Footnote #1: A Literary Journal of History

Alternating Current’s annual literary journal dedicated to historical and contemporary views on history contains poetry, maps and historical photographs, fiction, essays, articles, and nonfiction by various authors, both contemporary and historical, about various topics of history. Within these covers fantastically drawn by artist Terry Fan, you’ll meet the Romanovs, Serbian poet Vojislav Ilic, Dr. Zhivago, Stephen Crane, Geronimo, Lord Strathcona, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. You’ll learn of the misprint in Herman Melville’s obituary, the constellations in the Southern Planisphere mapped out by Nicolas de La Caille, what might have been exchanged between William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, how Laura Cereta thrived on insomnia, and who’s buried in the cemeteries at Pere-Lachaise and Montparnasse. Our first Featured Writer, A. Jay. Adler —— an interviewee for a junior fellowship at Harvard Society of Fellows, Vermont Studio Center grant recipient, and Maui Writers Conference Screenwriting Competition prize winner —— will take you through Jewish life on the Lower East Side, Van Gogh’s mental asylum, Route 66, and the bordello rooms of Old-West Tombstone. Our second Featured Writer, Jesseca Cornelson —— a Catskill Center’s Platte Clove Preserve and a Sundress Academy for the Arts’ Firefly Farms resident artist —— will take you through the Tablet of Daughters, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville’s journals of the South, and a history of her home state of Alabama’s unfortunate past with racial lynchings. Their work is showcased next to three of our Pushcart Prize nominees and the first, second, and third places, and nine notable-mention finalists, for our 2015 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical. From the Wild West to the Holocaust to Lincoln’s exhumation to the folk music of the sixties to the lost city of Atlantis, you’ll discover entire past worlds between these covers and meet a cast of characters colorful enough to color every page.