Louisa May Alcott was heartsick when she checked into the old Hotel Bellevue in Boston. It was April 1880, and Alcott was mourning the death of her sister May, who’d died unexpectedly a few months ...

In January, 1861, Louisa May Alcott began writing a novel that she planned to call “Success.” Alcott was twenty-eight and living at Orchard House, the family home in Concord, Massachusetts. That same ...

In the annals of irresponsible utopianism, few names stand out like that of Bronson Alcott. This dreamy 19th-century son of New England was a high-minded Transcendentalist and visionary teacher, and, ...

Harvard historian Tiya Miles on how some of American history’s most remarkable young women forged their truest selves beyond the confines of home. A few years before the Civil War, Harriet Tubman told ...