Steven Biel

A Jewish State

By Theodor Herzl

Theodor Herzl proposes a solution to the 'Jewish Question' and to anti-Semitism: a separate and independent ...

My Father's Girl

By Jane Addams

Jane Addams, whose Hull-House became a symbol of progressive reform, here remembers her father who helped ...

Paris Goes to War

By Edith Wharton

As the World War engulfs Europe in August 1914, Edith Wharton reports from Paris on the ...

Emancipation

By Lord Charwood

Lord Charnwood recounts the development and importance of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, a signal event in American ...

Darwin Changes His Mind

By Charles Darwin

Here is Darwin’s account of his visit to the Galapagos Islands with its myriad species, which ...

A Grand Way to Chronicle a War

By Ronald Weber

A fascinating glimpse of World War II journalism behind the front lines at Paris’s Hotel Scribe, ...

The Genius and the Jerk

By Walter Vatter

Walter Vatter explores the early years of Steve Jobs--was he a genius, or simply an expert ...

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall

By William L. Riordon

“I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” said George Washington Plunkitt in this charming manual ...

Shaping the American Character

Turner’s key “frontier thesis” argues that frontier life shaped the ...

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Steven Biel is executive director of the Mahindra Humanities Center and senior lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University. An updated edition of his book Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster is published by W. W. Norton this year. His other books include American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting and Independent Intellectuals in the United States, 1910–1945.

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Steven Biel