tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2009-05-03://1 2013-03-06T17:41:40Z A Magazine of History and Ideas tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2013://1.2570 2013-03-06T17:37:01Z 2013-03-06T17:41:40Z

Michelle Legro On newsstands March 15. Saddle up! Animals, the Spring 2013 issue of Lapham's Quarterly, is galloping onto newsstands on March 15th. It's a veritable circus (and yes, we've got lions, tigers, and bears) tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2013://1.2581 2013-03-01T19:30:19Z 2013-03-11T17:24:53Z

Michelle Legro Historian Paul Collins talks with Lewis Lapham about his book, The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century.. The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century by Paul Collins Public Affairs (February 12, 2013) Historian Paul Collins talks with tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2013://1.2566 2013-02-28T21:02:12Z 2013-03-05T21:34:56Z

Michelle Legro Author and philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen talks with Lewis Lapham about his book, Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way between West and East.. Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way between West and East by Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels Polity (November 28, 2012) Author and philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen talks with tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2013://1.2545 2013-02-26T21:40:44Z 2013-03-05T18:33:12Z

Michelle Legro John Glassie uncovers the strange life and works of 17th-century scientist and nutball Athanasius Kircher in his new book, A Man of Misconceptions.. Aidan Flax-Clark talks to author John Glassie about his book A Man of Misconceptions, which chronicles the odd pursuits of 17th-century scientist and nutball Athanasius Kircher, the misguided decoder of tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2013://1.2567 2013-02-21T21:19:36Z 2013-03-05T21:30:33Z

Michelle Legro John Cooper talks with Lewis Lapham about his book The Queen's Agent: Sir Francis Walsingham and the Rise of Espionage in Elizabethan England. . The Queen's Agent: Sir Francis Walsingham and the Rise of Espionage in Elizabethan England by John Cooper Pegasus (February 13, 2013) John Cooper talks with Lewis Lapham about Elizabeth I tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2013://1.2568 2013-02-14T21:35:39Z 2013-03-05T22:25:01Z

Michelle Legro Paul Kennedy talks with Lewis Lapham about his book, Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War.. Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War by Paul Kennedy Allen Lane (January 29, 2013) Author Paul Kennedy talks with Lewis Lapham tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2013://1.2569 2013-02-07T22:25:28Z 2013-03-05T23:06:01Z

Michelle Legro Jonathan Jones talks with Lewis Lapham about his book, The Lost Battles: Leonardo, Michelangelo and the Artistic Duel That Defined the Renaissance.. The Lost Battles: Leonardo, Michelangelo and the Artistic Duel That Defined the Renaissance by Jonathan Jones Knopf (October 23, 2012) Jonathan Jones talks with Lewis Lapham about the artistic rivalry tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2013://1.2498 2013-01-13T14:01:58Z 2013-03-05T18:42:49Z

Michelle Legro Amidst all the award-season hubbub, here are a few performances from last year you might have missed, with readings and songs by Anne Hathaway, Oliver Platt, Maude Maggart, Brian D'Arcy James, and Ari Graynor.. LQ had some great parties last year, and some incredible performances at them. Check out the highlights, with songs and readings by Anne Hathaway, Oliver Platt, Maude Maggart, Colin Donnell, tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2478 2012-12-13T18:16:06Z 2012-12-18T04:12:59Z

Lewis H. Lapham is the editor of Lapham's Quarterly.

Michelle Legro by Lewis H. Lapham. To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2418 2012-12-06T19:25:43Z 2012-12-13T20:03:12Z

Michelle Legro c. 1867 / Paris. One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing, the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2467 2012-12-06T02:08:35Z 2012-12-06T02:31:25Z

Michelle Legro Brands reconsiders the misunderstood life and career of President Ulysses Grant, the subject of his essay, "Tales of Brave Ulysses," in LQ's Politics issue and of his new book, The Man Who Saved the Union.. Historian H. W. Brands talks to LQ editor Aidan Flax-Clark about his new look into the life and career of President Ulysses Grant, the subject of his essay for LQ's tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2419 2012-12-05T19:38:00Z 2012-12-17T15:53:56Z

Thomas De Quincey, from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Afflicted with ague and whooping cough as a child, De Quincey excelled at the study of Latin and Greek. “That boy,” a master once said of him, “could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one.” De Quincey first took opium to treat a toothache in 1804 and began using the drug daily in 1812. He published his Confessions serially to wide acclaim in 1821 in London Magazine, to which he also contributed essays on suicide, Thomas Malthus, and Macbeth.

