"The groundbreaking, never-before-told story of Brooklyn's vibrant and forgotten queer history, from the mid-1850s up to the present day. When Brooklyn Was Queer is a groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond. No other book, movie, or exhibition has ever told this sweeping story. Not only has...

An illustrated collection of twenty-six poems and excerpts from longer poems by the renowned nineteenth-century poet.

Walter Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in its time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sensuality. Whitman's...

"Effortlessly blending biography, criticism, and memoir, National Book Award-winning poet and best- selling memoirist Mark Doty explores his personal quest for Walt Whitman. Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman's bold, new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty-a poet, a lover of men, a New Yorker, and an American-keeps company with Whitman and his...

In this course, Walt Whitman and the Birth of Modern American Poetry, we'll explore how Walt Whitman broke with the tyranny of European literary forms to establish a broad, new voice for American poetry. By throwing aside the stolid conventions and clichEd meters of old Europe, Walt Whitman produced a vital, compelling form of verse, one expressive of the nature of his new world and its undiscovered countries, both physical and spiritual, intimate...

Walking is a lecture by Henry David Thoreau first delivered at the Concord Lyceum on April 23, 1851. It was written between 1851 and 1860, but parts were extracted from his earlier journals. Thoreau read the piece a total of ten times, more than any other of his lectures. "Walking" was first published as an essay in the Atlantic Monthly after his death in 1862. He considered it one of his seminal works, so much so, that he once wrote of the lecture,...

1916: The Western Front. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong and the wind in the leaves. Where have the mud, blood, and blasted landscape of no-man's-land gone? For that matter, where has Percy gone? 2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Police officer Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive--some say mad, others allege dangerous--scientist who seems to have vanished. Sifting through...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant comes a twisting story of love and deceit: an American man vanishes from a rural road in Vietnam and his girlfriend, an ER doctor trained in deductive reasoning, follows a path that leads her home to the very hospital where they first met. Alexis and Austen met on a Saturday night. Not in a bar, but instead in the emergency room where Alexis sutured a bullet wound in Austen's arm....

"Love Songs (1917) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poet's fourth collection, for which she was awarded the 1918 Pulitzer Prize, is a masterful collection of lyric poems meditating on life, romance, and the natural world. Somber and celebratory, symbolic and grounded in experience, Love Songs revels in the mystery of existence itself. From despair to elation, confusion to security, Sara Teasdale captures the many emotions at work in the...

When Laura Ingalls and her family leave their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, they head west for the open prairie skies of Kansas Territory. They travel for many days in their covered wagon until they find the perfect spot for Pa to build them a new home. Soon they are planting and plowing, hunting wild ducks and turkeys, and gathering grass for their cows. But just when they begin to feel settled, they are caught in the middle of a dangerous...