In a lecture in 1923, Thomas Mann said that the ordinary middle-class German had never considered culture to include an interest in politics, and still not do so. ̀To ask him to transfer his allegiance frominwardness to the objective, to politics, to what the peoples of Europe call freedom, would seem to him to amount to a demand that he should do violence to his own nature and abandon his sense of national identity.' The idea of the true freedom...

Marisol, a 30-something historian for the Miami Museum of History, recounts in jumbled retrospect the tale of her sometimes idealized, sometimes difficult childhood in Cuba. After her father's early death and her mother's subsequent unbalance, Marisol is raised by her loving grandmother, and the two emigrate to the Cuban Miami of the Vietnam era. Santiago focuses on Marisol's love life, from her first crush as a little girl to a succession of Miami...

Mary Shelley: The story of Mary Shelley and the creation of her immortal monster, Frankenstein. Raised by a renowned philosopher father in eighteenth-century London, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin is a teenage dreamer determined to make her mark on the world, when she meets the dashing and brilliant poet Percy Shelley. So begins a torrid, bohemian love affair marked by both passion and personal tragedy that will transform Mary and fuel the writing of...

Photographs of Concord, Mass. (homes and bridges, streetscapes and landscape views, river, boating and bridge views, and several views of "Tower's Excursion" train, Boston to Pasadena Calif., ca. 1886). It is unclear whether Fred A. Tower was the photographer or merely the owner of the negatives in the collection. (He would have been only about 15 years old when the "Tower's Excursion" images were made). His father, Alonzo Tower (organizer of several...

"Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) was one of the leading British landscape painters of the 19th century. Inspired by his mentor, the artist and poet William Blake, Palmer brought a new spiritual intensity to his interpretation of nature, producing works of unprecedented boldness and fervency. Pre-eminent scholar William Vaughan--who organized the Palmer retrospective at the British Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005--draws on unpublished diaries...

"On March 23, 1849, Henry Brown climbed into a large wooden postal crate and was mailed from slavery in Richmond, Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. "Box Brown," as he came to be known after this astounding feat, went on to carve out a career as an abolitionist speaker, actor, magician, hypnotist, and even faith healer, traveling the US, the UK, and Canada until his death in 1897. The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown shows how...