Michelle Legro 1822 / London. Now, reader, assure yourself, at my own risk, that no quantity of opium ever did, or could, intoxicate. As to the tincture of opium (commonly called laudanum), that might tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2453 2012-12-05T17:56:40Z 2012-12-18T19:34:20Z

From The Women’s Petition Against Coffee. A reply to this anonymously published pamphlet came in the form of another anonymously published pamphlet, The Men’s Response to the Women’s Petition Against Coffee, which stated, “Have we not with excess of patience borne your affronts, been sweated, purged, fluxed between two featherbeds, flogged, jibbed, and endured all the rest of the Devil’s martyrdoms, and will you still offer to repine? Certainly experienced Solomon was in the right when he told us that the grave and the womb were equally insatiable.”

Michelle Legro 1672 / London. Our men in former ages were justly esteemed the ablest performers in Christendom, but to our unspeakable grief, we find of late a very sensible decay of that true tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2420 2012-12-04T19:52:46Z 2012-12-10T20:38:08Z

John Milton, from Paradise Lost. Born in 1608, three years before the publication of the King James Bible, Milton grew up in a house on the same London street as the Mermaid Tavern, where Ben Jonson liked to drink. Milton contributed a poem, his first published verse, to the second folio of William Shakespeare, which appeared in 1632. He wrote “The Reason of Church Government” in 1642 and “Areopagitica” in 1644, became secretary for foreign tongues for the Commonwealth in 1649, and published Paradise Lost in 1667.

Michelle Legro c. 3760 BC / Eden. The Tempter all impassioned thus began: O sacred, wise, and wisdom-giving plant, Mother of science, now I feel thy power Within me clear not only to discern Things in their tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2441 2012-12-03T20:09:03Z 2012-12-03T20:14:59Z

Michelle Legro On newsstands December 17. Time to pour one out at the newsstand--Intoxication, the Winter 2012 issue of Lapham's Quarterly, will be available for consumption on December 17th. We've assembled the most well-stocked open tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2421 2012-12-03T19:58:37Z 2012-12-17T16:39:09Z

James Joyce, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Not long after Joyce completed in 1900 what he called “the first true work” of his life, the play A Brilliant Career, he began writing down “epiphanies,” moments his fictional alter ego Stephen Dedalus would later describe as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself.” He used them in his novels, among them the posthumously published Stephen Hero and Ulysses. The latter was first printed on his fortieth birthday—February 2, 1922.

Michelle Legro c. 1900 / Dublin. Stephen wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering into the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound. He moaned to himself like some baffled tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2422 2012-12-02T20:12:48Z 2012-12-10T20:39:39Z

Little Turtle, from a speech to the Baltimore Annual Meeting of Friends. As chief of the Miami tribe, Little Turtle fought successfully against American military forces dispatched to the Northwest Territory, defeating Gen. Josiah Harmar’s militia in 1790 and Gen. Arthur St. Clair’s in 1791. Eventually subdued, he signed the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, ceding parts of present-day Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan to the U.S. After meeting with President George Washington in 1797, Little Turtle began his campaign to regulate the sale of spirits to American Indians.

Michelle Legro 1801 / Baltimore. Brothers and friends, My brother chiefs that are now present with myself are happy to find that you have a good opinion of us. You say that you apprehend that tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2423 2012-12-01T20:24:51Z 2012-12-10T20:43:42Z

Martin Luther, from a letter to Jerome Weller. Angered by the Church’s selling of supposed salvation through indulgences, Luther sent his Ninety-five Theses on October 31, 1517, to Archbishop Albert of Mainz, who passed it along to Pope Leo X in Rome. Luther was excommunicated in 1521. During the Swabian peasant revolt of 1525, Luther married Katharina von Bora, and Wittenberg beer was served at the reception feast. His wife later brewed her own beer for sale and household consumption; Luther found alcohol helpful for inducing sleep.

