A Harmless Drudge: Dr. Johnson, His Dictionary and What He Said About Us
by Nine years in a London attic, forty thousand words and one sentence about American liberty that my night class would not let go A Harmless …
The Penny University: How a London Coffeehouse Paper Taught America to Write
Addison and Steele’s daily essay, the boy in Boston who copied it to learn prose and what a night class made of the first blog …
Eighteen Men Signed a Paper to Say She Wrote Her Own Poems
Teaching Phillis Wheatley, the enslaved Boston teenager whose book had to be printed in London, on a night when the class did not want to …
Gulliver’s Travels Is Not a Children’s Book and My Night Class Just Found Out
Tiny politicians, a flying island of experts and a man who ends up preferring horses: reading Swift with people who have jobs Gulliver’s Travels Is …
Dear Diary: Arizona’s Proof-of-Citizenship Case Is Coming to the Supreme Court Just After the 3 November Midterms, and I Have Been Counting on My Fingers
Stephanie on election law, the calendar that puts a voting case right after a vote, 35 Senate seats and a revolution that began with a …
A Sixteen-Year-Old Boy Pretended to Be a Widow and Fooled All of Boston
Teaching Ben Franklin’s first hoaxes to a night class, and the almanac in which he killed off a rival who was still alive A Sixteen-Year-Old …
Dear Diary: The New York Society Library Is Showing Its 18th-Century Collections Until the End of December and Is Closed on Monday, so Plan Accordingly
Stephanie on Collective Witness, the library that lent books to Washington, a Johnson talk, a Common Sense conservation display and the pleasures of a very …
A Man’s House Is His Castle, and So, Apparently, Is His Phone
James Otis argued against general search warrants in a Boston courtroom in 1761, and a headline about the Supreme Court tells me the argument is …
Boston to New York on a Horse, With Complaints
A joke about airlines selling the same seat four different ways went up next to the journal of a woman who made the trip in …
Eighteen Men Signed a Paper Saying She Wrote It Herself
Teaching Phillis Wheatley in a semester when every essay arrives with a question mark over who typed it Monday, Adjunct Office, Shared I teach early …