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Tag: History

Neil Roberts, Melvin Rogers

Melvin Rogers and Neil Roberts discuss the difficulty of keeping faith in a foundationally anti-Black republic.

Samuel Moyn

Lionel Trilling crystallizes the cynical Cold War liberalism that sacrificed idealism for self-restraint.

David Scott

It's at the heart of what makes The Black Jacobins a classic.

Hugh Ryan

Our ideas about sexuality and gender have changed before, and now they’re changing again.

Margaret A. Burnham, Jeanne Theoharis

Jeanne Theoharis speaks with Margaret Burnham on her work in reconstructing Jim Crow terror, within and outside the law.

David Waldstreicher

What happens when radical historians write for the public.

David S. Jones

But awareness alone won't solve the problem. Here's what we should do.

Daniel Bessner

Real democratic participation in foreign policy is almost unimaginable today—but this wasn’t always the case.

Eric Moses Gurevitch

Two recent books force us to rethink what knowledge is, where it is located, and how it moves.

Ira Katznelson

Revisiting When Affirmative Action Was White, nearly two decades on.

David Waldstreicher

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.

Sonali Chakravarti

Just as abolitionists fought the Fugitive Slave Act, those resisting the criminalization of reproductive health can employ jury nullification.

Samuel Clowes Huneke

The celebrated novelist treated the past seriously, depicting its psychological complexity and drawing out its present-day political implications.

Lisa Heinzerling

Through an assault on administrative agencies, the Supreme Court is systematically eroding the legal basis of effective governance.

Faisal Devji

Far from a metaphysical battle between fanaticism and tolerance, the Rushdie affair exemplifies the marketization of hurt sentiments.

Jodi Dean, Charisse Burden-Stelly

And what today’s organizers can learn from them.

Jonathan Kirshner

His new book cuts through economic orthodoxy on central banking. But he fails to reckon deeply with its political consequences.

Jonna Perrillo

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

Robin D. G. Kelley published his pathbreaking history of the Black radical imagination in 2002. Where are we two decades later?

Marissa Grunes

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.

Jamie Martin

To escape the imperial legacies of the IMF and World Bank, we need a radical new vision for global economic governance.

Lisa L. Miller

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.

Mie Inouye

How a new class of “salts”—radicals who take jobs to help unionization—is boosting the organizing efforts of long-term workers.

Robert Manduca, Nic Johnson

As the neoliberal order unravels, the international economic system can and must make room for cooperative forms of state-driven development.

Meena Krishnamurthy

Though a means of escaping and undermining racial injustice, the practice comes with own set of costs and sacrifices.

Lawrence Rosen

Pioneering Afro-Brazilian geographer Milton Santos sought to redeem the field from its methodological fragmentation and colonial legacies.

Michael Bronski
Challenges to Christian political control are often spun as being threats to child welfare. “Don’t Say Gay” laws are the latest in a long history dating back to medieval attacks on Jews.
Max Haiven
With the invasion causing a global shortage of sunflower oil, palm oil is back on the rise. But the commodity’s bloody history is instructive of how global capitalism can and can’t be fixed.
Robin D. G. Kelley
While W. E. B. Du Bois praised an expanding penitentiary system, T. Thomas Fortune called for investment in education and a multiracial, working-class movement.
Jack Parlett
Leo Bersani was a groundbreaking queer studies scholar who rejected the word “queer.” We can still learn from his contrarian sense of what made homosexuals unique.
Randall L. Kennedy

King could not accomplish what philosophers and theologians also failed to—distinguishing moral from immoral law in a polarized society.

Edin Hajdarpašić
On war and belonging, thirty years after the siege of Sarajevo began.
Marta Figlerowicz
Poland and Russia both think of Ukraine as a seat of authentic Slavic culture. A new translation of Józef Czapski’s war memoir highlights how this has often clashed with Ukraine’s independence.
Jonna Perrillo

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.

Rajan Menon
Condemning Putin's war must go hand in hand with imagining a more just security order.
Sandeep Vaheesan

Corporate restructurings are not a cure-all, but they would tilt the balance of power toward ordinary Americans.

Jackson Arn
No other artist more perfectly anticipated the banal strangeness of life in the twenty-first century.
Emily Callaci

Selma James’s work with the Wages for Housework movement shows that we ignore the labor of care at our own peril.

David Roediger
A history of imperial forgetting.
Samuel Clowes Huneke
In the 1970s, gay and lesbian West Germans sought to answer the question of what it meant to forge political solidarity from sexual identity.

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