History

The Complicity of the Textbooks

In Teaching White Supremacy, Donald Yacovone traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated our racial past.

September 22, 2022 issue

Anthony Grafton

How to Cast a Metal Lizard

The knowledge that underpins our world of things has been discovered over centuries, produced as the result of collaboration and generally unrecorded. How does a historian overcome these obstacles?

September 22, 2022 issue

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

‘Hell, Yes, We Are Subversive’

For all her influence as an activist, intellectual, and writer, Angela Davis has not always been taken as seriously as her peers. Why not?

September 22, 2022 issue

David Motadel

My Husband the War Criminal

Nancy Dougherty’s The Hangman and His Wife portrays Reinhard Heydrich as a cold, apolitical technocrat while downplaying his ideological commitment to Nazism.

September 22, 2022 issue

Joshua Hammer

Promise and Disillusion in South Africa

Despite a shift in political power, the country is plagued by racial divisions and economic inequalities.

September 22, 2022 issue

Duncan Hosie and Reva Siegel

The Remaking of the Second Amendment

The Supreme Court’s expanding interpretation of the Second Amendment threatens longstanding democratic authority to enact gun safety measures.

June 10, 2022

Christopher Alessandrini

Occasional Residences of the Gods

The artist Gala Porras-Kim has become an eloquent advocate for sacred objects in ethnographic collections. Will museums listen?

June 1, 2022

Paisley Currah

What Sex Does

For transgender people in the United States, the sheer number of institutions with discrete authority to define sex ensnares us in Kafkaesque contradictions.

May 27, 2022

Coast to Coast

Elizabeth Hardwick

In Maine

There is about Maine a fascinating softness that seems to spread like a blanket over the hardness of rock and woods and icy turf. Not a tropical softness, but the odd snowy lassitude of isolation.

October 7, 1971 issue

T.H. Breen

The Vigilantes of Vermont

In 1777 Vermonters declared themselves citizens of an independent republic and ratified one of the most liberal, egalitarian constitutions in American history. How did a populist movement led by a violent, charismatic figure give birth to a stable democratic society?

April 5, 2012 issue

Ange Mlinko

Naples, Florida

a poem

November 5, 2020 issue

Diane Johnson

Ah, Wilderness!

Americans’ captivation with wilderness springs from a deep source of anxiety and hope; an abiding belief in valuable myths of independence and personal enterprise that appear to survive in the frontier.

March 23, 1978 issue

Garry Wills

Chicago Underground

While Chicago has long been known as the “City of the Big Shoulders,” what has mattered from the outset is that it has had a brain on those shoulders: a technological and commercial mind and a reforming, even a socially creative, intellect.

October 21, 1993 issue

Annette Gordon-Reed

The Real Texas

People go to Texas seeking fortunes, hoping to find a place somewhere between what is real and what is myth; it is strange and disturbing that this hope resembles the feeling that brought Anglo settlers, along with the people they enslaved, into the region so long ago.

October 24, 2019 issue

Joan Didion

The Golden Land

The overland crossing to California has long had the aspect of a quest, and residents have dwelled upon the place and its meaning since the first remote settlement: What did that voyage ultimately mean?

October 21, 1993 issue

Patrick Vinton Kirch

‘Paradise of the Pacific’

Nineteenth-century Hawai‘i attracted traders, fortune-seeking entrepreneurs, and capitalists, who encountered, and displaced, a flourishing and elaborate culture whose ancestors had sailed from Polynesia in 1000 AD.

December 3, 2015 issue

The Latest

Jenny Uglow

Silences and Scars

Two new books on Berlin track the city through decades of growth, economic desperation, artistic innovation, Nazi terror, political division, and reunification.

October 20, 2022 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Symphilosophizing in Jena

The intellectual achievements of the early German Romantics were inseparable from their friendships and feuds.

October 20, 2022 issue

Caroline Fraser

Trouble in River City

Two recent books examine the idea of the Midwest as a haven for white supremacy and patriarchy.

October 20, 2022 issue

Peter Brooks

Resurrecting a Polyphonic Past

The Betrothed is a kind of historiographical novel that invites the reader to enter the dynamic of reading and writing history.

October 20, 2022 issue

Mary Wellesley

Lice and Licentiousness

Hair in the medieval period was a marker of identity, a symbol of power, and a focus of erotic interest, freighted with religious significance.

October 20, 2022 issue

Neal Ascherson

Hugging the Shores

Colin Thubron’s latest travelogue takes him down the Amur River and through the borderlands between Russia and China.

October 20, 2022 issue

Christopher Benfey

Emerson & His ‘Big Brethren’

“‘You are yourself a sequoia,’ John Muir told Emerson during the philosopher’s trip to California in 1871. ‘Stop and get acquainted with your big brethren.’”

October 20, 2022 issue

Tim Parks

The Pope’s Many Silences

A new account of Pius XII’s actions during World War II gives the impression of a pope who lacked any clear moral or political vision and made every decision on the basis of the merest expediency.

October 20, 2022 issue

David S. Reynolds

Throngs of Unseen People

In the Houses of Their Despair, Terry Alford’s history of spiritualism during the Civil War era, suggests an unexpected link between the Lincoln family and that of John Wilkes Booth.

October 6, 2022 issue

Erin Maglaque

Rome Was His Laboratory

By the time of his death in 1729, the astronomer, historian, and archaeologist Francesco Bianchini had been an aide to three popes and confidant to one Polish princess and an exiled king.

October 6, 2022 issue