by Rob Hardy, Carleton College

Before the 1630s, the domestic honey bee was unknown on the North American continent. The honey bee was one of the many invasive species brought to North America by the early European settlers, along with such commonplace species as dandelions and earthworms. Two hundred years later, honey bees had spread across the continent. To Native Americans, the honey bee became a harbinger of the arrival of the white man. To the settlers, bees became a marker of the frontier. Along the way, bees left their small mark on the literature of the American west—especially in the period between 1840 and 1860, when settlers were spreading across the flowering prairies of the Midwest.

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by Rob Hardy, Carleton College

In a long and varied career as a writer and activist, Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) wrote novels, poetry, and memoirs; helped establish the first birth control clinics in London; toured the Soviet Union with Doris Lessing; proofread The Fellowship of the Ring; and was adopted as the member of an African tribe. But it was as a historical novelist that she established her reputation in the 1920s and 30s. Focusing on The Corn King and the Spring Queen, her 1931 novel set in the world of Hellenistic Greece, this essay explores Mitchison’s concept of the historical novel as a vehicle for promoting social change.

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