Letters between soldiers and spouses are often powerful and moving documents. Given the intensity, danger, and uncertainty of armed conflict as well as the significant changes wrought by most wars, such correspondence reveals what individuals did, felt, and experienced like few historical records can. This is the case with the letters written by Henry and Lucy Knox during the Revolutionary War. Henry Knox is well known to historians. A Boston bookseller, he joined American forces following Lexington and Concord. After transporting fifty-nine captured British cannon from Fort Ticonderoga to…

"Received your package," Pvt. George Van Pelt of Company I, 165th Infantry wrote in May 1918 from the frontlines in France to Annie E. Cole, a grammar school teacher and principal on Staten Island, New York, and to her students. "I appreciate your kindness very much and glad to know that the boys and girls of P. S. #5 have not forgotten me. Those wristlets are fine, just the thing I needed." The woman behind these letters and gifts to the soldiers, Annie E. Cole, was one of eight children born to Jacob W. and Mary Cole. After attending public schools on Staten Island and taking education…

During the Great Depression, a top commercial portraitist took to San Francisco’s streets to experiment with representing the social devastation surrounding her. Her photos showed men sleeping on sidewalks and in parks like bundles of rags spit out by the economy. Dorothea Lange described watching from her studio windows the unemployed "drifting" past, and wanting to do something. Her "Man Beside Wheelbarrow" (1934) displays one such victim. The worker is bent up against a blank cinderblock expanse. We see only his workingman’s cap; he cannot face the light. Lange later told an interviewer…

With his tongue halfway in his cheek, Ambrose Bierce defined history as "an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools." Well, we’ve come a long way in a hundred years. These days, historical narratives routinely include the experiences and values of "ordinary" folk. They use popular culture to describe and analyze culture, society, and politics. So, "Roll over Beethoven/Tell Tchaikovsky the news": rock ’n’ roll merits inclusion in the American history curriculum.During the 1950s—when rock ’n’ roll was born…

To read the text and hear the poem click here.Whatever we say, whatever we write, whatever we do, we never act alone. Just as John Donne meditated upon the notion that "no man is an island," so, too, in the twentieth century did T.S. Eliot demonstrate how the individual talent grew out of a tradition that created, nurtured, and contextualized its ideas. In 1919, the same year in which Eliot published his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Langston Hughes published two poems in the January issue of his Cleveland high school’s literary journal. One of these poems was in the free verse…