Writing: My Favorites

Not necessarily the most popular posts; rather, my personal standouts.

“Salvaged Photos Capture the Rugged Life of Pennsylvania’s Late-19th-Century Lumber Camps” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, September 7, 2016)
“Timeline Lets You Browse Hundreds of Historical Documents From The Vault Blog” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, February 26, 2016)
“‘The Problem of Living in New York’: A Middle-Class Complaint From 1882” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, December 16, 2015)
“Early Aviation in Italy, As Seen Through the Enraptured Lens of a Futurist Pilot” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, October 21, 2015)
“How Early-20th-Century Americans Taught Their Kids to be Thrifty” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, July 27, 2015)
“Jack London’s Candid 1903 Advice to Writers Trying to Get Into Print” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, July 20, 2015)
“Gorgeous Nature-Themed Stained-Glass Mosaics, Sold to Victorian Builders” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, May 29, 2015)
“Luminous Lantern Slides of Blackfeet Tipis on the Prairies of Montana in the Early 20th Century” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, May 15, 2015)
“Bloody Accounts of Steamboat Disasters, Sold to Tourists on the 19th-Century Mississippi” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, March 20, 2015)
“The Two-Page Plot Outline a Writer of the Hardy Boys Series Used to Crank Out a Book” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, March 13, 2015)
“Pretty Tree Maps Showing the State of American Forests in 1884” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, January 9, 2015)
“The Beautiful Geometry of 18th-Century Forts, Built by Britain in the American Colonies” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, January 7, 2015)
“Peep Inside a Newspaper’s Bustling Headquarters, Circa 1922” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, November 21, 2014)
“A Kiowa Photographer’s Beautiful, Decades-Long Record of His Community and Family” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, September 3, 2014)
“The Patchwork Maps That Helped Prospectors Track Mining Claims in the American West” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, August 28, 2014)
“The Puzzle-Writing, Puzzle-Solving Teen Subculture of the Late 19th Century” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, June 19, 2014)
“How Guests at Late 19th-Century Luxury Hotels Ordered Up Their Sherry and Manservants” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, March 17, 2014)
“The Exquisite Wistfulness of 19th-Century Vegetarian Personal Ads” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, March 10, 2014)
“Hand-Drawn Early-20th-Century Charts Showing the State of African-American Economic Life” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, March 4, 2014)
“A Beautiful Driftwood-and-Sealskin Map, Carved by an Inuit Hunter in 1925” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, January 8, 2014)
“Test Your Victorian Celebrity IQ” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, December 26, 2013)
“‘Having a Baby’ in 1942: One Couple’s Utterly Charming Homemade Documentary” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, December 3, 2013)
“In the JFK Aftermath, A Dallas Minister’s Moving, Controversial Sermon Against Extremism” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, November 20, 2013)
“The Colorful Posters That Motivated Jazz-Age Workers to Strive” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, August 31, 2013)
“Fake Photos of WWI Aerial Combat That Really Had People Fooled” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, July 31, 2013)
“Threats From a Ghost: An 1868 Intimidation Letter Sent by the KKK” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, April 8, 2013)
“Colorful 19th-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints Depict the Fight Against Contagion” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, March 25, 2013)
“Stitching the Solar System: Science as Needlepoint, 1811” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, March 20, 2013)
“Gas Thieves and Gas Defenders in the 1973-4 Oil Crisis” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, March 15, 2013)
“How the Boy Scouts Became the Heroes of the 1913 Parade for Women’s Suffrage” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, March 4, 2013)
“A Kiowa Warrior’s Drawings of Captivity and Assimilation” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, February 27, 2013)
“The World’s First Baby Monitor: Zenith’s 1937 ‘Radio Nurse'” (Slate‘s The Vault blog, February 7, 2013)

Everywhere Else

“Avoiding The Scourge of a Million Crappy Plastic Toys” (Slate, January 16, 2018)
“Can I Be A Screen-Free Parent Without Being Horrible About It?” (Slate, November 29, 2017)
“We’ve Got The ’70s-Style Rage. Now We Need the ’70s-Style Feminist Social Analysis” (Slate, November 20, 2017)
“What Good Is Fear?” (Slate, July 20, 2017)
“Your Child Care Conundrum Is An Anti-Communist Plot” (Slate, June 14, 2017)
“No Girls Allowed” (a theory of Trump and boyishness) (Slate, October 28, 2016)
“Ready for the End” (essay on prepper fiction) (Slate Book Review, October 6, 2016)
“America Has Always Seen Ambitious Women As Unhealthy” (Slate, September 16, 2016)
“A Hamilton Skeptic on Why the Show Isn’t As Revolutionary As It Seems” (Slate, April 5, 2016)
“The Most Accurate Part of The Witch? It Nails the Desperate, Crazed Mindset of Early American Settlers” (Slate‘s Browbeat blog, February 29, 2016)
“America’s Other Original Sin” (on Native Americans and slavery) (Slate, January 18, 2016)
“Who Was Hugh Glass?” (Slate, December 23, 2015)
“What If Historians Started Taking the ‘What If’ Seriously?” (Aeon Magazine , December 8, 2015)
“Vox’s Victorians” (on the idea of cosplaying your way into a previous era) (Slate, September 10, 2015)
“Boyhood” (on a unique archive of childhood drawings) (Slate, May 28, 2015)
“Against Generations” (Aeon Magazine, May 19, 2015)
“The Pen” (A revisionist history of America’s oldest women’s prison—written by current prisoners). (Slate, March 22, 2015)
“Red Summer” (on black self-defense in 1919) (Slate, March 4, 2015)
“Ode to Green Slime” (The Atlantic.com, February 6, 2015)
“A Gift Guide for Young Historians” (Slate, December 17, 2014)
“What Did Gettysburg Smell Like? A Sensory History of the Civil War” (Slate, November 24, 2014)
“History, or Just Horror?” (Slate, November 6, 2014)
“On Letters of Note: The Internet’s Idea of History” (Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2014)
“Lock Up Your Wives!” (on marriage counseling before feminism) (Aeon Magazine, September 9, 2014)
“Honey, You’re Scaring the Kids” (The Appendix, July 25, 2014)
“The Pre-Pregnancy Contract” (Slate Double X, July 10, 2014)
“An Uncommon Household: The history of an early American same-sex marriage” (Boston Globe Ideas section, June 13, 2014)
“Taking Rube Goldberg Seriously: What Fictional Inventions Say About American Ingenuity” (Slate, April 24, 2014)
“The Awful Emptiness of ‘Relatable'” (Slate‘s Lexicon Valley blog, April 11, 2014)
“How Grand Hotels Shaped Modern Life” (Boston Globe Ideas section, March 9, 2014)
“Snapshots of History: Wildly Popular Accounts Like @HistoryInPics Are Bad For History, Bad For Twitter, and Bad For You” (Slate, February 5, 2014)
“The Snake-Eaters and the Yards: The Vietnamese Tribesmen Who Fought Alongside American Special Forces Won the Green Berets’ Admiration–And Lost Everything Else” (Slate, November 27, 2013)
“‘Be White To Your Dogs.’ Why People Are So Outraged About A Canadian Survival Story” (Slate‘s Wild Things blog, November 12, 2013)
“The Fantastical Allure of the Space Whale” (Lapham’s Quarterly‘s Roundtable blog, July 18, 2013)

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