Tag: American history
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All The Art We Do Not See: Curating From the Margins of the Art World
It might be 85 degrees outside, but technically it is almost fall here in Pittsburgh, and about time for us to return to the Carnegie Museums and see what they have going on. I haven’t been down to the Science Center yet since their big name change/reopening, in part because they’re cycling through all of…
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Shadow of the Colossus: Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Elinor Wyllys and Other Work
“Writing may be a very pleasant pastime; but printing seems to have many disagreeable consequences attending every stage of the process” – Elinor Wyllys, author preface “‘Yes,’ replied Mrs. Bernard; ‘but it is a pity her face should be so ugly; for she has rather a pretty figure—‘“ – Elinor Wyllys, chapter 2 Whew wee,…
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Destination Unexpected: A Trip Into Forensic Book Ownership
Listen, dear readers, my book-buying problem is no secret. I buy a lot of books every year, and apparently I’m not able to curb this addiction in any meaningful way—even as I fight an increasingly lost battle with where I’m going to put all of those books. That said, I’m not one to entirely throw…
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Original Chick Lit: 19th Century American Women Writers, Readers, and the Little House that Millbank Built
“Ma spread the between-meals red-checked cloth on the table, and on it she set the shining-clean lamp. She laid there the paper-covered Bible, the big green Wonders of the Animal World, and the novel named Millbank.” – On the Banks of Plum Creek, chapter 17 “Every window and shutter at Millbank was closed. Knots of…
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America’s Eternal Sweetheart: The Transatlantic Love Affair with Lafayette
“Lafayette, we are here.” – Col. Charles E. Stanton, visiting Lafayette’s tomb after the arrival of American forces in Paris during WWI “As I admired this noble countenance of stone, a wry smile crept across the [French] curator’s face. Suddenly the silence was broken. ‘Why,’ asked the curator, ‘should we have a bust of Lafayette?’”…
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Revolutionary Women: The Ladies of The Flight of Virtue
We’re back this week with more Flight of Virtue content, and I thought I’d make good on my threat to delve into some background information on the women who make up the core supporting cast of my novel behind Theo Burr. Because while I had a blast writing a lot of the men, this was…
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Stolen Valor: Museums and the Reclamation of North American Indigenous History
I did my quarterly museum walk over at the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History yesterday, with a somewhat unusual for me emphasis on the latter. CMOA is currently in major flux as the International is in the process of being taken down and boxed off to destinations unknown, so huge swathes of it…
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America’s Polymath Pirate Queen: The Brief Wondrous Life of Theodosia Burr Alston
“If I could foresee that Theo would become a mere fashionable woman, with all the attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind, adorned with whatever grace and allurement, I would earnestly pray God to take her forewith hence. But I yet hope by, her, to convince the world what neither sex appears to believe—that women have…
Sarah Holz 