History Essays

Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays "Self-Reliance" and "The Over-Soul". Together with "Nature", these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.

The Memory Palace is a collection of tiny, crystalline historical tales that come across like luminous short fiction, and, like Nate DiMeo’s acclaimed podcast of the same name, conjure lost moments and forgotten figures who are calling out across time to be remembered. For fifteen years, Nate DiMeo has turned to the past to make sense of the way we live today, finding beauty and meaning in history’s dustier corners, holding things up to the light and weaving facts, keen insight, wit, and poignant observation into unforgettable tales.

This is an extensive collection of short essays and other pieces by C. S. Lewis that have been brought together in one volume for the first time. As well as his many books, letters, and poems, Lewis also wrote a great number of essays and shorter pieces on various subjects. He wrote extensively on Christian theology and the defense of faith but also on various ethical issues and on the nature of literature and storytelling. In this essay collection we find a treasure trove of Lewis' reflections on diverse topics.

A collection of the best stories about Oregon Ducks football - updated through the 2011 Championship game. Tales from the Oregon Ducks Sideline takes the listener on a fun-filled trip through Oregon’s gridiron history. Author Brian Libby brings Duck fans out to the 50 yard line and into the locker room as he tells colorful tales about the Oregon football program, from its start in 1894 to today, culminating in the hard-fought BCS Championship game against Auburn in January 2011.

Walking in My Joy is a collection of electric stories by the one and only, super hilarious Jenifer Lewis. Her commentary on what’s happening in the world today, told through her outrageous real-life adventures, will have you laughing out loud, while her insightful messages touch your soul. A self-described “traveling fool and nature freak,” Jenifer takes listeners with her all over the world, from Cape Town to Bali; Washington, DC, to the Serengeti; Mongolia to St. Petersburg; and Argentina to Antarctica to demonstrate how she walks in her joy by seeking pleasure in everyday encounters.

In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we can expand it. Taking a clear-eyed look at injustice, political polarization, and the destruction of the natural world, Gay shows us how we might resist, how the study of joy might lead us to a wild, unpredictable, transgressive, and unboundaried solidarity. In fact, it just might help us survive.

Guns, germs, and steel might have transformed us from hunter-gatherers into modern man, but booze, sex, trash talk, and tripping built our civilization. Cracked editor Robert Evans brings his signature dogged research and lively insight to uncover the many and magnificent ways vice has influenced history, from the prostitute-turned-empress who scored a major victory for women's rights to the beer that helped create - and destroy - South America's first empire.

In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy that resonates profoundly. In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.

Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando, Anthony Hopkins, Carey Mulligan. When we watch these remarkable actors in a performance, we see only Sophie, Stanley Kowalski, Hannibal Lecter, or Cassie from Promising Young Woman. How are they able to transform our world in this way? How and why do they do what they do? In Acting Naturally, David Thomson sheds light on the actors who have shaped the film industry. He shrewdly analyzes these stars, revealing how a sly smile, an extra-long pause, even a small gesture of the hand can draw in an audience.

In the 1960s and early '70s, the most prominent, vocal cultural movement was the New Left: a movement that condemned America and everything it stood for: individualism, material wealth, science, technology, capitalism.

By age twenty, at the height of the Jazz Age, Trudy Ederle was the most accomplished swimmer in the world. She’d won Olympic gold and set a host of world records. But the greatest challenge remained: the English Channel. Only a few swimmers, none of them women, had ever made the treacherous twenty-one mile crossing. Trudy’s failed first attempt seemed to confirm what many naysayers believed: No woman could possibly accomplish such a thing. In 1926, Ederle proved them wrong.

After sixty years of keeping notes on the things he's seen and learned and on the golfing greats he's taught, Penick lets the secrets in his Little Red Book be heard by the golf world in this classic work. His simple, direct, practical wisdom pares away all the hypertechnical jargon that's grown up around the game, and lets all golfers play their best - whatever their level.

This Leibniz collection contains some of the philosopher’s most important works and ideas, spans three decades and illuminates the fascinating intellectual journey undertaken by him in his quest for truth. A prodigious polymath, Leibniz was a mathematician, philosopher, physicist and statesman and engaged with a sweeping range of ideas and disciplines, striving throughout his life to be at the cutting edge of scientific thinking. These Principal Essays are arranged in chronological order.

At The Athletic, home to the best newsroom in sports, this question would become a labor of love for dozens of the best football writers on the planet, including Mike Sando and Dan Pompei. Over the course of 100 riveting profiles—each drawing upon unparalleled access and superlative storytelling to offer intimate perspective on what made the greatest players tick—these writers reveal their findings. In the process, they also uncover the history of football.

Predicting society’s present addiction to technology, our challenges with data privacy, and the dramatic increase in drug overdoses and depression that have accompanied a technology-induced lack of purpose, The Unabomber’s vision of the future has become our reality. Of course, his means were disgusting and condemnable. But his message is more important than ever. If we want to thrive in an age where automation and artificial intelligence and rapidly making humans obsolete, it is our responsibility to understand and prepare for the technological machine we are up against.

Indiana champions shining examples of literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver the coup de grâce when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breath—in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent way—about high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it's also political, plus it's a riot of fun.

"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author, Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes. Today we live amidst converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics are dominated by either a "business as usual" attitude or nostalgia for a mythical past.

Still considered one of the best books ever written about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon reflects Hemingway's belief that bullfighting was more than mere sport. Here he describes and explains the technical aspects of this dangerous ritual, and "the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped on a stick."

The story of NASCAR's legendary racer - newly revised Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s name virtually assured that his life would not be ordinary. Over the past decade, he has fulfilled that destiny. His father, one of the most successful drivers in the history of international motorsports, gave his son more than his name. Dale Earnhardt Sr. placed Dale Jr. in position to follow the footsteps and tire tracks he had left from Darlington to Daytona, from coast to coast, from one championship to the next.

Centuries after the infamous witch hunts that swept through Europe and America, witches continue to hold a unique fascination for many: as fairy tale villains, practitioners of pagan religion, as well as feminist icons. Witches are both the ultimate victim and the stubborn, elusive rebel. But who were the women who were accused and often killed for witchcraft? What types of women have centuries of terror censored, eliminated, and repressed? Celebrated feminist writer Mona Chollet explores three types of women who were accused of witchcraft and persecuted.