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Lomax hit the road in search of as many folk traditions as he could discover. “Folk music,” he wrote, “blooms hard by the crossroads.”

Alan Lomax Spent Years Traveling the Country to Record the Sounds of America. The Legacy of His Obsession Will Live Forever

By letting Muddy Waters hear himself for the first time, he unlocked a new confidence that set the sharecropper on the path to superstardom. And that’s just the start of what he found in churches, prisons and even lumberjack camps

Robert Caro, seen here in 1990, worked on a novel based on his time as a newspaperman.

We Rediscovered Robert Caro’s Abandoned Novel About an Intrepid Journalist Buried in His Archives

A deep dive into the legendary biographer’s papers leads to the surprising revelation of a work he has all but forgotten

Caro and Ina at home in New York. The couple shares a passion for the past. Ina studied French history and wrote two books on the subject. 

Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro

Reams of papers, revealing how the scholar came to write his iconic biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson, are preserved forever in New York. But his work is far from over