HUMANITIES: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities

Cover Story

William Bartram’s Man-Eating Monster

An early American naturalist’s terrifying account continues to color how the public views an iconic reptile

Mark V. Barrow Jr.

HUMANITIES, Spring 2021, Volume 42, Number 2

alligator head

The American alligator, seen here in Florida, lurking in the water.

—Troy Harrison / Getty Images

Current Issue

Eye of the Alligator

Volume 42, Issue 2

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Classics

How Black Suffragists Fought for the Right to Vote and a Modicum of Respect

Hallie Quinn Brown and Other "Homespun Heroines"

Martha S. Jones

A Lot of What Is Known about Pirates Is Not True, and a Lot of What Is True Is Not Known.

The pirate next door.

Texting in Ancient Mayan Hieroglyphs

What Unicode will make possible

Edmund Wilson’s Big Idea: A Series of Books Devoted to Classic American Writing. It Almost Didn’t Happen.

The origins of the Library of America were a messy business.

Why Spinoza Was Excommunicated

How America Became “A City Upon a Hill”

The rise and fall of Perry Miller

Abram Van Engen

The Messy Genius of W. H. Auden

A disheveled poet crafted verse of exquisite order.

World War I Changed America and Transformed Its Role in International Relations

So why don't we pay more attention to it?

Meredith Hindley