History

The Bloodhound

A distinct thread of anger runs through all of Nicholson Baker’s work: anger at what people with power get up to in the shadows, anger at how they lie about it, anger at how we forget.

March 11, 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

Elizabeth Kolbert

Chemical Warfare’s Home Front

Since World War I we’ve been solving problems with dangerous chemicals that introduce new problems.

February 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

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

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

The Latest

Sean Wilentz

Lincoln’s Rowdy America

A new biography captures the cultural jumble of great literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the self-making of the foremost self-made American.

April 29, 2021 issue

Magda Teter

When Poverty Became Profane

Two recent books, by Debra Kaplan and Natan Meir, examine poverty and charity in European Jewish communities, looking at how a marginalized minority dealt with the problems of destitution and social welfare during periods of rapid change.

April 29, 2021 issue

Gary Younge

‘What the Hell Can I Call Myself Except British?’

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series presents Black Britons not as objects but as protagonists, not as heroes but as humans.

April 29, 2021 issue

Robert Kuttner

Dividends of a Just Economy

What is keeping the government from acting on behalf of its citizens?

April 29, 2021 issue

Namwali Serpell

The Ecstatic Internet

“Many of us have found a contingent online community of funny, smart black people from across the diaspora, one that isn’t necessarily available to us IRL.”

March 27, 2021

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Naming New York City

The words we use to refer to streets, buildings, and public places make maps of meaning across the city.

March 24, 2021

Brenda Wineapple

A Posthumous Life

The great-grandson of a president and the grandson of another, Henry Adams struggled to break free of a personal history intimately tied to that of the country.

April 8, 2021 issue

Joshua Hammer

A Ghost in the War Machine

Alexander Wolff’s turbulent family history centers on his grandfather, who fled the Nazis, and his father, who fought for them.

April 8, 2021 issue

James Oakes

Why Did the Slave Trade Survive So Long?

The history of the Atlantic slave trade after the American Revolution is a story of sustained efforts to suppress it even as demand for African slaves increased.

April 8, 2021 issue