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Dan Allosso So I’m thinking very seriously about getting to work on my story about a British radical named Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891).  Bradlaugh is the British equivalent of America’s “Great Agnostic,” Robert Ingersoll, only more so.  Unlike Ingersoll, Bradlaugh was extremely political—he was even elected to Parliament and prevented from taking his seat for six Charles Bradlaugh years by the conservative opposition because he could not take the religious oath of office.  I’ve been researching him, off and on, since about 2006.  In that time, I’ve tried on the idea of writing a straight biography of Bradlaugh, but Londoner Bryan Niblett recently wrote a very good account of Bradlaugh’s adult years (especially the Parliamentary struggle), called Dare to Stand Alone .  I was thinking of writing the story of Bradlaugh’s youth for a young adult audience.  Bradlaugh was thrown out onto the streets of East London by his parents at age 16 for declaring himself ...

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe As I struggle to find the energy, focus, and drive to complete my summer writing deadlines, the opening lines of Thomas Paine’s The Crisis take on new meaning: THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. For those of us “Alternative Academics,” marked by #altac hashtags on Twitter, the summer IS the season that tries our souls.  Our tenure-line colleagues disappear into the archives and post to Facebook from glamorous destinations around the globe. At the same time we work full time and wonder whether or not to attempt CPR on the scholarly commitments we left flailing for breath during the academic year.  The difference appears less acute from September to June.  I may advise while others teach, but the strain on scholarship seems less stark then.  In the summer,...

Copies of classical Roman busts, the Scottish National Gallery.  Photo by Randall Stephens. Susan Ware, "The challenges and rewards of biographical essays," OUPblog, April 11, 2013 One of the first things I did after being appointed general editor of the American National Biography was to assign myself an entry to write. I wanted to put myself in the shoes of my contributors and experience first-hand the challenge of the short biographical form. >>> "Paul Johnson reviews 'C.S. Lewis: A Life', by Alister McGrath," Spectator , April 20, 2013 C.S. Lewis became a celebrity but remains a mysterious figure. Several biographies have been written, not to much avail, and now Alister McGrath, a professor of historical theology, has compiled a painstaking, systematic and ungrudging examination of his life and works. Despite all the trouble he has taken, his book lacks charm and does not make one warm to his subject. >>> Jonathan Freedland, ...

Heather Cox Richardson Claude McKay. Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University . Recently, I found myself telling history students which poems they must know as part of their rock-bottom basic understanding of American history. There is Anne Bradstreet’s “Epitaph for her Mother," exploring what it meant to be a good woman in colonial America; Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in theDooryard Bloom’d," linking Lincoln’s assassination to the natural world; and Claude McKay’s 1919 “If We Must Die."     If we must die—let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die—oh, let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one...