Ed Simon

The popularity of his music signaled the emergence of a very different country.

Ed Simon goes back to when the past was the future.

Is it too late for our republic to learn from Gibbon’s epic history of Rome’s collapse?

On the eternal tension between human creativity and mechanical efficiency.

On the terror of being buried alive and Americanism in Poe’s work.

“Whether or not Heraclitus was right that you can’t step into the same river twice, you certainly can’t return to the same New York.”

By posting paintings like “American Progress,” the DHS signals its white supremacist beliefs.

On grifters, the Chicago World Fair, and Oz as symbol of a modern USA.

Tales of the city and beyond.

Samuel Roth was the sort of bookseller whose wares came wrapped in brown paper.

On the porous, ever-shifting boundaries between science and speculation.

Part of what defines Pittsburgh literature is the transcendent in the prosaic, the sacred in the profane. An intimation of beauty amid a kingdom of ugliness.

Forged in the cauldron of Chicago’s streets and factories, born from the experience of workers in the mills and plants of Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.

A reconsideration of Robert Frost at 150.

Jonathan Edwards’s sermon reflects the complicated religious culture of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but Newtonian physics as well.

In a covenantal nation like the United States, words are the very ligaments that hold the body together, and what words we choose become everything.

Is Jefferson's Bible evidence that the Founding Fathers engaged with scripture to birth a Christian nation? Or that they sought to foster a new secular order?

The US Supreme Court's most recent decisions undermine centuries of established secularism within American government.

The captivity narrative as creation myth.

Coming to love Puritan poetry is an odd aesthetic journey. It's the sort of thing you expect people partial to bowties and gin gimlets to get involved with.

How Henry Wadsworth Longfellow interpreted Reconstruction by translating Dante.

Pittsburgh as a symbol of America itself.

A review of "Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America."

When we think of early New England, we picture stern-faced Puritans. But in the same decade that they arrived, Morton founded a very different kind of colony.