Heather in Fairbanks, Alaska, asks why historians and documentary narrators sometimes describe past events in the present tense. This use of the historical present is a storytelling convention that creates immediacy. The historical present can be...
Author, poet, and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht has observed that although medical advice even from 100 years ago can be wildly outmoded, expressions of love written two millennia ago can have deep resonance, creating what she calls a...
Pulitzer-winning historian Barbara Tuchman has observed that her single most formative educational experience was exploring Harvard’s Widener Library. She captured the feelings of many library lovers when she added that her own daughter...
The a historian vs. an historian debate has a pretty straightforward answer: a historian is the correct way to write and say it. “A history” and “a historical” are the best choices, too. This is part of a complete episode...
Careful what you criticize! Not long ago, some words that sound perfectly normal today were considered gauche and grating on the ear. If the complainers had had their way, we couldn’t say a word like pessimism or use contact as a verb! Also...
Some of the world’s greatest writers had to do their work while holding down a day job. William Faulkner and Anthony Trollope toiled as postal clerks. Zora Neal Hurston trained as an anthropologist. Vladimir Nabokov was a lepidopterist who...