We rely on readers to keep our website open to all. Help sustain a public space for collective reasoning and imagination—make a tax-deductible donation today.
Melvin Rogers and Neil Roberts discuss the difficulty of keeping faith in a foundationally anti-Black republic.
Lionel Trilling crystallizes the cynical Cold War liberalism that sacrificed idealism for self-restraint.
It's at the heart of what makes The Black Jacobins a classic.
Our ideas about sexuality and gender have changed before, and now they’re changing again.
Jeanne Theoharis speaks with Margaret Burnham on her work in reconstructing Jim Crow terror, within and outside the law.
What happens when radical historians write for the public.
But awareness alone won't solve the problem. Here's what we should do.
Real democratic participation in foreign policy is almost unimaginable today—but this wasn’t always the case.
Two recent books force us to rethink what knowledge is, where it is located, and how it moves.
Revisiting When Affirmative Action Was White, nearly two decades on.
Historian Gerald Horne has developed a grand theory of U.S. history as a series of devastating backlashes to progress—right down to the present day.
Just as abolitionists fought the Fugitive Slave Act, those resisting the criminalization of reproductive health can employ jury nullification.
The celebrated novelist treated the past seriously, depicting its psychological complexity and drawing out its present-day political implications.
Through an assault on administrative agencies, the Supreme Court is systematically eroding the legal basis of effective governance.
Far from a metaphysical battle between fanaticism and tolerance, the Rushdie affair exemplifies the marketization of hurt sentiments.
And what today’s organizers can learn from them.
His new book cuts through economic orthodoxy on central banking. But he fails to reckon deeply with its political consequences.
In her new book, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández makes the case for why U.S. history only makes sense when told as a binational story.
Robin D. G. Kelley published his pathbreaking history of the Black radical imagination in 2002. Where are we two decades later?
Inspired by the rediscovery of Shackleton's HMS Endurance, we revisit two centuries of lessons in leadership from getting trapped in Antarctica's Weddell Sea.
To escape the imperial legacies of the IMF and World Bank, we need a radical new vision for global economic governance.
In the age of Trump, some progressives have embraced the division of power between state and federal government as a boon to democracy. We should be skeptical.
How a new class of “salts”—radicals who take jobs to help unionization—is boosting the organizing efforts of long-term workers.
As the neoliberal order unravels, the international economic system can and must make room for cooperative forms of state-driven development.
Though a means of escaping and undermining racial injustice, the practice comes with own set of costs and sacrifices.
Pioneering Afro-Brazilian geographer Milton Santos sought to redeem the field from its methodological fragmentation and colonial legacies.
King could not accomplish what philosophers and theologians also failed to—distinguishing moral from immoral law in a polarized society.
Laws controlling what schools teach about race and gender show an awareness that classrooms are sites of nation-building. During the Cold War, El Paso public schools knew this too when they taught the children of former Nazis how to be white Americans.
Corporate restructurings are not a cure-all, but they would tilt the balance of power toward ordinary Americans.
Selma James’s work with the Wages for Housework movement shows that we ignore the labor of care at our own peril.
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission
For nearly 50 years, Boston Review has been a home for collective reasoning and imagination on behalf of a more just world.
But our future is never guaranteed. As a small, independent nonprofit, we have no endowment or single funder. We rely on contributions from readers like you to sustain our work.
If you appreciate what we publish and want to help ensure a future for the great writing and constructive debate that appears in our pages, please make a tax-deductible donation today.
That’s what sociologist Alondra Nelson says of Boston Review. Independent and nonprofit, we believe in the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world.
That’s why there are no paywalls on our website, but we can’t do it without the support of our readers. Please make a tax-deductible donation to help us create a more inclusive and egalitarian public sphere—open to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.