Good Writing. Serious e-Reading.

Cecelia Holland was born in Nevada and grew up on the East Coast, where she went to Connecticut College and studied history under F. Edward Cranz. She has been a free-lance writer for fifty years and lives in northern California. Her Kindle Single “Blood on the Tracks,” about the great 1877 railroad strike, was a recent best-seller.

Daniel Horowitz is Mary Huggins Gamble Foundation Chair and Professor of American Studies Emeritus at Smith College. He has written extensively on the history of consumer culture and social criticism in the twentieth-century United States, including the books The Morality of Spending (1985); Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (1994); Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique (1998); The Anxieties of Affluence (2004); and Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (2012). In May 2015 ...

Lyndon Johnson was the 36th president of the United States.

Stewart Justman’s books include Seeds of Mortality, a reflection on cancer and culture that received the PEN Award for the Art of the Essay; Fool’s Paradise, an exploration of self-help literature that won the Popular Culture Association award for best book of the year; and Do No Harm, a study of a treatment initiative that was halted by prudent medical practice.  Mr. Justman is the only lay member of the Five-Alpha Reductase Committee of the American Society of Clinical Oncology/American ...

Frances Anne Kemble (1809–1893), who came from a British theater family, was a notable actress in the early and mid-nineteenth century. She also wrote plays, poetry, memoirs, and books about travel and the theater. In 1834 she married an American, Pierce Butler, heir to cotton, tobacco, and rice plantations and hundreds of slaves on the Sea Islands of Georgia. Kemble waited until 1863, during the American Civil War, to publish her anti-slavery Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation ...

Hilton Kramer is co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion, which he founded in 1982. He has been editor of Arts Magazine, art critic for The Nation, chief art critic for the New York Times, and art critic for the New York Observer. His books include The Triumph of Modernism, The Twilight of the Intellectuals, The Age of the Avant-Garde, and The Revenge of the Philistines. He lives in Damariscotta, Maine.

David E. Kyvig was a distinguished research professor emeritus at Northern Illinois University and winner of the Bancroft Prize for his book Explicit and Authentic Acts, about the amending of the Constitution. He is the author of The Age of Impeachment, Repealing National Prohibition, Nearby History: Exploring the Past Around You (with Myron Marty), and Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940, from which this piece is drawn.

William E. Leuchtenburg is William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studied at Cornell and Columbia, and taught for many years at Columbia before moving to Chapel Hill. His Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, from which this excerpt is taken, won both the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize in American history. His other books include The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932; In the Shadow of FDR; ...