July 20, 2012
How to Make Friends and Walk on Swords
During the nineteenth century, magic tricks were commonly published in newspapers, encouraging teenagers to take dangerous risks to impress their friends.
Read MoreRoundtable
Opinions and analysis from Lapham’s Quarterly writers and editors.
October 2, 2025
July 16, 2012
Gold and Silver Coined from Human Blood
Witch hunts were big business, employing hundreds of judges, jailers, and executioners across Europe for hundreds of years.
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July 12, 2012
Aaron Burr’s Target Practice
Was the outcome of the Hamilton-Burr duel circumstantial, or was it carefully practiced?
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June 27, 2012
Sherlock Holmes in Fairyland
How the creator of literature’s most logical detective became utterly seduced by the world of magic.
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June 26, 2012
Mischief Makers
Genies, or jinn as they are known in Arabic, are not always enslaved in lamps—they are the devils and demons of the Islamic world, playful and often tormenting.
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April 18, 2012
Post Secrets
The young women of old New York had their mail monitored by parents and servants until they could visit that epistolary den of vice, the post office.
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April 03, 2012
The Myth of the Fourth Estate
We should think of reading the paper and watching the news as acts belonging to the world of ritual as much as the commerce of information.
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August 07, 2023
Monumental Mistakes
2023:
Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
c. 1850:
Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.
May 22, 2023
Revolutionary Lovebirds
2023:
Writers on strike search for romance at the picket line.
c. 1945:
Young communists engage in party matchmaking.