History

Nazis on the Run

Many perpetrators of the Holocaust escaped justice. Should Germany prosecute as accessories to murder the elderly few who remain alive?

December 2, 2021 issue

J.H. Elliott

Mastering the Glyphs

New histories of the conquest of Mexico look to Nahuatl-language sources for a fresh perspective on Aztec society.

December 2, 2021 issue

Neal Ascherson

Grand Illusion

Armed with only a Ouija board, two British officers attempted an eccentric and devious escape from a Turkish prisoner of war camp.

December 2, 2021 issue

Fintan O’Toole

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

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

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

Krithika Varagur

The Anti-Nazi Punjabi Princess

Catherine Duleep Singh was an Anglo-Indian aristocrat who lived much of her life quietly with another woman in Germany. Then she became a savior of Jewish refugees.

November 27, 2021

Alma Guillermoprieto

Nicaragua’s Dreadful Duumvirate

Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo’s corrupt and paranoid dictatorship has destroyed the Sandinista movement’s proudest achievements.

December 16, 2021 issue

Irina Dumitrescu

Industrious Habits

In Matrix, Lauren Groff continues to ask the question that has haunted her work for years: What kind of utopias can we imagine when the apocalypse is already in sight?

December 16, 2021 issue

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Inventing the Science of Race

In 1741, Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences held an essay contest searching for the origin of “blackness.” The results help us see how Enlightenment thinkers justified chattel slavery.

December 16, 2021 issue

David S. Reynolds

He Was No Moses

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

December 16, 2021 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Digging for Utopia

In The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow search for historical examples of nonhierarchical societies to justify their anarchist vision of human freedom. But must we find our future in the past?

December 16, 2021 issue

Willa Glickman

Fruits of Empire

The plant explorers of the USDA succeeded in bringing the world’s fruits to American supermarkets. But at what human, ecological, and gustatory cost?

November 12, 2021

Christopher Benfey

Exile on Main Street

A new book argues that Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology helped overturn old notions of the virtuous New England village as the prototype of American life.

December 2, 2021 issue

Kevin Young

‘And I One of Them’

Nancy Cunard’s relationship with the jazz musician Henry Crowder helped inspire her years of civil rights activism. Her romance wasn’t just with him, but with Blackness.

December 2, 2021 issue