Michelle Legro 1530 / Veste Coburg. Whenever this temptation of melancholy comes to you, beware not to dispute with the devil nor allow yourself to dwell on these lethal thoughts, for so doing is nothing less tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2424 2012-11-30T20:31:05Z 2012-12-17T21:39:56Z

Frederick Douglass, from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Taught as a boy how to spell words of three or four letters, the author was told by his master that “learning will spoil the best nigger in the world.” He escaped from slavery in 1838 and, to elude capture, changed his surname from Bailey to Johnson and then to Douglass, after a character in Walter Scott’s poem “The Lady of the Lake.” Douglass spoke at an antislavery convention in Nantucket in 1841. His speech was so well-received that he became an agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

Michelle Legro 1833 / Maryland. My term of actual service to Mr. Edward Covey ended on Christmas Day, 1833. The days between Christmas and New Year’s Day are allowed as holidays, and accordingly we tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2425 2012-11-29T20:38:20Z 2012-12-17T16:53:18Z

King James I, from “A Counterblaste to Tobacco.” When Christopher Columbus set ashore in the Bahamas in October 1492, he was given by the inhabitants “fruit, wooden spears, and certain dried leaves which gave off a distinct fragrance.” This was the Old World’s first encounter with tobacco, and Columbus dumped the leaves overboard—although other specimens did return with the sailors. James assumed the crown of England and Ireland in 1603, one year before publishing this spirited attack, which he followed with a 4,000 percent increase on the importation tax of tobacco.

Michelle Legro 1604 / London. Many in this kingdom have had such a continual use of taking this unsavory tobacco smoke as now they are not able to forbear the same, no more than an tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2426 2012-11-28T20:48:21Z 2012-12-17T16:58:38Z

From “Opium Made Easy.” Once writing that he plants “certain things because I want to learn certain things,” Pollan published A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder in 1997, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World in 2001, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals in 2006. He currently serves as a professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and his latest book is Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.

Michelle Legro 1997 / Connecticut. Last season was a strange one in my garden, notable not only for the unseasonably cool and wet weather—the talk of gardeners all over New England—but also for its tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2427 2012-11-27T21:15:40Z 2012-12-17T21:33:15Z

From reports by two operatives employed by Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill to document the activities of its workers. Many such reports dating from 1914 to 1922 are still extant and detail, among other things, the installation of a dictograph to monitor labor meetings, the outbreak of a fight in the mill village, and the arrest of a pharmacy owner for the sale of cocaine. There was a strike in 1914 and 1915 as labor leaders tried to have the workforce join the United Textile Workers, asking for higher wages and a fifty-four-hour workweek.

Michelle Legro 1919 / Atlanta. Operator No. 259, November 7 John Willie Right is a blockade runner, and he supplies a lot of peddlers with whiskey. He has a large car and brings whiskey tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2428 2012-11-26T21:21:49Z 2012-12-10T20:48:10Z

Emily Dickinson, Poem 207. After trips in her early twenties in the 1850s to Washington, DC to visit her congressman father and to Boston for treatment for an eye disorder, Dickinson wrote to a friend from her Amherst house, where she spent the remainder of her life, “I do not cross my father’s ground to any house or town.” She composed her poems in her bedroom, writing over 1,700, only a handful of which were published in her lifetime. She died of a stroke at the age of fifty-five in 1886.

Michelle Legro 1861 / Amherst, MA. I taste a liquor never brewed— From Tankards scooped in Pearl— Not all the Frankfort Berries Yield such an Alcohol! Inebriate of air—am I— And Debauchee of Dew— Reeling—through endless tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2429 2012-11-25T21:28:32Z 2012-12-10T20:48:28Z

Archilochus, from a fragment. Among the most ancient of Greek lyric poets whose work survives, Archilochus is noted for the personal nature of his writing. Most of his biographical details derive from his poetry: he mentions the reign of the Lydian king Gyges (c. 680-c. 645 bc), refers to a solar eclipse that took place in 648 bc, and says of soldiering, “Some Thracian is waving the shield I reluctantly left/by a bush, a flawless piece./So what? I saved myself. Forget the shield./I will get another, no worse.”

