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It is not entirely clear on which day Aphra Behn was born, but we know that she was baptized on December 14th, 1640, in the little church that sat quietly in the shade of Canterbury Cathedral in the south of England where she was born. One of the...

It would be easy to credit Walt Disney with making Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea an adventurous cultural phenomenon, but in fact, credit should actually go to French author Jules Verne, whose penned this futuristic novel in 1870, almost...

To this day, scholars are unsure why Kant wrote this text, and bicker constantly about Kant's intentions when he wrote it, and his inspiration for doing so. What they can agree on, however, is that it was the most influential writings on the...

Hegel believed that history follows the dictates of reason - in other words, history is fluid, interpretive, and written retrospectively according to how we understand the facts as we see them. Hegel makes history into more of a science than an...

"It is not love which you poor fools do deem" is a sonnet that appears in Lady Mary Wroth's 1621 sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. In it, the speaker (Pamphilia) challenges an unknown group of antagonists by asserting that her...

"Big Poppy," featured in Ted Hughes' Flowers and Insects: Some Birds and a Pair of Spiders (1986), is a poem about sex and death. A first-person speaker dramatically narrates the path of a bumble bee as it guzzles nectar from a poppy flower. He...

"In Memory of Radio" was published as a part of Baraka's first poetry anthology, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961) under the name LeRoi Jones. This was published before Baraka became a radical black nationalist and changed his name....

To read the beginning of the Feminist Manifesto, one could close one's eyes and believe oneself to be in the middle of the Women's March, or at the very least, burning bra after bra as the sexual revolution inspired women everywhere to demand...

If Cher's nineteen seventies hit "Half Breed" were a novel, this would be it; like the song, it tells the story of a protagonist on the cusp of adulthood, struggling with never quite fitting in with either their Native American or their white...

'The Secret Lion' is a well-known published text written by American author Alberto Alvaro Rios. It is narrated from the position of a mnemonic adult but with a child's eye and voice, which gives the story a good deal of humor and wit. Through...

2011 McArthur Fellow Alicia Elizabeth Stallings is an American poet, and also a renowned translator of the poems of others. From an early age, Stallings was captivated by classical civilizations and studied Classics at the University of Georgia...

Most poets credit philosophies, natural beauty, and all things esoteric as their inspiration, but Vijay Seshadri credits his influences as American poetry heavyweights Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Seshadri is an American poet and essayist of...

Born in 1905, Sartre was an intellectual and writer whose political beliefs and worldview were greatly altered by the German occupation of France during World War Two. The invasion in 1940 was followed by the collaboration of the Vichy government,...

Stranger than Fiction is a film released in 2006, directed by Marc Forster. A fantasy and comedy film, it stars Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, and Emma Thompson. Will Ferrell plays the main character, Harold Crick....

The novel Breath, Eyes, Memory was published in 1994 by the Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat. Her first novel, it became a bestseller almost immediately and won numerous awards. Critics almost unanimously praised Breath, Eyes, Memory. The...

In 1969, Kenneth Clark debuted a BBC miniseries narrating the history of Western art. Entitled Civilization, the series sketched out a concise, simple approach to art history, positing that every work of art can be understood by an adequate...

Gorgias is one of the earliest of Plato’s dialogues, dating back to a period in the 4th century B.C.E. when the Sophists' rhetoric reached a fever pitch of popularity in Athens. Sophistry was viewed by Plato as the epitome of false rhetoric...

Victorian poet Christina Rossetti was well-known for her ability to craft poetry that remains at once deeply philosophical, yet fully accessible to many readers. Oftentimes, her religious themes and fascination with the ephemerality of experience...

"Wind," published in Ted Hughes' first collection The Hawk and The Rain (1957), operates on two levels of poetic meaning. On the surface, the poem narrates a destructive storm. However, the poem's final stanzas suggest that Hughes uses the storm's...

The Wizard of Oz remains, to this day, one of the most iconic American films of all time. Production was complicated and huge in scale, with a revolving door of directors coming in to work on the film, an ambitious undertaking unprecedented in...

Raging Bull is a 1980 drama directed by one of the most respected American directors, Martin Scorsese. A complex and subtle film about the tragic and violent life of a prizefighter, it was based on boxer Jake LaMotta's autobiography. Actor Robert...

Mean Girls is a high school teen comedy released in 2004 by Paramount Pictures, starring Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams. Mark Waters directed the script written by Tina Fey, adapted from the self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind...

Sergei Eisenstein was commissioned by the Soviet government in 1925 to direct a film commemorating the 20th anniversary of the unsuccessful revolution of 1905. Eisenstein originally envisioned this project as an eight-part episodic film which...

The Giving Tree is a children's illustrated book, written by Shel Silverstein, and published on in 1964 by Harper & Row. The book was widely acclaimed for dealing with mature themes and conveying a deep moral of sacrifice and unrequited love.