Harriet Jacobs is one of the best-known female abolitionists and authors who wrote about their experiences of enslavement in the South. But while searching for information about Jacobs' children, literary historian Jonathan Schroeder discovered something else: The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, the long-lost autobiography of Jacobs' brother, John Swanson Jacobs. In today's episode, Schroeder speaks with NPR's Juana Summers about the life of the author, his escape to freedom and the blistering critique of the United States that he wrote in 1855 while living in Australia.
To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday
Last week, we looked at Trump’s felony convictions and the various weaknesses that brings his campaign. This week, we turn to Biden world. First, Hunter is in court on federal gun charges, leading us all to learn about his bizarre taste crack music. Then, we spend the majority of this ep reading through the absolutely addled interview Joe Biden gave to Time magazine last week. How cooked is he? Can we make sense of any of this? How could we get two candidates this bad leading their presidential tickets? We discuss all inside.
Amanda Holmes reads C. P. Cavafy’s “He Asked About the Quality,” translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
We are back to answer your questions that you, our listeners, have been sending. On today's show, is chicken actually getting cheaper? Why doesn't the Federal Reserve use different interest rates around the country? And: is election spending an indicator of economic health?
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In this episode, Robert Cwiklik joins Mark Bauerlein to discuss his book “Sheridan's Secret Mission: How the South Won the War After the Civil War.”
Music by Jack Bauerlein.
The contrast could not have been starker: Israel rescues hostages while demonstrators defile the park across from the White House and chant "death to America"—in Washington, D.C. Hello, Joe Robinette McFly? Anybody home? Give a listen.
Books are one of the foundational tools of civilization. They allow us to pass knowledge and information between people who don’t know each other, and their compact form allows knowledge to be transported across vast distances.
Their permanence allows information to be sent across time such that centuries might separate a writer from a reader.
But how did books develop, and in the modern world, is a book still a book if it's purely digital?
Learn more about books, where they came from, and how they’ve changed on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The Mango Tree kicks off with a phone call: Journalist Annabelle Tometich is informed her mom has been arrested for shooting a man, with a BB gun, who was trying to take mangoes from her yard. What follows is a memoir about a rich but turbulent upbringing in a half-white, half-Filipino family in Fort Myers, Florida. In today's episode, NPR's Scott Simon asks Tometich about the moment she realized the violence in her household wasn't normal, and what that mango tree represented for her immigrant mother. To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday