History

Contraception and Counterrevolution

An Interview with Corey Robin

  • Corey Robin
  • David V. Johnson

Not So Nasty, Brutish, and Short

Steven Pinker’s Good News

  • Claude S. Fischer

The People and the Patriots

Who led whom in the American Revolution?

  • Alfred F. Young

What Would Emma Do?

An interview with Vivian Gornick about the mother of anarchism.

  • Vivian Gornick
  • David V. Johnson

Regime Change Doesn’t Work

History shows that forcing rulers from power rarely works. Even apparently successful regime changes often leads to bitter civil war.

  • Alexander B. Downes
with responses from
  • Greg Grandin
  • Neta C. Crawford
  • James D. Fearon
  • Mary Kaldor
  • John Tirman
  • Tod Lindberg
  • Joanne Landy

Making Muslim Democracies

The history of Christian Democracy provides reasons for optimism and lessons for the future in Turkey. 

  • Jan-Werner Müller

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Suppose You’re an Idiot

Mark Twain tells his own story.

  • Roger Boylan

A Question of Character

  • David M. Kennedy

Off Minor

Robin D.G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original restores the pianist and composer to the history he lived through.

  • Scott Saul

Real Americans

Repeatedly in U.S. history, liberalism and populism have defined themselves by rhetorical rejection of the other.

  • William Hogeland

The Ancient Dream

The tumultuous marriage of Leo and Sophia Tolstoy

  • Vivian Gornick

Ending the Endless War

Will Colombia’s democracy survive the violence?

  • Luis Fernando Medina

Keynes, Recovered

Separating Keynes from the Keynesians

  • Jonathan Kirshner

Man of Principle

The Passions of Arthur Koestler.

  • Roger Boylan

Past Forward

Coping with post–Cold War Romania.

  • Paul Hockenos

Remembering Haiti

In the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake, an anthropologist reflects on his fieldwork in Haiti fifty years earlier.

  • Sidney W. Mintz

Whitewashing Haiti’s History

The world never forgave the slaves who freed themselves

  • Sidney W. Mintz

The Memory That Will Not Die

Exhuming the Spanish Civil War

  • Julius Purcell

Condemned

Stephen Daldry’s The Reader.

  • Alan A. Stone

Love Letters

The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

  • Cecily Parks

A Tribe Apart

Afghan elites face a corrosive past.

  • Barnett R. Rubin

Remembering Randall Forsberg

The originator of the idea of a “nuclear freeze.”

  • Joshua Cohen

Constitutional Conventions

Public history should make us think.

  • William Hogeland

The Good Life

According to both a new book and the United Nations’ Human Development Index, the good life is about three things: living long, going to school, and being wealthy.

  • Claude S. Fischer
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