As the title of Marian Crotty’s award-winning short story collection, What Counts as Love, suggests, what counts is not always the same as what’s hoped for, but may be exactly what’s expected, for in love’s pursuit, her characters go about…
The Eastern Shore by Ward Just The Great American Political Novel, from Henry Adam’s Democracy, to Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, from Toni Morrison's Beloved, to Ward Just’s Echo House, tangles with the notion of America as an…
“Abandon Yiddish.” The masters of the Enlightenment might as well have said abandon hope, for all the impact this particular prescription for a better life would have on its intended beneficiaries. Never mind that Yiddish had been their language for…
The Truman Commission, which determined that everyday Americans deserved access to the same kind of education offered at Harvard and Yale, the kind of education, that is, that exposed them to the resources that allowed them to "live free," free…
A great poet does not so much meet the demands of his or her time but, granted unerring insight, discovers them. Such insight can bestow an enormous isolation that he or she may, of course, disguise, or, like Sophocles’ Philoctetes,…
We in the Academy no longer require serious study of the humanities, much less of the arts, which reveals our outrage over President Trump’s proposal to eliminate their national endowments—not to mention our self-satisfied, self-righteous snickering a few months ago…
Every time you try to make a meme—literary or historic or geographic—of the Mid-Atlantic, much less one in which the three align, you are upended by the power of some new discovery of person, place or past. The region’s countless…
It seemed that there was some kind of fallacy at work—likely of the logical, but perhaps, also, literary variety and of which textbooks in most disciplines warn students, lest they lose the argument or the patient or the poem—in the…
That Henry Greenbaum spoke November 16th at the Germantown campus of Montgomery College recounting his experiences living in the ghetto, enduring death marches as well as slave labor in concentration camps after the loss of his mother and five of…
Our Republic of Outrage and Its Assault on America’s Public Square “I am convinced.” “Let me be clear.” “There is no question about it.” “The stakes could not be higher.” “Make no mistake…” These are the signals, unintentional signals, of…