward Hodgson are all described in the author's index first as 'Asllan's friend' and second ...
The Malleus Maleficarum: A Witch Hunting Guidebook (01/26)
The history of witch hunting in Europe is broad and varies by locale and time period. However, one of the unifying factors across these different contexts is the Malleus Maleficarum—translated as the 'Hammer of Witches'—a 1487 German handbook on witchcraft that inspired witch hunt movements for centuries after its publication....
Desegregation Activist Daisy Bates (01/26)
In We Refuse, Kellie Carter Jackson recalls the courageous and tireless efforts of civil rights activist Daisy Bates and her husband, L.C., to integrate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Bates home became a place of refuge for the students known as the 'Little Rock Nine' — the first group of Black children to attend the ...
Beloved Criminals (01/26)
In A Serial Killer's Guide to Marriage, Fox and Hazel are an attractive, wealthy, glamorous couple who kill others for sport. (But they only kill evil men, like rapists and child abusers—making them, in the reader's eyes, less serial killers and more vigilantes.) Their wealth and beauty offer them an inconspicuousness that lets them...
Dinosaurs at the Crystal Palace (01/26)
In Beasts of the Sea, the reality of extinction is first discovered by the French anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier when he is tasked with analyzing a mammoth tooth sent to him by none other than Thomas Jefferson, who is determined to track down a living mammoth. In a nightmarish sequence he walks through his vast collection of ...
Indentured Servitude and Enslavement in Colonial Virginia (12/25)
In This Here Is Love, Princess Joy L. Perry tells the stories of Bless, David, and Jack as they grow from children into adulthood in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in Tidewater, Virginia. At first glance, they appear to be bound by shared hardship: Bless and David are enslaved, while Jack is an indentured servant. But as the novel...
The Activism of William Monroe Trotter (12/25)
Americans know the names Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, and many may be familiar with W.E.B. Du Bois, but if asked about Black activists, fewer would recognize the name of William Monroe Trotter. This is an unfortunate oversight because Trotter was a passionate defender of Black civil rights and founder and editor of one of the ...
The 1985–1986 Paris Terror Attacks (11/25)
In Sacha Bronwasser's Listen, Eloïse leaves her home in Germany to spend a year in Paris as an au pair. As she adjusts to her new life, the news is punctuated with stories of bombings targeting civilians across the French capital. Indeed, the events forming the backdrop to Eloïse's year abroad really did take place: ...
Comet Hale-Bopp and the Heaven's Gate Cult (11/25)
A central event in Ruby Todd's debut novel, Bright Objects, is the sighting of a comet in the atmosphere. Comet St. John appears in January of 1997 over Sylvia's small town in Australia, causing its residents, along with the rest of the world, to stargaze and ponder the mysteries of the universe.
While Comet St. John is a ...
Benito Juárez (10/25)
In his novel Season of the Swamp, Yuri Herrera illuminates the year and a half Benito Juárez spent as a political exile in New Orleans, an often-overlooked period in the life of Mexico's first Indigenous president.
Juárez was born in 1806 to a Zapotec family living in the town of San Pablo Guelatao, Oaxaca, Mexico. He was ...
Recreational Curiosities of Jane Austen's Era (10/25)
In The Austen Affair, Madeline Bell imagines what would happen if two 21st-century actors—Tess Bright and Hugh Balfour—were hurled back in time to the early 1800s. In the middle of a heated disagreement on set, an electrical accident sends them into the Regency countryside. There, amid picnics, balls, and the difficult act of ...
Willie Reed: The Witness Who Returned Home (10/25)
The plan had to be executed perfectly by Willie Reed, an eighteen-year-old native of the Mississippi Delta. He had to walk into the darkness by himself making sure his bearings were correct. He had in his possession a coat and another pair of pants. He had to walk six miles on rural roads absent of all light. That would protect him, the ...
The Filipino Manongs and the Delano Grape Strike (10/25)
Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay explores the lives of four generations of men in the Maghabol family. The family's patriarch, Francisco, leaves the Philippines to seek work in America in the 1920s. Francisco quickly discovers that the stories he's heard of a country full of acceptance and success for immigrants are fantasies. A ...
The Long and Exhausting Journey for Central American Migrants (10/25)
For seven years, anthropologist Jason De León followed low-level smugglers to understand the motivation, culture, hopes, and dreams of those guiding migrants to the US-Mexico border and beyond. De León documents their stories, some of which ended in death, in
Soldiers and Kings. While his work is centered
on the smugglers, a ...
Slate Mining in America (09/25)
What does one name a fictional small town that once served as a hub for slate mining before its inevitable decline? Well, Slater, of course. In her novel The Dark We Know, Wen-yi Lee describes it as 'an old mining town sunk in a crater at the end of the road with nowhere to go beyond it but down.' Isadora Chang dreads returning there for ...
Conditions for People with Disabilities in 1930s America (09/25)
James McBride's novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store follows a community as they work together to save a young deaf Black boy, Dodo, from unjust institutionalization in 1930s America. Though Dodo's disability is physical, the state authorities are determined to place him in a mental institution called Pennhurst. In the context of ...
Ezra Pound's Fascist Politics (09/25)
Joyce Hinnefeld's The Dime Museum makes many references to the poet Ezra Pound. Pound was born in Idaho in 1885, grew up near Philadelphia, and spent much of his adult life in Europe. He died in Italy, his adopted country, in 1972. As a poet, he was best known for his epic The Cantos, published in segments from 1925 onward. Taking ...
The Cinema Rex Fire (08/25)
In the southwest of Iran lies a city called Abadan, over five hundred miles from the country's capital of Tehran, with a population of a little over 200,000. Despite its relatively quiet presence, it played a crucial role in sparking the Iranian Revolution of 1979. On August 19, 1978, Cinema Rex, a movie theater located in a working-class...
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (08/25)
One of the characters in Kate Quinn's The Briar Club played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), which existed from 1943 to 1954.
In 1942, owners of professional baseball teams and stadiums were in a panic. Young men who played ball were being drafted to fight in World War II, and several minor league ...
Dunbar Creek and the Igbo Landing (08/25)
On the slave ship The York, nearing St. Simons Island on the Georgia coast, Igbos and other West Africans were below deck and chained to one another like property. They were to be auctioned off once they reached land. The Igbos were from the region we now know as Nigeria but that in the early 1800s was a series of independent states, ...
French Philosopher Guy-Ernest Debord (08/25)
Characters in Creation Lake frequently reference the French philosopher Guy-Ernest Debord, whose popularity has recently grown due to his work's relevance to digital culture.
Born in Paris in 1931, Debord had activist leanings early on while protesting France's war with Algeria. He also joined the Lettrists at age 18. They were ...
