Manchester First Wednesdays

On his farm overlooking Brattleboro, Rudyard Kipling wrote the Jungle Book and many of his Just So Stories, and began to draft his great novel, Kim. Christopher Benfey, author If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years, answers hard questions about Kipling’s time in this country, including whether he should be considered partly an American writer.

Cosplay— the practice of dressing up as a character from a movie, book, or video game—has a long history within science fiction and fantasy fandom. In recent years, it’s become a mainstream phenomenon. Andrew Liptak, author of Cosplay: A History, describes how cosplay has evolved from a niche activity of convention-goers in the mid-20th century to wide popularity today.

In his landmark 1864 book, “Man and Nature,” George Perkins Marsh drew distinctions between the “free” landscapes of the prosperous North and the Southern practice of cultivating cotton and tobacco with slave labor. Reviewing Marsh’s ideas, along with the works of Hudson River School artists and their Southern counterparts, Smithsonian curator Eleanor Jones Harvey explores how images of agriculture served abolitionist politics in the 19th century. 

UVM professor Luis Vivanco explores the fascinating early history of the bicycle in Vermont, an invention that generated widespread curiosity when it arrived here in the 1880s. Over the next decade, enthusiasm exploded statewide as bicycles became safer, women took to the wheel, roads improved, and retailers developed novel advertising techniques to draw in buyers.