History week at Slate

Good stuff. I particularly enjoyed this article by Megan Marshall, who tells about the sinking feeling she got when a friend found letters written by the Peabody sisters right after she'd sent her biography, which had taken 20 years to write, to the publisher.

But with the excitement of fresh discovery could also come disaster. There was the all-too-real possibility that some new information in these letters would throw off everything I'd written. What if I had to start over again—as I'd already done once before? That was after a manuscript find at the 10-year mark turned up Elizabeth's adolescent diary, the daily journals she'd kept while visiting Ralph Waldo Emerson in the late 1830s. The same material yielded my greatest scoop, Elizabeth's confession of love for Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer who ended up marrying her youngest sister, Sophia, a landscape painter, in 1842.