From The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, a memoir by Austin Reed, published this month by Random House. Likely completed in 1858, the manuscript was discovered at…

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By Friedrich Nietzsche, from Anti-Education, which will be published in November by New York Review Books. The volume gathers five lectures on “the future of our educational institutions” that the…

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I found my first Ragged School, in an obscure place called West-Street, Saffron-Hill, pitifully struggling for life, under every disadvantage. If I say it is ten years ago, I leave…

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From “Voyage Alone in the Rob Roy,” which appeared in the May 1868 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete essay — along with the magazine’s entire 164-year archive — is available online at harpers.org/fromthearchive.

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In my seventeenth year, there suddenly appeared in Fifth Avenue a very small canary-yellow brougham with dark trimmings, drawn by a big, high-stepping bay and driven by a coachman who…

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The origins of the Underground Railroad

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From entries in Comic, Curious and Quirky: News Stories from Centuries Past, by Rona Levin, a collection of British newspaper articles published this month by the British Library.

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Two centuries of racial tribulation in the nation’s capital

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Is the new Vatican all talk?

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