History

The Sweet Life of Sidney Mintz

Remembering one of the century’s great anthropologists and teachers.

  • Sarah Hill

Black Study, Black Struggle

The university is not an engine of social transformation. Activism is.

  • Robin D. G. Kelley
with responses from
  • Derecka Purnell
  • Randall L. Kennedy
  • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
  • Christopher Lebron
  • Barbara Ransby
  • Shana L. Redmond
  • Charlene Carruthers
  • Aaron Bady
  • Michael Eric Dyson
  • Amanda Boston
  • Bridget Todd
  • Thabisile Griffin

As a God Might Be

The recurring—and often conflicting—narratives of technology and progress.

  • Meghan O’Gieblyn

The New Nature

It is impossible to divorce nature from human influence. Can that influence be democratic?

  • Jedediah Britton-Purdy
with responses from
  • Jo Guldi
  • Jairus Grove
  • Robert Paarlberg
  • Andreas Malm
  • David Keith
  • Anna Tsing
  • Ugo Mattei
  • Vandana Shiva
  • Paul Waldau
  • Roy Scranton

Do We Need a New Constitutional Convention?

A discussion of the fear and inertia baked into U.S. politics.

  • Richard Kreitner
  • Sanford Levinson

A Street Divided

The Long Life of Segregation

  • Claude S. Fischer

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A Moment for Primo Levi

Nearly thirty years later, the circumstances of Primo Levi’s death continue to provoke debate.

  • Boston Review

Historical Method and the Noble Lie

Mass incarceration is so politicized that we can't talk about its origins.

  • Michael Javen Fortner

Who’s to Blame for Mass Incarceration?

Michael Javen Fortner’s Black Silent Majority makes the controversial case that African Americans backed the Rockefeller Drug Laws.

  • Donna Murch

Come On Up, Sweetheart

James Baldwin’s letters to his brother.

  • Ed Pavlić

The Gore Vidal Museum

The author's bid against being forgotten.

  • Daniel Luzer

John Clare’s Heirs

The Enduring Reach of a Rural Poet

  • Stephanie Burt

I’m Fine How I Am

A response to Randall Kennedy’s defense of respectability politics.

  • Christopher Lebron

Our Panics, Ourselves

Richard Beck’s new book on the moral panic over child abuse in the 1980s.

  • Rebecca Onion

Hail to the Pencil Pusher

American bureaucracy’s long and useful history.

  • Mike Konczal

Learning from the Watts Rebellion

Half a century on, we need to recommit ourselves to correcting the conditions that undergirded the civil unrest of the 1960s.

  • Sekou Franklin

Beaches and Bombs

On vacationing in Vieques.

  • Sarah Hill

In Same-Sex Marriage Case, a Contest over History

History really matters in Obergefell v. Hodges.

  • Nancy F. Cott

The Moynihan Report at Fifty

On the long reach of intellectual racism.

  • Stephen Steinberg

Hashpipe of the Vanities

Overestimating the counterculture of the 1960s.

  • Hal Stucker

A Good, Bad, Hard, Easy Life

A new collection of Lead Belly’s recordings.

  • Dave Byrne

Left Out

The instability of the white working class.

  • Claude S. Fischer

How Patent Law Created Inventors

Alexander Graham Bell and telecom’s founding myth.

  • Graeme Gooday

Curbing the New Corporate Power

Consumer prices are not the only concern raised by dominant companies.

  • K. Sabeel Rahman
with responses from
  • Dean Baker
  • Juliet B. Schor
  • Robin Chase
  • Adam Thierer
  • David Bollier
  • Arun Sundararajan
  • Mike Konczal
  • Sofia Ranchordás
  • Richard White
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