Footnote #5

The fifth issue of our annual literary publication contains 46 works of poetry, fiction, essays, articles, and nonfiction by 41 authors about various historical topics, paired with dozens of photographs. Within these pages, you will find contemporary outlooks on history right alongside little-known public domain works that feel as fresh and as vibrant (and as scary) as if they were written today. Here, the old meets the new, and you’ll discover fascinating history from a personal, accessible, nonscholarly literary approach.

With our current atmosphere being what it is—uncaring and unjust to so many people—there’s an abundance of social justice writing in this issue, showing the cyclical nature of history throughout world wars, American wars, the Civil Rights era, and beyond. We begin with the father of all modern wars, World War II, as we dissect a Nazi octopus, dive into the darkness of the Holocaust, and go through an alternative history of wartime medical experiments and the polio vaccine. Girls face mistreatment as “comfort women” in Indonesia, hostages in Budapest, and massacre victims of U.S. violence in Korea. We travel through Siberia with the Czechoslovak Legion, flee with refugees, and hold our breath through 1960s protests, lynchings, and the race-related hate crimes of the American Civil Rights movement. From the Orangeburg massacre to the Freedom Summer murders, we meet the lives lost tragically by racists, and round out the 60s with voices from the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike and anti-apartheid demonstrations in South Africa. Nigerian bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther talks about his time in bondage, which leads us into the horrors of slavery in the American Civil War, where we meet plenty of unsavory characters getting away with awful crimes—among them the Confederates of Thomas’ Legion—and a few sparks of hope and kindness circling the gloom. Follow Civil War troops into Florida, North Carolina, Georgetown, and Virginia, and spend time with Dr. Mary Edwards Walker and other nurses and surgeons who administered to fallen soldiers. Women face adversity with their passions and skills in a stiff patriarchy, and we watch female doctors, laborers, immigrants, and even Mozart’s sister succeed among the difficulty or fail with sorrow at the whims of powerful men. Immigrants tell their stories of the Lower East Side and Thanksgiving Day parades, and historical LGBTQ+ stories are told through Henry David Thoreau, Aphra Behn, and the gutting mass-removal of government employees during the Lavender Scare. We visit 1700s witch hunts, ride unicorns through Medieval tapestries, and get goosebumps from featured writer Kathryn Smith’s take on the Spiritual movement, where P. T. Barnum, the Fox Sisters, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle all weigh in about mediums and communing with the dead. Utopian societies and Shaker villages aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and hummingbirds during the Luminist period make way for dog-headed human beasts from 16th-century conquistador nightmares and illnesses of everyone from George Washington’s brother to chain-smoking miners of 19th-century Australia.