History

The Forgotten Crime of War Itself

In his new book, Samuel Moyn argues that efforts to humanize war with smarter weaponry or sanctify it with moral cant have obscured the task of making peace the first goal of foreign policy.

April 21, 2022 issue

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

An Unexpectedly Modern Monarch

Despite his mundane outlook and stiff conventionality, George V may have ensured the survival of the British monarchy in a turbulent century.

April 7, 2022 issue

Ariel Dorfman

The Futility of Censorship

Eric Berkowitz’s Dangerous Ideas focuses on heroes and heroines who refused to allow their freedom of expression to be extinguished.

April 7, 2022 issue

Erin Maglaque

‘Monstrous’ or ‘Prudente’?

A new feminist history asks us to reconsider early modern queenship.

April 21, 2022 issue

Molly Crabapple

The Joy of Yiddish Books

The language sustained a Jewish diasporan secular culture, from Vilna to the Lower East Side. Today, that heritage survives in a gritty corner of Queens to be claimed by a new generation.

February 26, 2022

Emily Raboteau

The Stories of the Bronx

How did the South Bronx of the 1970s and 1980s come to symbolize slumdom all over the world when its problems could be found in any other deindustrializing American city?

April 7, 2022 issue

J. Hoberman

Framing Babyn Yar

Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries, sourced from archival propaganda, have drawn criticism for what they do not show.

March 29, 2022

Ishion Hutchinson

The Noble Fish

No traces exist to point me to my African origin, but I knew that the sea around Senegal’s coast constituted a leg of the Middle Passage.

February 9, 2022

The Latest

Vivian Gornick

‘What We Want Is to Start a Revolution’

Formed in Greenwich Village in 1912 for “women who did things—and did them openly,” the Heterodoxy Club laid the groundwork for a century of American feminism.

August 18, 2022 issue

Hari Kunzru

Socialists on the Knife-Edge

From early utopian communities to the leftist resurgence today, the history of American socialism is deeper than its meager successes.

August 18, 2022 issue

David A. Bell

Paris Transformed

Although Esther da Costa Meyer deplores the human costs of urban renewal in Paris during the Second Empire, she cannot disguise her appreciation for what was accomplished.

August 18, 2022 issue

James Romm

Kings of the Universe

Two exhibitions at the Getty Villa explore the links between the Assyrian and the Persian Empires, which both revolved around powerful monarchs.

July 21, 2022 issue

Alice Kaplan

The Master of Blame

A recently rediscovered work by Louis-Ferdinand Céline has been celebrated as a masterpiece, but does it erase the rabid anti-Semitism of his later writing?

July 21, 2022 issue

Daniel Immerwahr

Wielding Wheat

A new history makes a case for the world-ordering power of wheat.

July 21, 2022 issue

Robert Kuttner

Free Markets, Besieged Citizens

Why did Democratic presidents embrace an economic credo that annihilated their own public philosophy and its appeal to the electorate?

July 21, 2022 issue

Rosa Lyster

Whose Homeland?

Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise confronts South Africa’s most significant political issue: the land and whom it belongs to.

July 21, 2022 issue

Apropos of Nothing

Nonbeing belongs to that category of concepts that seem self-evident and self-explanatory, but have been objects of deepest perplexity for philosophers.

July 21, 2022 issue