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

Magda Teter

Rehearsal for Genocide

Three recent books conclude that the anti-Jewish pogroms following World War I help to explain what would take place a generation later.

June 9, 2022 issue

Yuri Slezkine

‘He Loved Handing Out Decorations’

The admiring biographer of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union’s most memorably inconspicuous leader, finds him an affable heartthrob who longed for peace “with every fibre of his body.”

June 9, 2022 issue

Melissa Gira Grant

Policing Womanhood

For groups like Alliance Defending Freedom, the erosion of abortion rights and trans rights are complementary pathways to building a Christian nation.

May 15, 2022

Catherine Coleman Flowers

Our Lives in Their Hands

If state governments truly cared about the lives of poor women or our children, they wouldn’t poison our water and pollute our air. They can’t be trusted with our bodies.

May 13, 2022

Clair Wills

A Lesson from Ireland

Decades of forced birth and coerced adoption convinced the Irish people to lift a state ban on abortion. Will Americans learn the hard way, too?

May 6, 2022

Ruth Franklin

Beyond the Betrayal

Why are we so eager to assign a single person blame for revealing the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family?

May 26, 2022 issue

Brenda Wineapple

A Fable of Agency

Kristen Green’s The Devil’s Half Acre recounts the story of a fugitive slave jail, and the enslaved woman, Mary Lumpkin, who came to own it.

May 26, 2022 issue

E. Tammy Kim

A Permanent Battle

A new history draws on recently declassified archives to illustrate how the Korean War was an intimate civil conflict, not just a proxy battle between superpowers.

May 26, 2022 issue