The Bennington Museum's 2011 exhibition “Grandma Moses and the Primitive Tradition” invited viewers to reassess the twentieth-century work and reception of painter Anna Mary Robertson Moses. The meteoric rise of her art, marketed as “primitive,” coincided with certain refugee German art dealers’ quest to offer an American alternative to the war-contaminated wares of Europe.

Reviewing the recently completed, five-volume History of the Book in America, this essay discusses the project's inception within the context of the rise of the history of the book as an intellectual pursuit. It concludes by considering the role of the historian of the book today.

A brilliant new Selected Poems , a moving and absorbing new volume of Letters , and several innovative critical studies have again restored Robert Lowell's reputation. In the poems and letters, as Lowell struggles to make sense of his world and his psyche, his words reveal themselves as a unique combination of beauty, awkwardness, eloquence, and power.

The two-hundredth birthday of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow prompted two curators at the Maine Historical Society to gather materials that demonstrate the skill and respect for art making shared by many members of the Portland, Maine, Longfellow family. This review reflects on their visual creations, produced over the course of 120 years.