Many know of Walt Whitman as America’s first true poet and the liberator of American literature. What many might not know is that Whitman did not emerge on the literary […]
Jacques Barzun, 1907 – 2012
Back before Frankenstorm Sandy took over the air-waves, academia met its demise. Well, not academia as it is today–we are all still here, obviously!–but academia as it existed in the […]
Happy 101st!
The world of 20th-century Irish literature can feel dominated by certain giants looming over the rest; Joyce, Beckett, Yeats, and Heaney have, and deserve, their impressive positions. Nonetheless, certain names […]
China in Ten Words
How is it possible to summarize a country as complex as China in ten words? Yu Hua, a renowned novelist in China, did just that. In his first work of […]
The End of the Book?
If someone said that recent technological advances made the printed book, as the conveyor of knowledge and information, obsolete, would you think this prediction a recent one? What about a […]
Book Fest At the Peabody Library: It’s the Best Ever!
Are you a local literature lover? Is your ideal day rummaging through book sales and attending talks from the high brow to the nonsensical? Do you fancy each tome whispering […]
Duxiu? What the…
As an avid browser of our library’s ever-growing database list, you probably have noticed a brand new addition, one that might seem quite odd. Duxiu? What the heck is that? […]
Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange Collection
Interested in learning about the diplomatic relations between East Asia and the West in the nineteenth century? Are you writing a paper on the missionary accounts of the Asian countries? Or, […]
The Art of Google Customization
Do you know about Google Custom? It’s a great feature that allows you to focus your Google searching across exactly the websites you want. Of course it’s really cool for personal use, […]
Readers as Illustrators
Human beings are hard-wired to rely on visual perception; perhaps this explains why we really, really like to look at pictures. And when we read, we often want to see […]