Michelle Legro c. 650 BC / Paros. I wish I had as sure a chance of fingering Neoboule— the workman falling to his flask—and pressing tum to tummy and thighs to thighs… as sure as I know tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2430 2012-11-24T21:31:45Z 2012-12-10T20:43:29Z

Richard Henry Dana Jr., from Two Years Before the Mast. At the age of nineteen in 1834, Dana took leave of Harvard College and became a common sailor aboard a ship bound for California by way of Cape Horn. He resumed his formal education two years later and was admitted to the Bar in 1840, the same year he published his account of life at sea. It was a success on both sides of the Atlantic, eventually netting some $50,000 for the Harper publishing firm—to whom Dana had sold all the rights for $250. Herman Melville called the book “unmatchable.”

Michelle Legro 1836 / Pacific Ocean. Our ship was now all cased with ice—hull, spars, and standing rigging—and the running rigging so stiff that we could hardly bend it so as to belay it, or, still tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2432 2012-11-23T16:55:24Z 2013-01-09T21:16:59Z

John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale.” One autumn evening several weeks before his twenty-first birthday in 1816, Keats was introduced to George Chapman’s translation of Homer by a friend; at ten o’clock the next morning, the friend received “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” considered among the finest English sonnets. Keats toured the Lake District in 1818, during which time signs of tuberculosis manifested, and by 1820 he had difficulty writing because of the disease. He died in Rome at the age of twenty-five in 1821.

Michelle Legro 1819 / London. 1. My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2434 2012-11-22T17:01:15Z 2012-12-10T20:42:20Z

From Methland. Reding first encountered methamphetamine use in 1999 while researching ranching in Idaho: he met a nineteen-year-old Mexican drug dealer who called himself Coco and said about his business strategy, “At first we give it away. Then the addicts will do anything to get more.” It was estimated in 2008 that 12.6 million Americans had tried meth, and 66 percent of state and local agencies in the West reported that it was their greatest drug threat.

Michelle Legro 2001 / Oelwein, IA. On a cold winter night, Roland Jarvis looked out the window of his mother’s house and saw that the Oelwein police had hung live human heads in the trees of tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2435 2012-11-21T17:23:47Z 2012-12-17T18:31:54Z

Fitz Hugh Ludlow, from The Hasheesh Eater. Warned by his apothecary friend about the bottle labeled CANNABIS INDICA—“That stuff is deadly poison”—Ludlow adminstered to himself his first dose when the friend “was out of sight.” He published his account at the age of twenty-one in 1857 and went on to write for magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, to which he contributed a series of articles about his journey to the West in 1863 with the painter Albert Bierstadt. He met Brigham Young in Salt Lake City and later camped in Yosemite.

Michelle Legro c. 1855 / Poughkeepsie, NY. On reaching the porch of the physician’s house, I rang the bell but immediately forgot whom to ask for. No wonder; I was on the steps of a palace tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2437 2012-11-20T17:36:45Z 2013-01-28T21:08:30Z

From LSD: My Problem Child. Hofmann grew up near the remains of a castle, a “child’s paradise,” where “the wonder of creation revealed itself ” to him “during enchanted moments.” Having received his PhD in chemistry at the age of twenty-three in 1929, Hofmann began work at Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories, first synthesizing LSD-25 in 1938 while researching the stimulant effects of ergot fungus. Of his first contact with the substance, he said it was like “the same experience I had had as a child.” He died at the age of 102 in 2008; he had taken his last dose of LSD five years earlier.

Michelle Legro 1943 / Basel. A peculiar presentiment—the feeling that LSD-25 could possess properties other than those established in my first investigations—induced me, five years after the first synthesis, to produce it once again tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2012://1.2438 2012-11-19T18:55:26Z 2012-12-10T20:40:20Z

Michelle Legro 1535 / Lyon. While everyone was pleasantly tattling on the subject of drinking, Gargamelle began to feel disturbed in her lower parts. Whereupon Grandgousier got up from the grass and comforted her