History

Freedom for Sale

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.

July 22, 2021 issue

Josephine Quinn

Ravenna Between East and West

It has been a barbarian city, a holy city, a woman’s city, and a city ruled by Romans, Huns, Goths, Greeks, and bishops.

July 22, 2021 issue

Fred Kaplan

Why Did We Invade Iraq?

The most complete account we are likely to get of the deceptions and duplicities that led to war leaves some crucial mysteries unsolved.

July 22, 2021 issue

Michael Kazin

Ending the Kennedy Romance

The first volume of Frederik Logevall’s biography of JFK reveals the scope of his ambition and the weakness of his political commitments.

May 27, 2021 issue

Jenny Uglow

The Reader of Rocks

William Smith’s innovative use of the fossil record helped him create the first detailed geological map of England, Wales, and Scotland.

March 11, 2021 issue

James Romm

What Happened at Masada?

We know the Roman conquest of Masada only through the account of the enigmatic Jewish historian Josephus, whose shifting allegiances make his motives hard to discern.

January 14, 2021 issue

David W. Blight

An American Pogrom

Uncovering the truth about the 1898 massacre of black voters in Wilmington, North Carolina.

November 19, 2020 issue

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

The Latest

Tim Flannery

Out of Savannastan

A new book provides convincing evidence that our earliest direct ancestors evolved in Europe, and that they were walking upright as early as six million years ago. But it is overly confident in its challenge to the idea that the genus Homo arose in Africa.

November 4, 2021 issue

Clair Wills

The Wages of Virtue

Chastity seems like a simple concept, but a new history proposes that it has always been a shifting and malleable virtue.

November 4, 2021 issue

Larry Wolff

A Halo of Nostalgia

The frivolous charms of Viennese operetta helped preserve a sense of Habsburg identity after the breakup of the empire.

November 4, 2021 issue

Perry Link

The CCP’s Culture of Fear

In China under Xi Jinping, idealism is passé and conformity a shell for the ruthless pursuit of hierarchical power and private interests.

October 21, 2021 issue

Jenny Uglow

Napoleon’s Greatest Trophy

How a Venetian masterpiece ended up in the Louvre.

October 21, 2021 issue

Jessica Riskin

Nature’s Evolving Tastes

In a new collection of essays on Darwin’s Descent of Man, a number of scientists claim that human and animal cultures emerge from the “purposeless process” of natural selection. Darwin himself said the opposite.

October 21, 2021 issue

Ruth Franklin

‘The Lucky Ones’

Several groundbreaking new books chronicle the fate of the quarter-million or so Polish Jews who evaded Hitler only to wind up in the hands of Stalin.

October 21, 2021 issue

Nathaniel Rich

Rolling Along

The beauty, eccentricity, and precariousness of life on the river side of the New Orleans levees.

October 7, 2021 issue

Susan Tallman

The Uses of Portraiture

As three exhibitions show, portraiture can be an argument, a celebration of surfaces, an occasion to play with historical tropes, or a form of resistance on behalf of the normally unpictured.

October 7, 2021 issue