David A. Bell | The New York Review of Books

Ego-Histories

The more that historians make their own experiences an explicit part of their work, the harder it will become to let the sources speak clearly.

Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography

by Enzo Traverso, translated from the French by Adam Schoene

History and Human Flourishing

edited by Darrin M. McMahon

June 22, 2023 issue

Paris Transformed

Although Esther da Costa Meyer deplores the human costs of urban renewal in Paris during the Second Empire, she cannot disguise her appreciation for what was accomplished.

Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852–1870

by Esther da Costa Meyer

August 18, 2022 issue

The End of the Terror

Colin Jones gives an hour-by-hour account of the Ninth of Thermidor, a day that marked a turning point in the French Revolution.

The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris

by Colin Jones

March 10, 2022 issue

Rousseau & Slavery

November 4, 2021 issue

Whose Freedom?

Tyler Stovall demonstrates the potent and noxious ways that people have conflated freedom with whiteness but pays too little attention to the force of freedom as a concept.

White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea

by Tyler Stovall

September 23, 2021 issue

Letter

Regina U. Gramer

Rousseau & Slavery

November 4, 2021 issue

A Haunted Patrimony

Through their art collecting wealthy Jews staked a claim to being French, but the nation they loved savagely betrayed them.

The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France

by James McAuley

July 1, 2021 issue

The Duchess & the Jews

The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern

by Maurice Samuels

September 24, 2020 issue

Did Britain Win the American Revolution?

To Begin the World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe

by Matthew Lockwood

April 23, 2020 issue

The Contagious Revolution

In 1791 enslaved people in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue—now called Haiti—staged the largest and most successful slave revolt in history.

The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution

by Julius S. Scott, with a foreword by Marcus Rediker

Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti

by Johnhenry Gonzalez

December 19, 2019 issue