Reading the Fall of New Orleans

William Waud, "Landing of Captain Bailey and Lieutenant Perkins on the Levee, New Orleans [. . .] to Demand the Surrender of the City", from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated History of the Civil War (New York: Mrs. Frank Leslie, 1895)

A century and a half ago, Confederate New Orleans was on the brink of surrendering to a Union naval force under the command of David Glasgow Farragut. As well as being a pivotal episode in the Civil War, it was a moment that left a rich literary record.

Grant and the Gamblers

Reading William S. McFeely's biography of Ulysses S. Grant I was amused by the future president's encounter with a group of riverboat gamblers in 1844.

Ralph Keeler, Literary Vagabond

(via)

Above: the lost literary vagabond, Ralph Keeler (1840-c.1873). Who? Exactly.

Louisa May Alcott and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué

Another post, another youthful Gilded Age reader. I must have perused the opening passages of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868-9) a good handful of times by now, and every time one moment has given me pause.

The Reading of a Bad Boy

Following on from Charles Dudley Warner's fireplace reveries, another postbellum scene of reading.