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History

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

Law & Justice

The Menthol Cigarette Ban Shows There Is No Democracy Without Petitions

The menthol cigarette citizen’s petition recalls the lost political tradition of petition democracy, when not only could the complaints of any citizen get a hearing, but that hearing would occur publicly—in Congress.

Daniel Carpenter

Politics

How the Modern NRA Was Born at the Border

Watch our release of documentary short ‘The Rifleman,’ which examines how NRA head Harlon Carter fused gun rights, immigration enforcement, and white supremacy. Then read an interview with filmmaker Sierra Pettengill and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

Sierra Pettengill, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Class & Inequality, Politics

Portrait of the United States as a Developing Country

Dispelling myths of entrepreneurial exceptionalism, a sweeping new history of U.S. capitalism finds that economic gains have always been driven by the state.

Justin H. Vassallo

Race

Police and the License to Kill

Detroit police killed hundreds of unarmed Blacks in response to the civil rights movement. Their ability to get away with it reveals why most of today’s proposals to make police more accountable are bound to fail, and how we can do better.

Matthew D. Lassiter

Class & Inequality

Employers, Not Immigrants, Hurt American Workers

Non-college-educated U.S.-born workers have every reason to be enraged by declining wages and living standards, but more restrictive immigration policies won’t solve these problems.

Ruth Milkman

Race

Police Reform Doesn’t Work

A century of failed liberal attempts at policing reform in Minneapolis supports the view that none of the city council’s current proposals will prevent there from being another George Floyd.

Michael Brenes

Race

Slave Rebellions and Mutinies Shaped the Age of Revolution

Several recent books offer a more complete, bottom-up picture of the role sailors and Black political actors played in making the Atlantic world.

Steven Hahn

Arts in Society

Angels of History

In the 1974 cult-classic teleplay Penda’s Fen, the past holds the key to escaping the catastrophic present. We too can learn from wilder pasts in our confrontations with capitalism today.

Andy Battle

Global Justice

How We Speak About the Failure of the PLO

A recent Foreign Affairs article gets history wrong and obscures a robust Palestinian discourse.

Helena Cobban

Class & Inequality, Law & Justice

The Other Nuremberg Trials, Seventy-Five Years On

Failures in prosecuting the businessmen who profited from the Nazi war machine show just how far postwar Europe and America were willing to go in the Cold War quest to protect capitalism. 

Erica X Eisen

Arts in Society, Politics

Petra Kelly and the Radical Green Past

The Greens are on track to become Germany’s second strongest party. For many, this is proof that abandoning radicalism was the right choice, but a new novel offers valuable insights into why it should be recovered.

Stephen Milder

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