Vita

Brief life of a museum impresario: 1839-1914

Brief life of a great enigma, the Russian author and political propagandist born Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov: 1868-1936…

Yale was the first American college to offer instruction in Chinese, in 1877; apparently, no one signed up. The next year, a group of Boston and…

Sarah Wyman Whitman was an original and compelling figure in late nineteenth century Boston. Very much a public personality, she was a painter…

William Brewster was too frail, his eyesight too poor, said his parents and doctors, for him to attend Harvard. Instead, early each morning, he…

One day in 1858, Gordon McKay paid cobbler Lyman Blake $70,000, mostly in promises, for the patent on a machine Blake had devised to stitch the…

Between 1857 and 1950, Frederick Law Olmsted, A.M. 1864, LL.D. ’93, and the firm he founded shaped many of our nation’s notable open…

Wendell Phillips on a platform,” wrote Henry Adams in his Education, “was a model dangerous for youth.” In this opinion Adams…

Although he died almost seven years ago, Edward Gorey ’50 has just brought out a new book. Amphigorey Again, the fourth anthology of…

As a pianist, conductor, and composer, Ludwig van Beethoven was the most famous musician in music-crazy early-nineteenth-century Europe. He also…

Those whove heard of Zane Grey usually identify him as the author of best-selling westerns, but few realize that he was the commercially most…

There will be no need of great national armies,” Edwin Ginn declaimed in 1901, once an international force controlled by a league of…

Splendiferous in his purple Russian blouse, with shaggy hair and beard, Hervey White, A.B. 1894, helped transform a tiny village in the…