American Civil War
The artist’s works amend the white supremacist mythology contained in American monuments and historical paintings: “Democracy requires a clear understanding of the past, including its mistakes.”
Reminding us of what should never have been forgotten
Historical analogies between the Civil War period and our own time are plentiful in a conversation about the author’s much-anticipated first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.
In the spring of 2015, An-My Lê was invited by film director Gary Ross to photograph on the set of Free State of Jones, his period war film inspired by the life of Newton Knight, a Mississippi farmer and Southern Unionist who led an armed revolt against the Confederacy in 1864.
“I would like to do more of that kind of thing: travel, spend some time in a place and really work from a different vantage point. I don’t know what will happen in my work from that, but I trust my ability to find the tools to find my way into my work. I think I will sit out in the woods more.”
I’ve been thinking about Kara Walker’s work for a long time. Two years ago, a bleeding barn from one of her watercolors appeared in one of my poems.
The author of The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, chats with novelist Patrick McGrath about the most famous resident of Broadmoor—Dr. William C. Minor.
In the early 1930s, shortly after the invention of the portable audio recorder, the Federal Writers’ Project documented the experience of slavery by interviewing those who had lived under it.
Charles Frazier can neither be praised nor blamed for having his revelatory first novel, Cold Mountain, released into what can rightly be called a crisis in book publishing.
Novelist Nancy Lemann crafts languorous Louisiana dramas in her two books, Lives of the Saints, and The Ritz of the Bayou. Here, she discusses being a Jew in the south, the future of her characters, and the lingering memory of the Civil War.
Two serigraphs from a portfolio of 10—Sitting Bull and General Custer from the Cowboys and Indians series by Andy Warhol.