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History

Politics

Is There a War on Thanksgiving?

Some on the right insist that efforts to curtail Thanksgiving are in reality sinister attempts to rewrite the country’s history.

Jonathan Beecher Field

Class & Inequality

How Latin America Reimagined Classical Economics

The region has a long legacy of critical engagement with classical political economy, helping to change the way we think about markets and morals.

Nicola Miller

Politics

When Democracy Ails, Magic Thrives

West German witchcraft trials after World War II reveal how political rupture can fuel magical thinking. What lessons might we draw for our own age of QAnon conspiracies, anti-vaccination, and strange COVID-19 cures?

Samuel Clowes Huneke

Politics

Why Is America the World’s Police?

A new book tells the history of how U.S. political elites sold the United Nations to the public as a route to global peace, while all along wanting it as a cover for militarization.

Sam Lebovic

Class & Inequality, Politics

The World Henry Ford Made

A new history charts the global legacy of Fordist mass production, tracing its appeal to political formations on both the left and the right.

Justin H. Vassallo

Race

Is Freedom White?

In a political season of dog whistles, we must be attentive to how talk of American freedom has long been connected to the presumed right of whites to dominate everyone else.

Jefferson Cowie

Science & Nature

How Early Modern Empire Changed Medicine

Global trade, enslaved labor, and colonial warfare created demands for medicines that would work for anyone, anywhere. That pressure to view patients as interchangeable remains with us today.

Zachary Dorner

Arts in Society

The Woman Erased from Bauhaus History

Lucia Moholy helped create the visual language of the Bauhaus, but when she fled the Nazis her work was stolen by Walter Gropius.

Elizabeth Hoover

Law & Justice, Politics

American Democracy Is in the Mail

U.S. democracy and the U.S. postal service share a long, entangled history. An attack against one signals an attack against the other.

Daniel Carpenter

Philosophy & Religion

The Angel of History

Pestilence and plague have often prompted waves of apocalyptic thinking, calling into question the steady march of progress in human history.

John Merrick

Philosophy & Religion

Repertoires of Rage

Anger’s history—along with the very fact that it has one—can shed light on the hypertrophied emotional climate of today.

David Konstan

Race

Tearing Down Black America

Policing is not the only kind of state violence. In the mid-twentieth century, city governments, backed by federal money, demolished hundreds of Black neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal.

Brent Cebul

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