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History

Fires during the Haitian Revolution; engraving by Jean-Baptiste Chapuy, circa 1791

Fara Dabhoiwala

Speech and Slavery in the West Indies

Slavery was foundational to Britain’s prosperity and rise to global power.

August 20, 2020 issue

‘Congressional Pugilists’; an anonymous cartoon depicting Republican and Federalist congressmen fighting on the floor of the House, 1798

Brenda Wineapple

Our First Authoritarian Crackdown

Wendell Bird’s ‘Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions Under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798’

July 2, 2020 issue

An East India Company official, probably the Scottish surgeon William Fullerton of Rosemount, with attendants; painting by Dip Chand, circa 1760–1764

Christopher de Bellaigue

The Pillage of India

William Dalrymple’s ‘The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire’ and Shashi Tharoor’s ‘Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India’

June 11, 2020 issue

Peter Nabokov

The Intent Was Genocide

July 2, 2020 issue

David A. Bell

The Duchess & the Jews

September 24, 2020 issue

Eastman Johnson: A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves, circa 1862

David W. Blight

‘A Doubtful Freedom’

Andrew Delbanco’s ‘The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War’

January 16, 2020 issue

A reunion of former slaves at the Cosmopolitan Baptist Church, Washington, D.C., 1917. From left to right, Lewis Martin, 100; Martha Elizabeth Banks, 104; Amy Ware, 103; and Reverend Simon P. Drew, who was born free.

James Oakes

An Unfinished Revolution

The ideological struggle to control the story of Reconstruction began at Appomattox.

December 5, 2019 issue

Workers removing a statute of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from Robert E. Lee Park (now Turtle Park), Dallas, Texas, September 2017

Michael Gorra

A Heritage of Evil

Three books dealing with memory and historical witness

November 7, 2019 issue

The Latest

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; portrait by Cristofano dell’Altissimo, 1560s

Anthony Grafton

Pico della Mirandola’s Mystical Thinking

A new book cuts through generations of misguided commentary on the most famous speech of the Renaissance.

November 5, 2020 issue

Marie-Antoinette; unfinished portrait by Alexander Kucharsky, 1791–1792

Lynn Hunt

Marie Antoinette: Why Was She So Hated?

How Marie Antoinette tried to save the monarchy.

November 5, 2020 issue

An edition of Hans Holbein’s The Dance of Death bound in human skin, 1898

Mike Jay

The Hide That Binds

A medical librarian’s history of books covered in human skin.

November 5, 2020 issue

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

The Right’s War on Universities

Authoritarians from Mussolini onward have seen colleges as holdouts of liberal democracy—and attacked them relentlessly.

October 15, 2020

Tim Parks

Whatever It Takes

“Is Machiavelli good, then, or is he evil?” asks the French scholar Patrick Boucheron.

October 22, 2020 issue

The writer Marie de France, who lived in England in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, pictured in a collection of poems in old French, from an illuminated manuscript copied in Paris circa 1285–1292

Mary Wellesley

Our Literary Foremothers

Diane Watt, a professor of medieval literature, shows that the earliest English women writers lived centuries before Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe.

October 22, 2020 issue

Gulag historian Yuri Dmitriev following his first trial, in which charges of child pornography were dismissed, Petrozavodsk, Russia, April 5, 2018

Olivier Rolin

Dmitriev: Historian of Stalin’s Gulag

Yuri found his vocation as a researcher—in archives, but also on the ground, in the NKVD killing fields of Karelia. “I wanted to find out about the fate of those people,” Dmitriev told me.

October 7, 2020