Sarah Churchwell

Lincoln’s Warning Against Mobocracy

“There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law,” declared the man who would be America’s sixteenth president. Only justice can make a more perfect Union.

The Oracle of Our Unease

The enchanted terms in which F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed modern America still blind us to how scathingly he judged it.

American Fascism: It Has Happened Here

“In America Negroes do not have to be told what fascism is,” the poet and activist Langston Hughes told an audience in the 1930s. “We know.”

The First Concentration Camps

The Racist History of US Immigration

Discussions of eugenics and other fascistic ideas in American history tend to provoke the defense that they never took root. But if they never took root, why do they keep flowering?

‘The Lehman Trilogy’ and Wall Street’s Debt to Slavery

For a century and more, the conventional wisdom about the evolution of the financial systems embodied in institutions like Lehman Brothers was that modern American capitalism was built not on the slave economy, but on its collapse. That story retains its cultural grip.

America’s Original Identity Politics

There are no pre-identity politics, just as there are no pre-identity economics, in a country in which political, economic, and legal rights were only ever granted to some identity groups and not to others. Virtually every major event in the long and troubled history of the United States was a direct consequence of identity politics.