Art for the Middle Classes: America's Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s
How did the average American learn about art in the mid-nineteenth century? With public art museums still in their infancy, and few cities and towns large enough to support art galleries or print shops, Americans relied on mass-circulated illustrated magazines. One group of magazines in particular, known collectively as the Philadelphia pictorials, circulated fine art engravings of paintings, some produced exclusively for circulation in these monthlies, to an eager middle-class reading audience. These magazines achieved print circulations far exceeding those of other print media (such as illustrated gift books, or catalogs from art-union membership organizations).
Literature: American Literature contains a comprehensive collection of outstanding literature and connected, relevant nonfiction. Throughout the program, there is strong, integrated skill instruction in literary analysis, literary elements, reading, writing, grammar, and vocabulary.
J.L. Borges - This Craft of Verse (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
For Borges (1899-1986), the central fact of life was the existence of words and their potential as building blocks of poetry. In this series of six long-forgotten lectures given at Harvard more than 40 years ago, he insists that reading (in English, primarily) gave him more pleasure than writing.
