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History

Science & Nature

Lost in Space

Billionaires such as Musk, Bezos, and Branson peddle the idea that space represents a public hope, all the while reaping big private profits.

Alina Utrata

Race

Looking for Nat Turner

Frightened slaveowners cast the rebel leader as a monster. Scholars have misunderstood his religiosity. A new creative history comes closer than ever to giving us access to Turner’s visionary life.

Alberto Toscano

Race

Blackness and the Bomb

Seventy years after the civil preparedness film Duck and Cover, it is long past time to reckon with the way white supremacy shaped U.S. nuclear defense efforts during the Cold War.

Erica X Eisen

Law & Justice, Politics

The Hidden Stakes of the Infrastructure Wars

The fight over the American Jobs Plan reflects a long history of competing visions of public works—and, most of all, who should benefit from rebuilding.

David Alff

Global Justice

What Isn’t Taught in Israeli Schools

A Palestinian mother’s perspective.

Muzna Awayed-Bishara

Class & Inequality, Politics

In the Common Interest

How a grassroots movement of farmers laid the foundation for state intervention in the economy, challenging the slaveholding South in the run-up to the Civil War.

Chris Hong, Robert Manduca, Nic Johnson

Arts in Society

Mike Nichols and the American Century

The director made landmark contributions to three distinct art forms. His life reflected the American experience in the latter half of the twentieth century—both its failures and its feats. 

Jonathan Kirshner

Global Justice

Poland’s Current Memory Politics Are Rewriting History

Not all research is at stake, however, only work that reveals the role of ethnic Poles in the persecution of Poland’s Jews.

Mikhal Dekel

Politics

Beyond the Nation-State

Sovereign states have been mythologized as the natural unit of political order. History shows how new they are—and how we can think beyond them.

Claire Vergerio

Gender & Sexuality, Science & Nature

The Feminist Past History Can't Give Us

Recent efforts to commemorate Laura Bassi—a pioneering physicist in eighteenth-century Italy—often say more about us than the world of women in science.

Paula Findlen

Race

Reclaiming the Power of Rebellion

Activist Derecka Purnell interviews historian Elizabeth Hinton about her new book, ‘America on Fire,’ and how the label “riot” discredits Black political demands.

Elizabeth Hinton, Derecka Purnell

Gender & Sexuality

When Queers Fought the State and Won

Sarah Schulman’s new history of AIDS activism group ACT UP NY is a definitive and instructive history of how outsiders forced the government to accept that they mattered.

Hugh Ryan

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