May 06, 2015
Alternative Medicines
For hundreds of years, medical quacks have offered what science could not—the promise of perfect health.
Read MoreRoundtable
Opinions and analysis from Lapham’s Quarterly writers and editors.
July 22, 2025
May 01, 2015
The Rest Is History
The end of all-male socializing, the whiteness of early color photography, and the ubiquitous hair of Edgar Allan Poe.
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April 24, 2015
The Rest Is History
Books enjoyed by Frankenstein’s monster, real-life ends for the characters of Wolf Hall, and the closeted life of Mark Twain.
Read MoreApril 16, 2015
The Nun’s Story
A bestselling 1836 book offered unbelievable tales of sexual depravity in a convent.
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April 16, 2015
The Rest Is History
Henry David Thoreau’s neckbeard, amateur John Wilkes Booth historians, and the mystery of Morgellons Disease.
Read MoreApril 15, 2015
Learning from Lincoln
On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln as the sixteenth president enjoyed a production of “Our American Friend” at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC. Early the next morning, Lincoln died in a boarding house across the street—the first American president to be assassinated. With Lincoln’s death, the divided country lost not just its leader but one of its wisest thinkers, a man who had something to say on nearly every subject, and then some.
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April 15, 2015
Creative Accounting
For writers, self-employment brings with it artistic freedom and a tax nightmare. For the novelist Patricia Highsmith, living abroad solved exactly none of her tax problems.
Read MoreApril 09, 2015
The Gatsby Index
This week marks the ninetieth anniversary of The Great Gatsby, first published on April 10, 1925. Gatsby enjoys such an iconic status among American novels that it’s easy to forget what a disappointing seller the book was for F. Scott Fitzgerald. His 1920 debut, This Side of Paradise, had been a surprise bestseller, and his next, The Beautiful and the Damned, was a hit as well: each sold about 50,000 copies. Fitzgerald privately considered The Great Gatsby “about the best American novel ever written,” and hoped to sell 75,000 copies.
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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.