laphamsquarterly.org

Creating the myth of the gold rush with the help of daguerreotypists.

On the World War II hideout located in an empty Tube station.

Whether a passing fad, a psychosocial disorder, an addiction, or just another manifestation of aristocratic excess, bibliomania in all its various manifestations was a remarkably widespread phenomenon.

"No one should not know the companionship of a dog," he said with double-negative emphasis. "There is nothing like it."

Sinclair couldn't have known that his campaign would give shape to two California cults: one an ingenious fraud, the other a deadly dream.

The rise and fall of Turkey's grand marketplace.

The inexorable proliferation of oil and sand on the global circuits of trade tells us about the shape-shifting ways of production, colonial forms of exploitation, our reckless wrecking of the global environmental commons and how the commodification of prosaic everyday things affects lives here, now, and half a world away.

How to make the trip from Sijilmasa to Oualata, circa 1352. First of all, you will have to deal with a desert mafia. For if they are not your guides and your guards, they will rob you

Ralph Nader on how power in America has turned the rule of law into a mere myth.

The Island Council of this half-forgotten outpost of the remaining British Empire has for the last quarter century declared me a Banned Person. I am welcome on Tristan neither today nor, indeed, as was succinctly put to me in a diplomatic telegram last year, "ever."

In the spring of 1970, Nikita Khrushchev posed for a series of seemingly silly photographs. A group of American editors needed the photographs as a sign to proceed with what would come to be seen as an explosive and grand act of Cold War subterfuge: the publication of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs, against the wishes of the Soviet leadership.

Lapham's Quarterly Lapham's Quarterly is a magazine of history and ideas founded and edited by Lewis H. Lapham.

In our modern surveillance state, it's possible we have actually regained the comforts of being known by a higher authority — something that the modern West had largely lost, and for which we have perhaps unconsciously longed.

Jefferson Davis throws a holiday rager.

There's nothing scarier this this circular infographic.

The first successful use of the insanity plea was a high-profile murder trial that riveted antebellum America.

Fitzgerald's failure is the book dealer's holy grail.

William Faulkner once called Henry James "one of the nicest old ladies I ever met."

Long before "Moby Dick," Herman Melville set off on a Polynesian trip that became a famous literary hoax.

It is possible to follow much of medicine's evolution through its changing reaction to feigned illness.