History

How Not to Tell the History of Science

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

Is Humanitarian Intervention Possible?

Using military force to solve humanitarian crises gained popularity after the Cold War, but decades of foreign policy blunders have called it into question.

The Blindness of Colorblindness

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

The Long American Counter-Revolution

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.

Jurors Can Protect Abortion Access

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

Hilary Mantel, Historian

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

How Government Ends

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

Salman Rushdie and the Neoliberal Culture Wars

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

How Black Communist Women Remade Class Struggle

And what today’s organizers can learn from them.

The Education of Ben Bernanke

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

The Mexican Revolution as U.S. History

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.

Twenty Years of Freedom Dreams

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

Endless Ice

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.

Cooperation without Domination

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

Up from Federalism

In the United States, the division of power between state and national government hurts democracy rather than helps it.

Labor’s Militant Minority

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

After Free Trade

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

The Burdened Virtue of Racial Passing

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

The New Old Geography

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

Grooming and the Christian Politics of Innocence

Challenges to Christian political control are often spun as threats to child welfare.

Far from Ukraine, Putin’s War Worsens Palm Oil Crisis

The commodity’s bloody history is instructive of how global capitalism can and can’t be fixed.

Abolition Democracy’s Forgotten Founder

T. Thomas Fortune called for investment in education and a multiracial, working-class movement.

The Critic of Gay Desire

Why groundbreaking queer studies scholar Leo Bersani rejected the word “queer.”

What Makes Laws Unjust

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

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