The American Scholar

Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous speech, The American Scholar is the quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Ives

The American Scholar

Adventures With Jean • Striking up a friendship with an older writer meant accepting the risk of getting hurt

Feels Like Coming Home • The wonders of the coastal redwood

The Patron Subjects • Who were the Wertheimers, the family that sat for a dozen of John Singer Sargent's paintings?

A Giant of a Man • The legacy of Willie Mays and the Birmingham ballpark where he first made his mark

Free • The knowledge of approaching death may allow some of us to experience time in new and liberating ways

Moondance • Experience the marvel that is night-blooming tobacco

Anchoring Shards of Memory • We don't often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both composers mined the past to root themselves in an unstable present

Thoreau's Pencils • How might a newly discovered connection to slavery change our understanding of an abolitionist hero and his writing?

The Art of Falling • THE FORCE OF GRAVITY IN THE LYRICS OF ANDREW MOTION

From: “Gravity Archives”

Reborn in the City of Light • At a time when Paris was an incubator of modernism, a group of bold American women arrived to make art out of their lives

Look Out! • Why did it take so long to protect spectators of America's favorite pastime?

Teach the Conflicts • It's natural—and right—to foster disagreement in the classroom

Others • Too many people in the world isn't the problem—people are the problem

Field Notes • Recollections of Jim Harrison

A POET OF THE SOIL • The legacy of a writer who struggled with his celebrity

FOR WANT OF TOUCH • The astonishing breadth of our passions

IMPERILED PLANET • The ecological havoc we've wrought

GROUND TRUTH • A story of dirt, dollars, and death

INSISTING ON THE POSITIVE • A popular historian's philosophical musings

A STRANGER IN THE SEVEN HILLS • A refugee's experience in the Eternal City

HEART OF SEMI-DARKNESS • A writer's delectable quest for rare flavors

MORTAL COILS • We aren't alone in facing the inevitable

SILENT PARTNER • The union that may have made possible a writer's late flourishing

SCHMALTZ OF SIGNIFICANCE • How the first talkie treated the myth of the melting pot

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